Frank Lovejoy

The Sound of Fury aka Try and Get Me!

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Howard and Jerry on the lam

A beacon of decent acting in a sea of ham and cardboard, Frank Lovejoy is the main reason to watch The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!), a dull, sanctimonious drama boosted by an incendiary finish. Fritz Lang had already turned the original true story into a film, Fury, but this is Cy (billed as Cyril) Endfield’s version. The plot: decent, hard-working family man Howard Tyler is the everyday sucker who can’t get a decent break and so takes up with flash Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), a smalltime criminal. Things go OK for Howard and Jerry for a while, and Howard’s blubby wife (Kathleen Ryan) is particularly happy that Howard is … Read more

The Hitch-Hiker

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L-R: Frank Lovejoy, William Talman, Edmond O'Brien

1953’s The Hitch-Hiker opens with an on-screen declaration: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours – or that couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.” A gun, a man, a car, those staccato sentences, the threat of death – it’s film noir, and an unusual one not because of its length (a lot of noirs were short B movies), but because it was directed by Ida Lupino, a rare female voice in among the big swinging dicks of … Read more