Nice effects though.

Good concept, poorly executed.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Fury (1936) A film that is about exceptions and is not quite exceptional by itself, though it's really good, and really interesting at every turn. And if you find the DVD that has the Bogdanovich commentary, that's actually eye opening just for all the Fritz Lang portions where he comments on it (from interviews in 1965). It should be noted that a lynching is any killing by a mob outside the law. The burning here seems to qualify (though there is no hanging). The culpability of everyone in the mob makes the courtroom case a large affair, the central event. Lang is an "important" director, a great director for sure even if for just a handful of actually great films (more than most directors). Like "Metropolis" and "M" in Germany, and "Scarlet Street" and "The Big Heat" in the U.S. This is his first Hollywood film, and an oddity for MGM (it was more suited to Warner Bros.). It stars Spencer Tracy, which is probably a slight mistake because he can play the nice guy (for the first part of the movie) but not as well the truly angry man (for most of the movie). The theme here is important in a lot of ways. It is about the mob killings of anyone, including Blacks, though that isn't at all introduced here (and that's to Hollywood's predictable shame, I think). But it's also about the growing "lynching" mobs of Jews and others in Germany, which Lang had to flee (his mother was Jewish, though was converted to Catholicism). And to how ordinary people can become complicit in revenge and unjust violence. I watched this not only for Lang, whom I admire, but also the reknowned cinematographer Joe Ruttenberg, who has such a tightly packed sense of framing, every scene has no waste. There is no fancy moving camera and little truly expressionist tilting or Germanic excess, though it's continually dramatic with layers of space and objects as it procedes. There are some special effects toward the end when Tracy is hallucinating (this gives nothing away) and the psychological impact here is compelling...and makes you wish there was more of it. Bogdanovich, for some reason, makes no mention of him at all. I said the movie is not exceptional and this is in the more normal sense of story, development, acting. It is certainly a really good film. It has courtroom scenes that are solid, it has behind the scenes interactions that bolster the individual drama of Tracy and his fiancé, Katherine, played by Sylvia Sydney, who is wonderfully sympathetic. It's important, in a way, for being an early example (possibly the earliest?) of using on-the-scene footage revealing the facts of a crime. (A news photographer happened to be filming the riot, and his footage acted the same way movies and videos have more recently in evidence for crimes.) The thing that Lang adds here really nicely is the underlying romantic drama. Here it twists around the misuse of the word, memento (and momentum)...for which you'll have to see the movie to find out. And it ends with a predictable personal and narrative twist. With the new museum devoted to lynchings in the South, this movie has a new, subtle significance. Tolerate the courtroom stuff and get into the really dramatic parts, which are great filming.

This really showed what Spencer Tracy was all about. Since the studio wouldn't deal with the usual victim of a lynching, they use Tracy as an everyman who gets put in jail on flimsy evidence over the kidnapping of a young woman. When the town gets wind of this, they escalate into a mob, burning down the jail with him in it. Fortunately for him, a couple sticks of dynamite thrown into the flames blows the door off the jail and Tracy escapes. Now that it is assumed that he is dead, he enlists family members to help him and an unwitting district attorney to try the men and women responsible. They are convicted of murder, even though there is no body. This is a suspenseful film from beginning to end under the capable hands of Fritz Lang. We are able to feel the incredible shame and regret that the principles feel, but we are also allowed to experience the awful event Tracy's character had to endure. Of course, how many trials in the South (and the North at times) allowed the members of a mob to get away with horrible acts, usually against Blacks. I had not heard of this film and am pleased I saw it.

I just finished reading the section of the new Spencer Tracy biography which discusses the making and success of "Fury", long one of my favorite Tracy films. In fact, before this early MGM film of his, his only truly notable films had been "The Power And The Glory" and "Dante's Inferno". The shooting schedules for Tracy's "Fury" and Tracy and Gable's "San Francisco" overlapped. Apparently, Fritz Lang was a pain in the patutty...a virtual tyrant directing this film, to the point where Tracy and Lang barely spoke. Nevertheless, the results then (much bigger box office than MGM had anticipated) and now (as this is seen to be an early Tracy milestone) speak for themselves.The story begins easily enough -- a guy (Tracy) and a gal (Sylvia Sydney) are hoping to marry, but to earn more money (this was in the middle of the Great Depression) they separate temporarily (which turns out to be over a year). He does all right, opening a gas station. He buys a car and goes to meet and marry Sydney.Then things turn dark. He is picked up on suspicion of kidnapping, which of course he was not guilty of. Placed in jail, while a hick deputy sheriff (Walter Brennan) blabs around the community. A mob develops, but instead of lynching him, they burn the jail down, with Tracy and his little dog in it. Burned to death as his fiancé watches.Or was he? Tracy suddenly appears as a dark, malevolent specter before his brothers...alive...and ready to exact his justice simply by letting the leaders of the lynch mob be found guilty and condemned to death in a court room. But, through an excellent trial sequence, Tracy slowly goes nearly mad with revenge, and ultimately his brothers begin to turn against him. But meanwhile, the guilt of 22 men and women is pretty much proved through newsreel footage. And then, when a surprise (and clever) bit of evidence is brought forward, Sydney realizes Tracy is still alive. The question is, will Tracy come forward, or remain silent. Apparently Lang was very angry over the edits MGM made to the film, particularly the final scene...and perhaps a kiss in front of the judge was taking it just a bit too far...perhaps embracing would have been enough.Tracy is superb here. No longer a "junior" actor, but a calculated actor who masters his role. Sydney is just as wonderful.Walter Abel performs well as the district attorney trying the men leading the mob. Bruce Cabot is fine as the worst of the mob leaders. Edward Ellis is excellent as the hard, but fair sheriff battling against overwhelming odds. It's unlikely you'll recognize many of the other supporting actors here, but they all play their parts well and lend a believability to the story.A part of my DVD collection, and one of the rare films I will award an "8" to. A must if you love cinema.

It's Fritz Lang's illustrated gloss on Aristotle's observation that "At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst." Lang himself, an escapee from the Nazis, was a fascinating director, given to striding around in riding breeches and boots, shouting orders through a megaphone, seeing things through a monocle. He directed a couple of pot boilers but seemed attracted most to stories of revenge -- taken too far. You can see it in "Rancho Deluxe" and "The Big Heat." Sometimes the work looks a little crude today but it's sublime in comparison to modern revenge movies like "The Punisher" and "Sudden Impact." "Fury", though it has its crude moments, is a fine moral lesson and a decent study of human nature. Spencer Tracy is in love with Sylvia Sidney, who is leaving him in Chicago for a better paying job out West, where he will join her after saving a bit of money. This is 1936 and everybody is broke. The two of them ache for marriage. He finally drives west but is coincidentally caught up in a man hunt for four kidnappers and held by a hick sheriff because, like one of the miscreants, he's fond of salted peanuts and happens to be carrying a five-dollar bill with the same serial numbers as one of the ransom notes. This is probably an echo of the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder, a sensation in the early 30s.Before he can be tried, the local newspaper convicts him and gossip spreads through the small town, exaggerating the thin evidence against him. Lang adopts a silent-movie technique and during a montage of women gossiping inserts a shot of a clutch of hens clucking.At any rate the mob attacks the jail in which Tracy is being held. Unable to reach him in his cell, they set fire to the building and in a striking shot, Lang shows us the frantic Tracy pressed against the window bars, surrounded by flames, while the crowd stands outside and watches him in utter silence, grinning, until they drive him from the window with a shower of stones.Briefly, Tracy secretly escapes and through the agency of his two brothers brings two dozen mob members to trial for murder. Where the money for this suit came from is a mystery. But the experience has burned Tracy, body and soul. He skulks in his brothers' apartment, grinning demonically as the trial proceeds and the twenty-two defendants wriggle and squirm. They're supposed to be suffering from monumental remorse as well, but we see little of it. If given the MMPI they'd probably produce the "caught psychopath" pattern -- high in psychopathy and high in depression, because after all they've been caught. Tracy is turning into an obsessed maniac himself, forging evidence, going unshaven, drinking, bitter, looking like Mister Hyde.I won't reveal the end. It's a rather long film but not one that's liable to put you to sleep. Some of the courtroom dialog is rather sophisticated, or at least so it sounds to untutored ears. The "crudities" I mentioned earlier include some confusion about what's taking place and where. The little town is called Strand. But at one point, when I thought Tracy was sneaking around the streets of Strand, he stops and peers through a shop window that's in Chicago. Capital City is mentioned but if anything takes place there I missed it.None of these carps detract from an interesting film involving some tough moral choices.