Anniversary of the Fury
On June 5, 1936, the premiere of Fritz Lang's film "Fury" took place in the USA.
The film "Fury" was the result of a happy coincidence of several not very happy circumstances. First, in the early 1930s, when Nazism flourished in Germany, manifested primarily in the brutal persecution of Jews, the opposite process began in the United States: the struggle for the rights of blacks intensified. In particular, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) submitted to the US Congress a draft federal law to combat the lynching of blacks. The bill was rejected by the US Senate, and this caused a heated discussion in American society.
Secondly, in 1934, the famous German director Fritz Lang immigrated to the United States, whose mother was Jewish and, therefore, it was extremely dangerous for him to remain in Germany.
Finally, thirdly, in 1933 in San Jose, California, two blacks, Thomas Harold Thurmond and John Maurice Holmes, were lynched. Suspicion fell on them that they kidnapped and killed the son of the owner of Hart's department store. They were taken into custody during the investigation, but "active citizens" stormed the police station, dragged out the suspects and brought Lynch to trial. This story formed the basis of an article in The Nation that caught the eye of playwright Norman Krasna. Krasna wrote the short story "Mob Rule" based on a newspaper publication.
Norman Krasna retold the content of his story to Joseph Leo Mankiewicz, an MGM film producer, who, seeing the real commercial potential of this story as the basis for a future film, attracted screenwriter Bartlett Cormack to write the script. Fritz Lang joined the work, for whom the story of the lynching in San Jose evoked associations with what is happening in Germany and, accordingly, a passionate desire to make a film about this story.
However, Fritz Lang failed to realize all his ideas. First of all, he was forbidden to cast black actors as victims of the lynching. And not only for these roles, but also for the roles of completely secondary characters. So, in the working version of the picture there was a scene in which a black washerwoman sings a freedom song while hanging clothes, and another scene in which a crowd of black southerners listens to and reacts to the radio speech of the district attorney condemning the lynching. Both scenes were ordered by the film company to be removed.
But the main indignation of Lang was caused by the sugary happy ending, traditional for American films, imposed on him by the management of the film company. Lang was going, if it was not allowed to bring the ending of the film closer to the real denouement of the story, to close the film with a close-up of the tear-stained face of Sylvia Sidney, who played the main character, so that each viewer would have the opportunity to think out the ending on their own. But the head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, insisted on the ending with the hugs of the main characters. For the rest of his life, Lang retained a distaste for the final shots of his film.
Constant conflicts between Fritz Lang and the head of MGM Louis B. Mayer in the process of working on the film ended with the fact that at the end of filming the director quit the film company and vowed never to deal with it again. And Mayer, according to Lang, reacted in his own way: he did not invest a cent in the promotion of the picture. However, word of mouth worked, and rumors about the birth of another film masterpiece by Fritz Lang leaked out, which first reached the ears of film critics.
In particular, Frank S. Nugent, a film reviewer for the most influential The New York Times, began his review of Lang's film, published the day after the premiere, with the words:
"Let it be said at once: "Fury," which came to the Capitol yesterday, is the finest original drama the screen has provided this year. Its theme is mob violence, its approach is coldly judicial, its treatment as relentless and unsparing as the lynching it portrays. A mature, sober and penetrating investigation of a national blight, it has been brilliantly directed by the Viennese Fritz Lang, bitingly written by Norman Krasna and Bartlett Cormack and splendidly performed by Spencer Tracy, Sylvia Sidney, Walter Abel, Edward Ellis and many others. It should appeal mightily to those of you who look to Hollywood—forlornly most of the time—for something better than superficial, dream-world romance."
As a result, the box office of the picture, with a budget of 604 thousand dollars, amounted to 1.3 million dollars, making the film one of the highest grossing films produced by the film studio in 1936. It was not shown in the USSR.
However, even after more than 60 years since the release of Lang's picture on the screens, film critics continue to evaluate it with great admiration. Thus, in a 2003 review by Felicia Fister, it was noted:
"Fury is stocked with ample evidence of Lang's cynical, biting view of humankind seen in his often wry and disturbing visual language, like a shot of the town's gossiping women which cuts to a shot of clucking chickens or his close-ups of the people outside the burning courthouse, gleefully holding their babies up for a better view of the burning man, their faces contorted by bloodlust. With shadows distorting their appearance, rendering them instantly ghoulish, Lang's vision of the potential evil in all human beings makes Fury as stylistically memorable as it is for its trenchant social message."
Another American film critic, Ed Gonzalez, noted in 2005:
"Throughout this memorable sequence, during which the townsfolk defy local authority and break into the prison before burning it down, Lang evokes how our animal instincts often run counter to our duties as decent, responsible human beings....Lang, a great social observer, recognized the parallel between German complicity in Hitler’s rise to power with that of people in small American towns who turned the other cheek to the lynching of blacks in the South. This is what gives Fury it’s great power: its pertinent allegory isn’t exclusive but something powerfully all-encompassing."
Despite the fact that more than 80 years have passed since the release of the film, the modern moviegoer, just like modern film critics, continues to rate Lang's film very highly. 66% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, Fritz Lang's film "Fury" rating according to FilmGourmand is 7,873, which allows it to take 884th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
And one more achievement of Fritz Lang's picture can be noted. According to many, it was at the suggestion of Lang in this film that newsreel footage began to be used as material evidence in American courts. Maybe not. But, in any case, there is no documentary evidence that such a practice was used in American justice before the release of the movie "Fury".
