The German director Fritz Lang is a pretty important filmmaker to me. Back before I became enamored with the art of film, I watched a ton of cartoons, and especially Japanese cartoons on Adult Swim. My favorite of these of Full Metal Alchemist. When I got a copy of the FMA film The Conqueror of Shamballa, I was surprised by its play with history and alternate timelines. In the film, Ed is stuck in an a world parallel to his own: that world is 1923 Munich. The political intrigue and how well the Thule society and the search for Shamballa fit within the narrative got me more interested in both history and philosophy, but above all, in film. Ed meets a film director who resembles King Bradley from his own world, but is instead a powerful creative figure within UFA, Germany’s national film program. This man is whimsical, anti-Nazi, and based on, as I would later find, Fritz Lang.

So when I began becoming more interested in film and in film history years later, as a freshman or sophomore at University, the first boutique film title I bought was Fritz Lang’s classic, proto-expressionist work ‘M,’ through the Criterion Collection. It alarmed me cinematically and struck me as the greatest work ever created in the medium of cinema (until I saw Kane a year or so later). It was artistic, visually beautiful, taut, intellectually-engaging, and it opened me up to his other works like Metropolis, Mabuse der Spieler, and Nibelungen. But Fury, and a film I will review later in this film noir series, ‘Hangmen Also Die,’ sat on my shelf of films I had yet to seen for years. I was wrong to wait so long.

1936’s ‘Fury’ is Lang’s first American film after leaving Nazi Germany in 1933. The concept for the film, of a man who is accused of a crime he hasn’t committed and brought to ‘justice’ by an unruly mob of otherwise decent people, was created by Norman Krasna and tentatively titled ‘Mob Rule.’ Later, Lang adapted the concept alongside Bartlett Cormack into something close to its current form (though it was edited and slightly compromised by the studio).

Spencer Tracy (before his burst into stardom just a few years later) plays the wrong man, Joe Wilson, in this b-picture film noir. He and his fiancee Katharine Grant (Sylvia Sidney) live in different parts of the country and are trying to save up enough money to start their marriage on a good financial foundation. Pretty good thinking too, as many unhappy marriages and something like half of divorces begin with money problems. After a year of working hard, trying to get his brothers Charlie and Tom out of the racketeering business and succeeding, adopting a stray dog, becoming financially stable and buying a new car, he is finally ready to make the trip to pick up Katharine. But along the way he is picked up on suspicion of a crime, of kidnapping a young girl with a group of men. He just happens to have picked up a five-dollar bill with the serial number of the ransom money on it too, but he’s innocent of the crime (one of the many moments of studio interference as Lang believed the only way to condemn mob violence in a film was to have the man be guilty, but still indict the violence- Just as Orson Welles would later do so well as Clarence Darrow in 1959’s ‘Compulsion’).

As Joe sits in prison and the Sheriff and his deputies work to clear up the case and make sure that he is absolutely innocent without a shadow of a doubt before releasing him, word gets out around town that they have caught one of the kidnappers. Gossip, which feeds the otherwise sleepy town denizen’s imaginations and makes them feel as if part of something larger than themselves, eventually swells into public outcry and a riot outside of the Sheriff’s office. The Governor has been called and is ready to send out the National Guard to defend the Justice System and the Constitution that the mob means to undermine, but calls off the ‘tin soldier’ gambit last minute when a political adviser assures him it would be political suicide to stop the mob from enacting justice the way they see fit. He withholds permission for the nearby stationed National Guard to stop the riot until it is too late, the Sheriff and his deputies have been roughed up, and the Sheriff’s office and adjacent jail have been razed to the ground.

Much of this chaos is shot using dutch angles that increase the dramatic power of the scenes. The mob arrives in front of the Sheriff’s office through use of the subjective camera. When they storm the building, they are shown breaking down the doors with a battering ram from a truncated crane angle. They enter over the destroyed doors and the camera is planted beneath their feet giving the audience a feeling of the kinetic energy of the moment and fear that must be attendant upon those protecting the rule of law within the building. We see many images of faces and action, of the pouring of gasoline, of the axing of firefighter hoses, of the throwing of rocks into Joe’s cell window, which speed up into a frenzy of montage akin to the work of Sergei Eisenstein. And we see the tortured face of Joe through the bars of cell window, camera ajar and tilted in the characteristic European manner of expressionism.

Later, we will find that Joe managed to escape the fires as he meets up with his brothers. He arrives in the door frame of their room, no longer looking jovial and kind. His trenchcoat is tattered and he is likewise worse for the wear. Just by taking a different side-road he could have escaped his date with destiny, the one that left him a dead man in the papers and in the newsreels and in the public imagination. Now, he wants to fight against that fate through revenge and he wants his brothers to help him achieve his aims. Joe has been reading through law books at a public library and found this pertinent passage: “Killing by lynch law is murder in the first degree. When the object is to inflict capital punishment by what is called lynch law, all who consent to the design are responsible for the overt act.”

He’s out for blood, and he will continue to feign death to get it as his brother bring a murder trial against 22 of the mob’s members, which through some twists and turns, the placing of important bits of evidence, and the use of the newsreel footage of the event and his fiancee’s testimony of events (she arrived at his burning at the last moment and fainted), they manage to convict 20 of them to the death penalty. But Joe learns along the way that revenge will get him nowhere and will continue to eat him up forever, especially insofar as a dead man can no longer live in civil society, can no longer marry, and must remain off the books. The revenge would make him a murderer, and worse than that, it would make it a very unhappy man.

The film parallels the events that Lang saw occurring all around him while in Germany in the 20s and 30s during the rise of the Nazi party. Insidious gossip and political propaganda brought the Nazi’s political prominence, fear and scare tactics like the burning of the Reichstag brought them to power, mob rule gave them total control. In 1936, these were pressing issues. But so too was the need to indict a problem within the U.S.. In the past 40 years, more than 6,000 people had been killed by mob justice and lynching. More than one person every three days. And Lang’s intense Brechtian belief that cinema should be didactic, not through propagandizing events, but through bringing them to alert, attentive viewers attentions, was paramount in his reasoning for creating ‘Fury.’ Even though it was B-picture, was at odds with the types of pictures released by the studio that commissioned it, and was seen by a relatively small number of theater-goers comparatively to larger films with bigger advertising budgets.

Cody Ward

[Next up: Night and The City]