Fury (1936)

(On Cable TV, February 2020) Some social issues movies still resonate through the ages, and there’s something still very unnerving about Fury’s depiction of mob justice in a small community—the collective unconscious of the group demanding sacrifice and stopping at nothing—certainly not proof—to get it. There’s certainly something eerie in seeing director Fritz Lang, freshly escaped from Nazi Germany, taking on the project as his first American film. Spencer Tracy brings his everyman quality to the protagonist, accused of kidnapping and left for dead by a mob seeking vengeance. Fury still strikes a nerve despite constraints imposed by the Production Code and limited technical means—even in politically charged 2020, where performative political discourse quickly descends to personal accusations, it’s far too close to plausibility to be comfortable. Lang brings an outsider’s perspective to something—lynching—that was still very much part of American culture at the time, and does so in just a way to make the matter feel atemporal—maybe it’s still quiet, but the impulse toward mob justice is still very much there.