Cinema
Fury
Fritz Lang · 1936
Synopsis
Joe Wilson, a garage owner, sets off to meet his fiancée Katherine, a schoolteacher in another town, whom he is soon to marry. On the way, he is arrested in a small town on the strength of slight evidence and accused of kidnapping a child. The rumour grows with each retelling; a crowd gathers outside the jail, overwhelms the sheriff and, unable to reach the prisoner, sets fire to the building.
Context
The first American film by its director, who had arrived in the United States in 1934 after a stay in France, it was produced by MGM from a story by Norman Krasna, freely inspired by a Californian news item, which Bartlett Cormack and Lang adapted. Lang would have liked the victim to be a Black man, which the studio refused. The film was released in the United States on 29 May 1936 and in France on 16 October that year, with Sylvia Sidney in the role of Katherine.
Who it is for
A black-and-white drama of an hour and a half, with Spencer Tracy, on rumour, the crowd and lynching.
Prizes and reception
Nominated for the Oscar for best original story for Norman Krasna; entered in 1995 in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.