Main Cast: Spencer Tracy, Sylvia Sidney, Walter Abel, Bruce Cabot, Edward Ellis
Release Year: 1936
Country: US
Run Time: 96 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
Fritz Lang's first American film is a vigorous and perceptive indictment of mob law, starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney. Katherine (Sidney) leaves her boyfriend, Joe Wilson (Tracy), behind in their Midwestern hometown when she takes a job in another city. Joe is a decent, hard-working soul, who wants to save up to buy a gas station and looks forward to the future when he and Katherine can get married. A year later, Joe is traveling to meet Katherine so that they can be married. Driving through a small town, Joe is stopped by a deputy sheriff waving a shotgun. Apparently there has been a kidnapping, and the fact that Joe has peanuts in his pocket circumstantially incriminates him in the crime. Joe is arrested and jailed. As Joe sits in his jail cell, the local townspeople begin to talk and whisper and spread rumors. Finally, a lynch mob forms and heads toward the jail. The mob tries to storm the jail and frustrated over their inability to penetrate the prison walls, they set the jail on fire. Joe barely manages to escape ("I could smell myself burning"), but the mob thinks that Joe has been burned to death. Behind the scenes, and with the help of his brothers, Joe tries to rig the verdict in the impending trial of the 22 vigilantes. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Review
Not long after he fled Nazi Germany rather than produce films for Hitler, Fritz Lang made his American debut with this powerful drama that it made clear that mob violence was not confined to his homeland. At a time when lynching was still a grim fact of life in America, Fury tackled this social evil head-on; even if MGM seems overly cautious in making both the mob and their victim white, the film's unflinching willingness to look dead-on at the ugly side of the American character is as impressive (and troubling) today as it was in 1936. Spencer Tracy delivers a typically strong "everyman" performance as the wrongfully accused Joe Wilson, and he doesn't shrink from Joe's less pleasant side in the second and third act, while Sylvia Sidney is genuinely affecting as his tormented fiancée. As Kirby and a band of local rabble trap Joe in his jail cell and then set the building alight, Lang takes the average folks of the American heartland, the sort of people that Frank Capra's populist visions were made of, and shows that a gruesome thread of hatred can be found inside them, waiting for the opportunity to come out. Sadly, this message may remain as pertinent today as it was when Fury first hit screens. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
