Fury (1936)

 Fritz Lang's "Fury"

After escaping Germany in 1933 when the Nazis took power, Fritz Lang eventually found his way to Hollywood. In response to the mob mentality that had overtaken Germany at the time, Lang constructed a film that demonstrates, step by step, the emergence of group mind. Lang had adapted the story from a Norman Krasna story called Mob Rule, which in turn was based on actual events in which a mob lynched a man named Brooke Hart in San Jose, California. With Fury, Lang presents a condemning view of how ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance can ignite mass hysteria and override rational thought.

The film stars a gas-station owner named Joe Wilson who is taken into custody on his way to meet his fiancé, Katherine. The police say he fits the description of a child kidnapper in the area, right down to the peanuts that he keeps in his pockets. While in custody, word around town begins to spread. Like a game of telephone, the gossip begins with, "I heard the police brought somebody in who may know something about those kidnapped girls," and through continued secondhand, eventually gets to, "The man came in and was cocky, bragging about those kidnappings, and the police aren't doing anything about it!" Eventually hysteria starts to ensue. A mob forms and storms the police station, and burn it to the ground with Joe inside. His beloved Katherine can do nothing but watch. Eventually, the real kidnappers are caught and confess, leading to the recognition that this small town mob lynched an innocent man. However, Joe eventually shows up at his two brothers' place - instructing them to put the mob on trial for murder while he hides away. The district attorney brings 22 of the townspeople in on trial for murder. The trial begins questionably, as the townsfolk stick together and lie about the incident to protect themselves. However, news reels are played in court showing and identifying the faces of those on trial. Katherine then figures out that Joe is not dead, but is instead concealing his fate so that he can take revenge on those who wrongfully tried to murder him. She pleads with Joe to stop the charade, but he is hellbent on vengeance. After a couple of days of his conscious weighing on him, Joe walks into the courtroom and sets things straight, preventing the hanging of those found guilty.

At the beginning of the film, Land demonstrates how the ignorance of the townsfolk fueled the flames for aggressive collective action. Each member of the town became wrapped up in 'justice' and vengeance over the missing children, taking it upon themselves to bring justice. However, because the viewer is aware of Joe's innocence, we understand the misinformation and become upset over the assumptions made by the town. With the emergence of this collective consciousness, individual rationality becomes lost. Rather, the behavior of the collective is motivated by emotional impulse. Lang was all too familiar with collective emotional irrationality, as a group mentality amplified individual bigotry back in Germany. As one character in the film, a barber, states, "People get funny impulses. If you resist them, you're sane. If you don't, you're on the way to the nuthouse, or the pen." The context of this quote was in regard to reasons why someone would kidnap a child. However, Lang uses this quote and turns it on its head to demonstrate the insanity of the herd mentality, as it acts purely on impulse. 

Lang then performs a magic trick. As we witness the injustice of what is happening, we begin to feel angry. Like Joe, we want these heathens tried for murder. As Joe states, "I'm legally dead, and their legally murders. That I'm alive is not their fault." The viewer mirrors this sentiment. We saw the crowd behaving irrationally, try and seemingly succeed to murder an innocent man, and even lie in the courtroom to protect themselves. For all intents and purposes, we want them to hang for what they did just like Joe. However, whenever Katherine discovers that Joe is not dead, she realizes that her compliance with this lie will cause 22 people to die for something that did not technically do. Once we occupy Katherine's perspective, we begin to realize that we were swept up in the same enthusiastic mentality that the mob participated in. We feel vengeful and emotional over what these people had done that we want them to die because of it, even though they did not factually kill anyone. We have become that same vengeful, angry mob acting on our emotional impulses, despite the rationality of what has happened. 

The film is a contemplation on fury, and how it overtakes and morally corrupts us. Not only this, it is a demonstration of how violent the individual actually is. Lang infuses the whole film with images of violence. After the barber's quote about impulses, he admits that he has impulses to cut people's throats while shaving (impulses he avoids). The sheriff's deputy is seen killing flies while the sheriff interrogates Joe. When word around town begins to spread, a farmer is shown practicing his whip while he calls for justice. Lang even places hanging ropes in  hardware store, giving the visual allusion of the pent-up anger and violence of the townspeople. With this constant demonstration of violence and aggression, Lang shows how no one is above giving into their violent impulses, and even taking those impulses to mass extremes. The characters believe they are acting in justice to punish violence, when in reality they're the ones who are enacting the violence themselves. Like the Nazis in Germany, Lang shows an American small town flame their bigotry, their hatred, and their misinformed self-vindication to become a fascist mob enacting violence believing that they are taking justice into their own hands.

When Lang pitched the idea to MGM, he wanted Joe to be played by a black man. Lang believed that the mob mentality's hatred toward Jews in Germany was something akin to the mass hatred of black Americans by white Americans. Lang wanted to demonstrate the similar ways of thinking between American racists and Nazis. However, MGM rejected this idea. Known for their lavish musicals and glitzy dramas, this gritty, socially conscious film was a major departure for the studio. Not only did they reject Lang's choice for a black protagonist, but also wanted Lang to change the ending to tack on a reconciliation for the characters. Basically, they wanted the film to have a 'happy ending' in which Spencer Tracy's Joe and Sylvia Sidney's Katherine kiss at the end. 

Lang's steely drama about mob mentality creates a unique experience in which it is objectively demonstrated before us, while then subjectively creating that same mentality within us. Due to the Hollywood studio set-up and control, Lang was not able to fully experiment with film as he had done previously in Germany, except through the script. However, Lang does infuse the film with visual expressionist touches. (An expressionist cannot escape his own impulses). When the crowd begins to spread gossip, Lang cuts to an image of a group of clucking chickens, visually comparing the mob to a group of dim-witted chickens. In another scene, Joe starts to feel a heaviness for the 22 being sentanced to death. While looking in a storefront, the faces of the 22 appear hovering behind him in frame, as Lang is visually conveying that Joe is being emotionally haunted by them. Not only this, when he walks through the street, Lang inserts the sound of multiple steps congruent to Joe's steps, continuing in this notion that they are following him in his mind. In perhaps the best shot in the film, Lang also shows up an extreme close-up of Katherine when she witnesses Joe stuck in his cell as flames surround him. The extreme close up closes Katherine into the frame, squeezing her in. This claustrophobic image instills a sense of inescapabilty, allowing no breathing room in the frame. Her eyes looking directly into the camera also instills a feeling of discomfort, as one feels when looked at directly in the eyes, especially in a circumstance in which someone inside a film seemingly breaks the fourth wall and 'sees' you. This allows the viewer to internally take on Katherine's emotional state: the inescapable discomfort and fear of her fiancé being burned alive by an insane mob.

 Fitz Lang's first American film Fury premiered in 1936, to much success. Despite the fact that Lang felt contentious over the studio's poor publicity for the film, it earned an impressive $685,000 domestically while taking in $617,000 in the overseas market. The film also earned an Academy Award nomination for best original story. Frank Nugent of the New York Times described the film as a "mature, sober and penetrating investigation of a national blight." In 1995, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Lang depiction of the kind of hysteria that infused Nazi Germany would not be the last time Lang incorporated that subject matter into his work. In fact, when the war began, Lang began to make anti-Nazi propaganda films, in which actual Nazis were the villains of the stories, enticing the ambivalent American population to join the war efforts. Fury was the first American film for Lang, but certainly wasn't his last, or even his last notable one.