Fury

Director Fritz Lang

California lynching following the kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FURY             A-                                                                                                                              USA  (92 mi)  1936  d: Fritz Lang

In this country people don’t land in jail unless they’re guilty.                                                    —a voice in the crowd

Fritz Lang is one of the founders of cinema, with a lengthy career extended from the early Silent era of 1919 until 1960, where his life epitomizes the birth and growth of cinema, deeply entrenched in its rich history.  But this film represented one of his greatest challenges, coming at such a difficult period in his life.  In 1933 he made the German crime thriller THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, which contained anti-fascist elements, urging public resistance to the emerging fascist party.  He was subsequently called into the offices of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda charged with enforcing Nazi ideology, informed that his film would be banned, yet he was also offered the job as head of the Nazi-controlled UFA studios.  Asked for time to consider, being part Jewish on his mother’s side, he fled the country that night, leaving his wife behind, who subsequently joined the Nazi party, coming first to Europe and then the United States in 1934, where this is his first film made in America, released just a year after becoming an American citizen, still, perhaps, having language difficulties.  Yet this is a very different kind of movie, a morality play moving from innocence to innocence lost, one of the strongest indictments of America’s small-town lynch mob mentality, coming years before Stuart Heisler’s Among the Living (1941) or William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), both dealing with the murderous effects of lawlessness from a lynch mob mentality, where vigilante justice replaces democracy, turning America’s ideals on its head.  Heisler’s film was made while Nazi’s were marching unchallenged throughout Europe while America sat on its hands in a position of neutrality, while Wellman’s film was made while America was at war, fighting on two battlefronts, in Europe and the Pacific, becoming a warning shot across the bow reminding viewers just what was at stake in the outcome.  But Lang’s film is the subject of great controversy, altered and tampered with by the studio, becoming a condensed version of what Lang had in mind, made earlier during Hitler’s rise to power transforming Germany into a fascist dictatorship with the Nazi regime eliminating all voices of opposition, fueled by mob violence, a subject Lang was intimately familiar with, having fled from Jewish persecution in Nazi-occupied Germany.  Lang originally envisioned a film about a black lynching, as there was a rise in lynching and mob violence in the 30’s, with NAACP lawyers drafting a federal anti-lynching bill that was killed in the Senate.  To perhaps no one’s amazement, to this day, it is still not a federal crime to lynch someone in America.  The subject, however, was taboo according to MGM head Louis B. Mayer, as his studio turned out family entertainment, not socially conscious filmmaking, with Mayer taking an active dislike to Lang, trying to bury the film upon its release, but Lang was able to sneak in a few scenes, appearing out of place and out of context, such as a black laundress (Edna Mae Harris) singing a slavery freedom song as she hangs out the wash, Oh Boys Carry Me 'Long STEPHEN FOSTER LYRICS ... YouTube (3:25), a scene cut out of the original print. 

Lang was never fully embraced by Hollywood, always viewing him with suspicion as a “foreigner,” as did critical reviews that accused him of anti-Americanism.  An additional thousand employees, both men and women from the German film industry also fled Nazi Germany, most finding employment in the newfound freedom of Hollywood, which welcomed the flood of immigrants, refugees, and exiles.  In the 1930’s Hollywood’s power rested with the movie moguls and producers, not with directors.  Lang was used to having total control over his pictures, never adjusting well to the American studio system, where he remained something of an outlier.  Unaware of labor laws and union rules, Lang was detested on the set for attempting to work through mandatory breaks, with Spencer Tracy vowing never to work with Lang again, with the director described as manipulative, abusive, and painfully insensitive.  Despite these problems, along with a studio-altered ending that infuriated the director, this is a powerful piece of filmmaking, where Lang’s vision of chaos and uncontrolled anarchy on the streets remained unequalled in American cinema until perhaps John Schlesinger’s THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1975), using German Expressionist film techniques to convey a macabre horror, with close-ups on faces expressing a kind of unbridled glee while inflicting insurmountable damage, setting fire to a police station, targeting a lone prisoner who was suspected of kidnapping a young girl for ransom, who happened to be innocent, but mob hysteria drove the crowd into a feeding frenzy of violence, wanting blood on their hands, and they wouldn’t stop until they got it.  While the film is a stark metaphor for the fascist Storm Trooper tactics of Nazi Germany occurring on American soil, and who better than a prominent German director to film it, becoming a cautionary tale of warning in a time of dark turmoil, when democracy as the fabric holding our nation together is under siege.  Lang also exposes the hypocrisy of the court, revealing how it can be manipulated by outside forces behind the scenes to advance personal agendas, a rare exposé receiving little to no press and rarely identified or examined on any level.  The patriotism on display here, with repeated references to living up to the ideals of the Constitution, were typical of the building sentiment surrounding a world leading up to war, with the film accentuating what happens when all that is instantly thrown out the window, suddenly finding yourself without due process, at the mercy and victim of vigilante justice, where a simple spark fuels the flames of mob rule, where tyranny reigns.  Despite the film’s confusing oddities, the message remains appropriate today as well, where blacks continue to protest against racial injustice and police brutality after the gruesome murder of George Floyd, finding themselves exiles in their own country, targeted and victimized by racial stereotypes and profiling, including centuries of unremedied racial bias, claiming they are subject to different standards of justice and an unequal application of the law, pleading for their Constitutional rights, wanting the same rights and benefits as everybody else in the hopes of forming a “more perfect” union.

The 1930’s was the decade of the Scottsboro Boys, Scottsboro Boys - Trial, Case & Names - HISTORY, 9 black kids (ages 13 to 19) arrested in Alabama for rape while riding the rails (a common practice during Depression times), wrongfully accused by a group of white kids who initially attacked the blacks, claiming it was a “white” train, but when their own assault proved unsuccessful, they contacted the police, with two white women claiming they were raped.  When word got out a lynch mob formed demanding their release, with the National Guard called in to prevent that from happening.  All except the youngest were convicted of rape and sentenced to death, resulting in multiple appeals and retrials while they languished in prison even after the Supreme Court overturned their convictions, now widely considered a miscarriage of justice, highlighted by the use of all-white juries.  Blacks were routinely disenfranchised in the Jim Crow South and unable to vote, which prevented them from serving on jury pools as well.  In addition, Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest, leader of the right-wing National Union for Social Justice, broadcast his hour-long radio show spewing hatred towards Jews and Communists, while supporting some of the fascist measures of Adolf Hitler in Germany.  In June 1934, Harper’s magazine published their lead article entitled, Must America Go Fascist?  This potential for fascism in America is at the heart of the film, which is filled with eloquent speeches about American democracy, but it’s less interested in politics than an angered mob’s disposition for violence.  Exiles and immigrants fleeing fascist Europe felt a particular responsibility not only to warn America against mob violence and the breakdown of law and order, but to fight for an idealized America that lived up to its values and principles.  The film is based on a real-life incident pulled directly from newspaper headlines occurring in San Jose, California in 1933 when two men were accused of kidnapping and murdering Brooke Hart, a likeable young department store heir, demanding $40,000 in ransom (Vigilantes in California lynch two suspected murderers ...).  When Hart’s decomposed body was discovered dumped in San Francisco Bay, a mob estimated to be as large as 15,000 people gathered in a park across from the jail demanding vigilante justice, eventually storming the police station, dragging the kidnappers to the park where they were stripped of their clothing, beaten, and hung from two different trees.  Child actor Jackie Coogan, a college friend of Brooke’s, reportedly held one of the ropes used in the lynching.  California Governor James Rolph refused to send in the National Guard, actually applauding the actions of the mob, vowing to pardon anyone who was convicted of the lynching.  In 1933 there were 28 reported lynchings, where all but four of the victims were black, yet it was the public spectacle of this notorious lynching that captured the nation’s imagination.  No one was ever indicted for the crime, one of the last lynchings to occur in the state of California, with hawkers selling post cards commemorating the event, even selling pieces of the tree limbs as souvenirs. 

In adapting the story to the screen, the original idea was presented by MGM writer Norman Krasna to noted screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz who was a producer on the film, largely because he spoke fluent German, at one time the Berlin correspondent for The Chicago Tribune.  Working with screenwriters Leonard Praskins and Bartlett Cormack (also a playwright), Mankiewicz largely provided the shape of the film, concluding that Tracy needed to be an ordinary man, a typical John Doe character, or an “average Joe.”  Adding a romance angle, Tracy as Joe Wilson is linked to Sylvia Sidney as Katherine Grant, a schoolteacher, with Wilson arrested by the police on the day of his intended marriage and held in jail on little more than flimsy evidence.  Aptly entitled, not to be confused with the Brian De Palma movie The Fury (1978), the film was released just 2 weeks after the execution of Bruno Hauptmann, an illegal immigrant from Germany charged in 1932 and convicted in 1935 for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindberg’s baby.  The round-the-clock publicity made this the trial of the century, but Hauptmann was convicted on circumstantial evidence, found with some of the ransom money, raising plenty of doubts and suspicions, which would have resonated with viewers at the time.  Made during the Depression when money is tight, forcing Katherine to take a job out of town in small-town America in order to accrue savings for their impending marriage.  After a year of living apart, the announced wedding day finally arrives, but Joe never shows up, having been stopped and detained by an overzealous deputy (Walter Brennan) on the lookout for the missing kidnappers.  When they discover a counterfeit $5 dollar bill in his pocket that was part of the ransom money, word spreads throughout town that they’re holding the kidnapper, who happens to be traveling with a small dog, appearing later as Toto in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939).  While the public rage seems fueled by implications of rape, which is never mentioned due to Pre-Code Hollywood standards, word spreads like wildfire, with exaggerations and animosity building, forming a mob with a predilection for attacking the sheriff and his deputies, breaking down the outside door to the police station with a battering ram, but they’re unable to reach the prisoner as the keys are actually thrown inside an empty jail cell that is locked, causing them to burn the building down, where the hellaceous mood grows into a frenzied explosion of fire and seething social discontent.  Much to Kate’s horror, she arrives on the scene as the jail is a blazing inferno of fire, witnessing the burning with Joe inside, utterly helpless and aghast at what she sees, with someone eventually throwing dynamite into the fire, Fury [1936] - Lynch Mob YouTube (1:48).  With so much destruction, the prisoner is presumed dead afterwards.  It’s just hours afterwards when the real kidnappers are caught that the town realizes their horrific mistake, with Kate left distraught and dazed, lost in grief afterwards.  Lang had dealt with this subject before, basically inventing the police procedural in M (1931), where an outcast pedophile child murderer is tracked down by the Berlin underworld and placed on trial before a mob of hardened criminals, claiming his actions are responsible for increased police presence, cutting into their criminal profits, basically giving crooks a bad name. 

The spontaneous destruction plays out like a delirious nightmare, happening relatively early in the film, shockingly killing off a lead character, while the case is later dissected and analyzed in lengthy courtroom proceedings, charging 22 instigators with the crime of murder.  While the townspeople remain tightlipped and refuse to acknowledge the names of anyone involved, where every single witness called to the stand blatantly lies, including the sheriff, blaming it on people from out of town, this is the first film to use newsreel coverage in a courtroom, becoming a film within a film, where the newsreel is stopped to identify each one in freeze frame, capturing them in the act of insurgency, countering their claims of innocence, creating extraordinary drama in the courtroom, basically putting a small community on trial.  At the time of the film’s release, film footage was inadmissible in California courts, but that was soon remedied less than a year later.  But in something of a twist, Joe actually survives (the dynamite blasts open his jail cell), climbing out of his sealed doom undetected, but is consumed by an overpowering drive for revenge, becoming a changed man, a vindictive avenger, turning it into a personal vendetta, a darkened figure focused completely on the trial afterwards, listening on the radio, showing little patience for those pretending to have alibi’s, covering up their crimes with fabricated lies, which only make Joe more driven to see them pay for their lawlessness.  The viciousness of Joe’s transformation is startling, no longer recognizing himself anymore, becoming strangely un-American, a stranger in his own country, consumed by his own anger and rage, mirroring the scene he witnessed outside his jail cell, lost in his own hysteria.  The prosecution, in all likelihood, is fully aware that Joe survived, working the case behind the scenes, nonetheless he presses his agenda forward, claiming murder knowing full well no murder occurred.  Katherine, meanwhile, seems lost in a catatonic state, too shocked to recognize the changing world around her, stuck or paralyzed by that moment, spending each day in a daze.  But she snaps out of it and starts putting together recognizable clues, realizing Joe is still alive, influencing the trial from behind the scenes.  The film continually lapses into a Hollywood melodrama, with longwinded, patriotic speeches in the courtroom serving as the nation’s conscience, followed by hysterical reactions from ordinary citizens seemingly driven by pangs of remorse, perhaps finally realizing the extent of their own cover up and crime, as they acted prematurely, thinking the worst, turned into a blood-thirsty mob taking murder into their own hands.  This kind of thing happened at the end of interrogation sequences on the long-running Perry Mason (1957 – 1966) television show, where out of nowhere the accused would spontaneously confess to their crimes, driven by internal forces of guilt.  That doesn’t exactly happen here, but through the newsreel footage, people perhaps see themselves in ways they never envisioned or realized, behaving like hoodlums or criminals, yet these are supposed to be upstanding citizens.  How quickly was Joe’s life destroyed?  How does a nation tolerate a public lynching?  What makes people lose possession of themselves like that and in an instant become a public menace, destroying community property, committing arson and perhaps even murder?  What flicks that switch?  The central trauma of the 30’s was the destabilizing effects of the Depression, as there was no threat yet to national security, which defined the 40’s.  As this film suggests, our entire system of values and democracy came under threat, with imminent signs of insurrection building from within, creating a societal rupture that has yet to heal, as the same dream of freedom and democracy is still not obtainable for all Americans, with a President, Senators, prominent billionaires, and police unions refusing to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter, causing some to lag far behind, unable to enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  

The Lost Patrol

 

 

 

 

Director John Ford (right) on the set with Victor McLaglen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LOST PATROL             B                                                                                                  USA  (73 mi)  1934  d:  John Ford     re-released in 1949 (66 mi)

Arabs are almost always easy targets in war movies. From as early as 1912, decades prior to the 1991 Gulf War, dozens of films presented allied agents and military forces—American, British, French, and more recently Israeli—obliterating Arabs. In the World War I drama The Lost Patrol (1934), a brave British sergeant (Victor McLaglen) guns down “sneaky Arabs, those dirty, filthy swine.”

—Jack G. Shaheen, 2003, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People 

Easily overshadowed by David Lean’s epic spectacle in the desert, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), John Ford decades earlier took a stab at what in hindsight looks like a mission of pure human folly, sending a British expedition into the blazing heat of the desert during WWI on some utterly senseless cavalry campaign, where they quickly realized they were lost in the ever-expanding horizon of endless sand dunes, assigned to some unknown mission that remained a mystery to them all, finding themselves literally alone in the middle of nowhere as the baking sun was about to take the last living breath out of the men and their horses.  Shot in the Yuma Desert of Arizona, with desert images reminiscent to von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), where the labyrinthian landscape is a human death trap, as so many of those that enter never find their way back out.  While it’s easy to get lost in any historical account of the British colonial involvement, which is all but absent in this picture, recounting instead the misadventures of a small British patrol of a dozen men during the WWI Mesopotamia campaign (Iraq, for all practical purposes, which didn’t yet exist as a nation), the film is meant to be metaphorical instead of historical, creating a mythical universe depicting the madness of war, as one by one this small renegade group is picked off by unseen snipers lurking just over the horizon, creating a psychological panic and interior hysteria among the men, who have no defense for this kind of guerilla war, where at no time in the film is there any motivation provided for just why they are at war or coming under attack, as it appears they are acting upon their own projected hatred.  Adapted by Garrett Fort from the 1927 war novel Patrol by Philip MacDonald, the film is a remake of a 1929 silent British film by Walter Summers under the same title, which happened to star Cyril McLaglen, the younger brother of Victor McLaglen, both playing the same role.  Written by Dudley Nichols, his initial experience as Ford’s screenwriter, working on 16 productions together before having a falling out, where he went on to direct Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), but this is a production that excludes women, that reveals the casual conversations that take place among the men, including references to home, and the dysfunctional lives many of these men lead, viewed as outcasts, which led them to sign up for military experience, sent to British territories around the globe, recalling former campaigns, where we hear the exaggerated sagas of former experiences that have been embellished through the years.  Finding themselves in the hot Mesopotamian desert, aptly described in the opening intertitles as a desert “that seemed on fire with the sun.  The molten sky gloated over them.  The endless desert wore the blank look of death,” surrounded by an unseen enemy that strikes like ghosts, as a shot rings out and the commanding officer falls to his death without ever revealing his regiment’s objective or their final destination.  A gutty Sergeant takes command, Victor McLaglen, an ex-boxer who fought against heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, becoming the heavyweight champion of the British Army, a big burly presence whose calm demeanor helps stabilize the troops, having been through it all before, who would win the Best Actor Oscar the very next year for his role in Ford’s The Informer (1935), working together in a dozen pictures, perhaps the most recognizable John Ford actor after John Wayne.   

A reflection of the British class system, where WWI was an attempt to protect a dying aristocracy, the remaining soldiers show little remorse for their fallen officer, coming from a distinctly different social class than the rank and file.  As the film was released during the Depression, largely viewed as a disaster caused by the super wealthy inflicting their incompetency upon the poor, giving the film an allegorical message about the rich refusing to share the wealth with the common man.  Lean and concise, perhaps a predecessor to films like Delmar Daves’ 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), André de Toth’s Day of the Outlaw (1959), Robert Aldrich’s FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (1965), John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), or Ridley Scott’s outer space sci-fi saga Alien (1979), the oppressive desert heat leaves the men weakened and exhausted, with little water left to share, while their horses are under the same strain, with some falling by the wayside.  By some miracle, they fall upon an oasis, providing water and fig trees, literally a lifesaver in what is otherwise a death march into a pit of Hell.  While the men are euphoric, recovering quickly, Reginald Denny is Brown, an experienced veteran who boasts of adventures in faraway places, like the Malayan Islands, which has a casual air of racism when they mention the skin color of the girls, as if that’s tainted goods, yet it makes no difference to men who are so far away from home.  A small group of isolated men under stress speaking that all-too familiar Irish brogue, where the stories resemble the talk along the ship decks in The Long Voyage Home (1940), among many Ford films built around a distant journey, though often the object of the journey is never attained, like a mythical quest for the Golden Fleece, or immortality.  A young inexperienced soldier Pearson (Douglas Walton) talks about living with his mother at home, but having no future, so he signed up for military service hoping to gain some experience, driven by heavily romanticized Kipling-inspired dreams of glory that preached the benefits of British imperialism, but by morning he’s shot dead by a sniper, while all their horses were also stolen right out from underneath them, leaving them stranded out in the open like sitting ducks.  Boris Karloff is Sanders, a Bible-toting religious fanatic who initially claims the oasis is a Garden of Eden (though clearly the land is Islamic territory), but he never joins in with the others, always keeping to himself, annoyed that his attempts at conversion fail, viewing the others as heathens and scoundrels for failing to follow the Word of the Lord, perhaps viewing this military venture into the land of infidels as a religious crusade.  He grows more maniacal as the men are picked off one by one, where the mystifying tone of the film is charged by the eerie silence that surrounds them, where no movement is ever seen, with the sand dunes concealing the face of the enemy.  Like Zurlini’s THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS (1976), the men are haunted by a lurking dread of an impending sense of doom, exacerbated by the fear of the unknown, psychologically projecting their own fears into the actions of the enemy, which eats at the inner core of these soldiers who live in a world abandoned by time.  Certainly a study of questionable leadership, the Sergeant is perplexed right from the outset at never being told the mission, allowing behavior that has disastrous consequences, like allowing the most inexperienced soldier sentry duty the first night, or allowing another to climb the highest tree, where he’s immediately picked off, while others panic and run out into the open desert, as if blinded by temporary insanity, but it costs them their lives, with a militaristic score by Max Steiner heightening the emotional impact, his first (out of 24!) Oscar nominated score.

This film is shrouded in a Macbethian gloom of paranoid delusion, countering the imperialist myth that war is glorious, growing progressively dark as the body count grows, becoming a staunchly anti-war fable.  The fact that it all takes place in such an artificialized environment that couldn’t be more remotely isolated, stuck in a state of paralysis, not knowing where they are or how they got there, or even where they’re going, giving this a staged theater of the absurd appearance with characters trapped in a modernist No Exit situation, allowing Sanders in particular to go off on the deep end, losing himself in his zealous fanaticism, shouting at one point, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”  Another internal conflict is existentialism against religious faith, with a grandstanding Boris Karloff pouring out the over-the-top melodrama as he expounds upon religious conviction, yet his obsession with holding the Bible near and dear to him in times of trouble feels as much like a crutch as the escapist, immoral tales told by ordinary men, whose drinking exploits and carnal desires are called upon in times of stress, if only to help alleviate the fear that engulfs them.  A primal tale of survival against implacable forces, a complete breakdown of moral order, growing ever more isolated and alone in their internalized sense of desperation, veering towards a horror film.  As the men bicker among themselves, their group dwindles in dramatic fashion, becoming panicked, held together by a primal desire to kill as many Arabs as possible, aligned in their mad desire for revenge, but what the men lack is faith in one another and faith in their mission, instead feeling stranded, as if left on a deserted island, where the only surety is that no one will be coming to rescue them, perfectly capturing a mood of bleak fatalism.  By the way, the solemn final image was borrowed by Akira Kurosawa for the conclusion of SEVEN SAMURAI (1954).  Even this early in Ford’s career, showing progressive moral values, the racial element is an unmistakable component to his filmmaking, where Arabs are a stand-in for what will become the Indians, as a non-white enemy is perpetually demonized, viewed as less than human, with the director expressing no interest in exploring or expounding upon their character, yet they are continually dehumanized as evil.  This vein of bigotry exists throughout his legendary career, and this film is no different.  In Hollywood, the celluloid mythology dominates the culture, becoming the predominate train of thought, a stand-in for truth that literally infects generation after generation.  In less than a decade, 100,000 Japanese-Americans would be sent to internment camps, American blacks would march off to war but were denied basic civil rights back here at home, while hate groups like the Klu Klux Klan were still burning homes and organizing lynchings, while also resorting to murder.  Earlier in history, American Indians were slaughtered and displaced.  Certainly part of the problem is the Hollywood depiction, as the mythology of Arabs and Indians are still rooted in evil, where this kind of racist hysteria becomes the norm.  These all-pervasive stereotypes have more of an effect on viewers today than they did during the Depression, for instance, when this film was released, as the motion picture industry has extended their influence into mainstream culture.  Even without revealing the face of the enemy, it’s hard not to view Arabs as threatening after watching this film.  Perhaps more importantly, the television and motion picture industry of today perpetuates the same threat, as Arab-Americans are nearly entirely non-existent except when depicted as villains, where they are routinely stereotyped as “terrorists.” 

Note

The film was reportedly a favorite of Peanuts creator Charles Schultz in his youth, which may be the reason Snoopy’s cousin Spike lives in the desert.