Cheap Fury (Video) (Sylvia Sidney, Spencer Tracy, Walter Abel) (Fritz Lang) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Fury

That good old American sport...Lynching.
This movie is an indictment of it of course. Quite common in the 30's. This is the first film of Fritz's Lang's American period & it seems like he's got the lingo down pretty good.
Briefly, Tracy plays a good guy, wrongly accused of a terrible crime by the residents of a small town. The evidence is highly circumstancial but the townsfolk want to lynch him & burn down the jail to get at him. He escapes & is presumed dead.
The townsfolk are broadly drawn as xenophobic, intolerant & quick to judge the world outside their little orbit.
Tracy's acting goes over the top, his character changing 180 degrees. One of his better efforts, however & that's saying a lot.

---

Tracy at his best
This is easily my favourite Spencer Tracy movie. Altough quite a different story line to his Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, Tracy uses a similar technique when he changes his personality in Fury from the young easy going loving man on a journey to visit his fiance, to a bitter twisted vengence seeking man.
Although you could not blame him for this

---

FRITZ LANG & SPENCER TRACY: WHAT A TEAM!
A very unusual M-G-M film from 1936: because of its theme of social consciousness, it seems much more a likely candidate for Warner Brothers. It's a dilly with an outstanding performance by Tracy as the wrong man: En route to see his fiancee, Katherine (Sylvia Sidney) Joe Wheeler (Spencer Tracy) is arrested as a suspected kidnapper and is jailed pending trial. The evidence against him is strickly circumstantial: he possess a bill from a ransom statement. Then a mob forms around the jail, but Sheriff Ellis (Walter Brennan) manages to disband them & send them home... And that's all I'm going to give out plot-wise. Obviously, there is a whole lot more to this famous film in which Fritz Lang made is American directorial debut. This was Lang's favourite American film - and rightfully so: it demonstrates his directorial genius in wasting NOT A FRAME of film, telling his story with sharp cross-cutting between victims and tormentors, while unravelling the mindless and murderous passion of a mob out of control. Sylvia Sidney is excellent as usual as Katherine: this was her sole role for M-G-M. The film awakened America to what the reality of mob violence means. The original working titles for the film were THE MOB & MOB RULE. For a great companion piece, view the excellent Lang production YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney made the next year, in 1937: it's available on video.