The Silver Screen Oasis

Fritz Lang's first American motion picture was " Fury ", an anti -lynching film starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney, with Walter Brennan, Bruce Cabot, Walter Abel,Frank Albertson, and Edward Ellis in support. How MGM was talked into releasing it is beyond me,but I am glad that they did.A great film dealing with mob rule which is always just beneath the surface in American society.

Top o' Mornin, to ye, Ken!
Ah, yes, Fritz Lang's "Fury"!
As I indicated in my "Face in the Crowd" thread, few films have moved, troubled & impressed me, all at the same time, as has "Fury".
So much of the film is so undeniably locked to "era" (cross-country travel sans highways, adult siblings as working-class roommates, the use of tripod kinetoscope cameras, jailing out-of-towners indefinitely on circumstantial evidence), and yet it speaks so eloquently, and powerfully, on so much of what continues to represent the deadliest contradictions in the morality of our "modern" society, both from an American and a global perspective.
I watched this film for the first time in 1988, and then, once each respectively, in the early and the late 90's, and then most recently in 2004, and each of those times, there was a current "hot topic" of news going on that was directly related to the issues blazing away in the frames of "Fury".
I believe that this film being passed-over by TCM's "Essentials" team was a grave oversight.
(Umm, haven't been back very much this week . . . "Fury" isn't on the Essentials list, is it? )

Klondike

Good Morning ,
The DVD of Fury is excellent.

In the film course I'm teaching this semester on "message movies" from the Hollywood studio era we watched FURY this past Tuesday evening. The majority of the students had no idea who Fritz Lang was (sadly) but after an introductory discussion about Lang and his desperate flight to America from Nazi Germany in 1933 followed by our viewing of the film, the class was quick to draw their own correlations between the horrifying events taking place in Germany at the time and those depicted in Lang's own nightmarish vision of Small Town America. They were simply astonished that a 70 year old "Hollywood" movie could galvanize and engulf them so completely. They hadn't been this thoroughly blown away by a film since...the week before, when we watched Mervyn LeRoy's I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG.

If pinned down to name one must-see performance by Spence, and one movie by Lang, FURY is my choice. I enjoyed reading the others thoughts on this powerful movie. I agree that it still carries relevance and its impact in undiminished over time. It is simply relentless.