Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 18-March-07
Spoiler Rating: High

Fury (1936)

How much of a director's reputation depends on the stories he decides or is given to tell? I wondered this while watching "Fury." Fritz Lang deserves lasting renown for making "M" if nothing else, yet the more I watch his work the more I appreciate his affinity for situations that define the best and worst of humanity, usually through a personal angle. "Fury" isn't the most cohesive DVD on the rental shelf, but it fully engages the mind and emotions. In fact, it could haunt a sensitive person's dreams.

The film begins with the romantic, rainy-night parting of a couple struggling to make enough money to get married. Joe (Spencer Tracy) is a good-natured lug who shares a Chicago tenement with his brothers (Frank Albertson, George Walcott); his fiancée Katherine (Sylvia Sidney) is a gentle beauty who moves west for a job which she hopes will enable their domestic happiness. A long year passes before Joe sets off to claim his bride, and both are joyous with anticipation. When just miles away from their rendezvous point, Joe is stopped by local police and arrested on suspicion of kidnapping. By the end of the day, the rumor mill in the town where he sits in jail has so dispersed and enlarged the story that a mob forms to deal with the "criminal." It's led by the community's black sheep (Bruce Cabot) and other dull souls with nothing better to do than play at destruction. They storm the jail where the sheriff (Edward Ellis) tries to fight them back and then, being unable to get the cell keys, burn it to the ground while Joe screams in vain from a window. Mothers bring their children to watch.

Katherine is also on hand to witness the lynching, having heard about it where she waited and walked for miles to exonerate her beloved. Arriving too late, she faints into a near-coma. Back in Chicago, Joe's brothers debate what to do next. The decision is made for them by the miraculous appearance of Joe, who is scarred both psychologically and physically. No longer the nice guy, he wants to remain in hiding, believed dead, while he exacts revenge on those who tried to kill him without trial or reason. His scheme centers on a murder charge brought against the town's citizens by a slick district attorney (Walter Abel). Even when revived, Katherine doesn't fit into his plans and is not deliberately let in on the secret.

The title of the picture refers to both the unthinking viciousness of the mob and the bloodlust it engenders in its victim. Lang depicts the lynching in such a way that a viewer must feel revulsion and anger, yet he also shows that Joe's pursuit of retribution springs from a similar impulse; i.e., vengeance of any kind has its price. The idealistic core of the drama is the love Joe once enjoyed with Katherine, how he cannot regain it or any chance of happiness unless he views the world without a fog of hate. That's a tall order for someone who has been set on fire by complete strangers. "Fury" allows one to feel the complexity of Joe's plight as well as the rightness of the filmmaker's conclusions.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.