En route to meet his fiancée Katherine Grant, gas-station owner Joe Wilson is arrested on flimsy circumstantial evidence for the kidnapping of a child. Gossip soon travels around the small town, growing more distorted through each retelling, until a mob gathers at the jail. When the resolute sheriff refuses to give up his prisoner, the enraged townspeople burn down the building, throwing dynamite into the flames as they flee the scene. Unknown to anyone else there, the blast frees Joe but kills his little dog Rainbow, who had run in to comfort him in the cell.
The district attorney brings the main perpetrators to trial for murder, but nobody is willing to identify the guilty, and several provide false alibis. The case seems hopeless, but then the prosecutor produces hard evidence: newsreel footage of 22 people caught in the act.
Katherine discovers that Joe escaped the fire and that his brothers are helping him take revenge by concealing his survival and framing the defendants for his murder. She goes to see Joe and pleads with him to stop the charade, but he is determined to make his would-be killers pay. His conscience begins to weigh on him and, just as the verdicts are being read, he walks into the courtroom and sets things straight.
Norman Krasna was inspired to write the story after reading about a lynching in The Nation. He pitched the idea to Samuel Marx and Joseph L. Mankiewicz at MGM, who were attracted to it. Krasna claimed that he did not write a script; he verbally pitched it to Mankiewicz, who then dictated it.[5] Multiple changes were made from Krasna's story to the final script.[6]
Fury was Lang's first American film, and is considered by critics to have been compromised by the studio, which forced Lang to tack on a reconciliation between Tracy's character and his girlfriend at the end. The film was a major departure for MGM, known for its lavish musicals and glitzy dramas; the expensive production features expansive and stylized sets to create its gritty world, and its style is more in keeping with the social-issue films associated with Warner Bros., such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.[7]
Lang originally wanted to make a film about a black victim of a lynching, but the idea was rejected by MGM.[citation needed] The kiss scene at the end, a typical Hollywood "happy ending," was appended because the production manager insisted. Lang, who credited himself with changing the protagonist from a lawyer to a mechanic, also said that he wanted to reveal that the protagonist had committed the murder.[8]
Reception
The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Original Story. Frank Nugent, in a review for The New York Times, praised it as "[a] mature, sober and penetrating investigation of a national blight."[9] Writing for The Spectator in 1936, Graham Greene strongly praised the film, describing it as "the only film I know to which I have wanted to attach the epithet of 'great'." Expressing his view that the film completely conveyed the "sense of spiritual integrity ... by sound and image better than by any other medium," Greene drew particular attention to the contributions of Sylvia Sidney: "[S]he has never more deeply conveyed the pain and inarticulacy of tenderness ... no other director has got so completely the measure of his medium, is so consistently awake to the counterpoint of sound and image."[10]
In 1995, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[11] It was released on Blu-ray disc in the North American region by Warner Bros. in their Archive Collection in 2021.
The film earned domestic rentals of $685,000 and $617,000 overseas.[3] According to MGM records, the final profit was $248,000.[2][12]
↑ McGilligan, Patrick, "Norman Krasna: The Woolworth's Touch", Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age, University of California Press,1986 pp. 218–219
↑ Skolsky, Sidney. "Hollywood". The Washington Post (1923–1954) Washington, D.C. June 8, 1936: 14.
↑ Bogdanovich, Peter (2005). Audio commentary for Fury, Warner Bros. Home Video.
↑ Essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 ISBN0826429777, pp. 246–247
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy was an American actor. He was known for his natural performing style and versatility. One of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, Tracy was the first actor to win two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor from nine nominations. During his career, he appeared in 75 films and developed a reputation among his peers as one of the screen's greatest actors. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Tracy as the 9th greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
How the West Was Won is a 1962 American epic Western film directed by Henry Hathaway, John Ford and George Marshall, produced by Bernard Smith, written by James R. Webb, and narrated by Spencer Tracy. Originally filmed in true three-lens Cinerama with the according three-panel panorama projected onto an enormous curved screen, the film features an ensemble cast formed by many cinema icons and newcomers, including Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne and Richard Widmark. The supporting cast features Brigid Bazlen, Walter Brennan, David Brian, Ken Curtis, Andy Devine, Jack Lambert, Raymond Massey as Abraham Lincoln, Agnes Moorehead, Harry Morgan as Ulysses S. Grant, Thelma Ritter, Mickey Shaughnessy, Harry Dean Stanton, Russ Tamblyn and Lee Van Cleef.
The following is an overview of 1936 in film, including significant events, a list of films released and notable births and deaths.
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career, and won both the Academy Award for Best Director and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in consecutive years for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), the latter of which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six.
George Raft was an American film actor and dancer identified with portrayals of gangsters in crime melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s. A stylish leading man in dozens of movies, Raft is remembered for his gangster roles in Quick Millions (1931) with Spencer Tracy, Scarface (1932) with Paul Muni, Each Dawn I Die (1939) with James Cagney, Invisible Stripes (1939) with Humphrey Bogart, and Billy Wilder's comedy Some Like It Hot (1959) with Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon; and as a dancer in Bolero (1934) with Carole Lombard and a truck driver in They Drive by Night (1940) with Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino and Bogart.
John Hodiak was an American actor who worked in radio, stage and film.
Boys Town is a 1938 American biographical drama film based on Father Edward J. Flanagan's work with a group of underprivileged boys in a home/educational complex that he founded and named "Boys Town" in Nebraska. It stars Spencer Tracy as Father Edward J. Flanagan, and Mickey Rooney with Henry Hull, Leslie Fenton, and Gene Reynolds.
Sylvia Sidney was an American stage, screen and film actress whose career spanned over 70 years. She rose to prominence in dozens of leading roles in the 1930s. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams in 1973. She later gained attention for her role as Juno, a case worker in the afterlife, in Tim Burton's 1988 film Beetlejuice, for which she won a Saturn Award as Best Supporting Actress.
Bruce Cabot was an American film actor, best remembered as Jack Driscoll in King Kong (1933) and for his roles in films such as The Last of the Mohicans (1936), Fritz Lang's Fury (1936), and the Western Dodge City (1939). He was also known as one of "Wayne's Regulars", appearing in a number of John Wayne films beginning with Angel and the Badman (1947), and concluding with Big Jake (1971).
The Power and the Glory is a 1933 pre-Code film starring Spencer Tracy and Colleen Moore, written by Preston Sturges, and directed by William K. Howard. The picture's screenplay was Sturges' first script, which he delivered complete in the form of a finished shooting script, for which he received $17,500 and a percentage of the profits. Profit-sharing arrangements, now a common practice in Hollywood, were then unusual and gained Sturges much attention.
William Joseph Patrick O'Brien was an American film actor with more than 100 screen credits. Of Irish descent, he often played Irish and Irish-American characters and was referred to as "Hollywood's Irishman in Residence" in the press. One of the best-known screen actors of the 1930s and 1940s, he played priests, cops, military figures, pilots, and reporters. He is especially well-remembered for his roles in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and Some Like It Hot (1959). He was frequently paired onscreen with Hollywood star James Cagney. O'Brien also appeared on stage and television.
The Murder Man is a 1935 American crime-drama film starring Spencer Tracy, Virginia Bruce, and Lionel Atwill, and directed by Tim Whelan. The picture was Tracy's first film in what would be a twenty-year career with MGM. Tracy plays an investigative reporter who specializes in murder cases. The film is notable as the feature film debut of James Stewart. Stewart has sixth billing as a reporter named Shorty.
Norman Krasna was an American screenwriter, playwright, producer, and film director who penned screwball comedies centered on a case of mistaken identity. Krasna directed three films during a forty-year career in Hollywood. He garnered four Academy Award screenwriting nominations, winning once for 1943's Princess O'Rourke, which he also directed.
They Won't Forget is a 1937 American drama film directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Edward Norris, and Lana Turner, in her feature debut. It was based on a novel by Ward Greene called Death in the Deep South, which was in turn a fictionalized account of a real-life case: the trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank after the murder of Mary Phagan in 1913.
You and Me is a 1938 American crime drama/comedy/romance film directed by Fritz Lang. It stars Sylvia Sidney and George Raft as a pair of ex-convicts on parole, working in a department store whose owner, played by Harry Carey, routinely hires former criminals to give them a second chance. It was written by Norman Krasna and Virginia Van Upp.
20,000 Years in Sing Sing is a 1932 American pre-Code drama film set in Sing Sing Penitentiary, the maximum security prison in Ossining, New York, starring Spencer Tracy as an inmate and Bette Davis as his girlfriend. It was directed by Michael Curtiz and based upon the nonfiction book Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, written by Lewis E. Lawes, the warden of Sing Sing from 1920 to 1941.
Princess O'Rourke is a 1943 American romantic comedy film directed and written by Norman Krasna, and starring Olivia de Havilland, Robert Cummings and Charles Coburn. Krasna won the 1944 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Edward Bartlett Cormack was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, and producer best known for his 1927 Broadway play The Racket, and for working with Howard Hughes and Cecil B. DeMille on several films.
Arthur Stone was an American character actor of the late silent and early sound film eras.
Wally Maher was an American actor, primarily on old-time radio; he was also known as the original voice of Tex Avery's cartoon character Screwy Squirrel.
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