Cheap Try and Get Me (Video) (Cy Endfield) Price

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Customer Reviews of Try and Get Me

Try to get it
I was searching for this flick for a long time and finally got my hands on it. Let me just say, it was worth the effort. This noir gem stands along side Fritz Lang's "Fury" as the best presentation of mob violence on film. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but all the crucial elements of prime noir are present: exceptional lighting, imaginative framing, taunt acting and an ending that doesn't compromise. Also of note is Lloyd Bridges. He gives an outstanding performance as a slick hood with big ideas. I just wish they kept the film's original title, "The Sound of Fury." "Try and Get Me!" sounds too much like a romantic comedy. Still, this movie rocks.

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Fearless political noir.
'The Sound of Fury' (a.k.a. 'Try and Get Me') surpasses those three classics of lynch-mob terror - Lang's 'Fury', Wellman's 'The Ox-Bow Incident' and Corman's 'The Intruder' - in its savage melodramatic power; its determination to galvanise its audience; its political integrity (the journalist who influences the mob is a civilised bourgeois cosy with the corrupt elite; with the anti-hero an ex-army prole in a near-Depression small-town, with an immigrant wife), its visual sense of America, its forgotten, anonymous small towns, its bowling alleys, petrol stations, caravan camps. There is one extraordinary sequence, the equal of the bank robbery in 'Gun Crazy' (no higher praise, etc.): we watch a petrol station hold-up through the window behind the getaway driver, the camera held on Frank Lovejoy's nervy, sweaty face, the second drama playing out in miniature. The seamless move from relentless film noir to complex, undogmatic social tract is invigorating.

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Wrenching
Despite a catch-penny tile, "Try and Get Me" remains a truly frightening movie whose disturbing imagery lingers long after the voice-over reassurances subside. The director, Cy Endfield, was one of the lower profile victims of the Mc Carthy purges. Viewing this movie , it's easy to see why. Family man and returning vet Howard Tyler (played by the always low key Frank Lovejoy) is recruited into a life of crime by no more than ordinary desires for the American Dream. Desperate and enemployed, he falls into the clutches of a swaggering stickup man superbly played by a preening Lloyd Bridges. (Notice how subtly Bridges bends Tyler to his will on their first meeting at the bowling alley.) Joining Bridges, Tyler finally gets the standing he desires, but the spiral he has entered dooms him and his family's share of America's promise. (Note that conspicuous among the lynch mob's vanguard are fraternity boys, true to the actual event on which the movie is based.)

Throughout, the lighting and photography effectively undermine the facile voice of reason which the producers probably felt obligated to include. Endfield may have wanted an anti-violence film, but the resulting visual landscape implies a world of endemic violence. A sense of powerlessness pervades the film, one that mere admonishments cannot overcome. As a result, the characters appear caught in some terrible metaphysical web from which there is no escape.Something should be noted in passing about the compellingly exotic performance of Katherine Locke as Hazel the manicurist. Watch her facial expressions as this highly repressed plain-faced woman experiences yet one more rejection in what a paste-on smile shows to be a lifetime of rejections. Never has a blossom perched so precariously on a cheap hairdo, conveyed as much lower-class longing as hers, while the car ride with a guilt-ridden Tyler could serve as tawdry inspiration for a dozen feminist tracts. What ever became of this talented actress, I wonder.

That Endfield exiled himself to England and a conventional career with Stanley Baker, shows how much was lost among those purge victims whose disappearance, unlike many others, went generally unnoticed. Just a couple of years after the remarkable "Try and Get Me", and Endfield's also provocative "Underworld Story", Hollywood began sanitizing the screen with period spectacles, technicolor, and full-cleavage sex goddesses. Indeed times had changed - as Endfield already knew, the studios had to fight the Cold War too. There would be no more Try and Get Me's.