The Sound of Fury (film)

For the album by Billy Fury, see The Sound of Fury (album).
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
Edited by George Amy
Production
company
Robert Stillman Productions
Distributed by United Artists
Release dates
  • December 12, 1950 (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 inspired by 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

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 Fox 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

References

  1. ↑ The Sound of Fury at the American Film Institute Catalog.
  2. ↑ Crowther, Bosley. The New York Times, film review. Accessed: August 19, 2013.
  3. ↑ Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953. 1955. ISBN 0-87286-412-X.
  4. ↑ Schwartz, Dennis. Ozus' World Movie Reviews, film review, December 6, 2004. Accessed: August 19. 20134.

External links