The Sound of Fury (film)

The Sound of Fury
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Cy Endfield
Produced by	Robert Stillman
Screenplay by	Jo Pagano
Based on	the novel The Condemned  by Jo Pagano
Starring	Frank Lovejoy Kathleen Ryan
Music by	Hugo Friedhofer
Cinematography	Guy Roe
Editing by	George Amy
Studio	Robert Stillman Productions
Distributed by	United Artists
Release dates	December 12, 1950 (1950-12-12) (United States)
Running time	85 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

The Sound of Fury (also known as Try and Get Me) is a 1950 black-and-white film noir directed by Cy Endfield and featuring Frank Lovejoy, Lloyd Bridges and Kathleen Ryan. The film is based on Jo Pagano's novel The Condemned, who also wrote the screenplay.^[1]

The film is based on factual events that occurred in 1933, when two men were arrested in San Jose, California, for kidnapping and murdering Brooke Hart. The suspects confessed and were lynched by a mob of locals. The Fritz Lang-directed 1936 film Fury was about the same incident.

Plot

Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) is a family man, living in California, who can't seem to get by financially. He meets up with a small-time, but charismatic, hood Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges). Soon, Slocum convinces Tyler into participating in gas station robberies to get by. Later, they kidnap a wealthy man in hopes of getting a huge ransom. Things go wrong when the man is murdered by Slocum then thrown in a lake. Tyler reaches his limit emotionally, and he begins drinking heavily. He meets a lonely woman and confesses the crime while drunk. The woman flees and goes to the police.

When the two kidnappers are arrested, a local journalist (Richard Carlson) writes a series of hate-filled articles about the two prisoners which eventually lead to a brutal lynching.

Cast

• Frank Lovejoy as Howard Tyler
• Kathleen Ryan as Judy Tyler
• Richard Carlson as Gil Stanton
• Lloyd Bridges as Jerry Slocum
• Katherine Locke as Hazel Weatherwax
• Adele Jergens as Velma
• Art Smith as Editor Hal Clendenning

Reception

Critical response

The New York Times film critic, Bosley Crowther, panned the film, writing "Although Mr. Endfield has directed the violent climatic scenes with a great deal of sharp visualization of mass hysteria and heat, conveying a grim impression of the nastiness of a mob, he has filmed the rest of the picture in a conventional melodramatic style. Neither the script nor the numerous performances are of a distinctive quality."^[2]

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, in a work on American film noir, wrote that "the prison assault remains one of the most brutal sequences in postwar American cinema."^[3]

Film critic Dennis Schwartz liked the film and discussed the political and social aspects of the film. He wrote, "Endfield's social consciousness film hits hard at uncontrolled violence in small-town America in much the same way as did Fritz Lang's Fury (also based on the same factual episode). The director was soon after making this film blacklisted due to his leftist positions on social and political issues. It's a superb characterization of America's thirst for crime and violence; one of the most powerful statements ever from a Hollywood film about the class divide in America and the yellow rag press that incites the public with poisonous newspaper coverage to sell papers (in modern times think NY Post or MSNBC cable TV). It calls attention to something about the 'cowboy attitude' in Americans that they don't like to acknowledge about themselves, but Europeans are quite aware of how uncivilized Americans can be."^[4]

Accolades

Nominations

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards: Best Film from any Source; 1952.

References

External links

• The Sound of Fury at the American Film Institute Catalog
• The Sound of Fury at the Internet Movie Database
• Try and Get Me at allmovie
• The Sound of Fury at Film Noir of the Week by Glenn Erickson
• The Sound of Fury essay at Yahoo! Voices by Timothy Sexton