The illusion of postwar American prosperity is on trial in Cy Endfield’s The Sound of Fury in which Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy), a financially desperate husband and father who dreams of owning a television set, falls prey to the supreme confidence and borderline psychosis of Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges). When Jerry persuades Howard to join him in a string of robberies, things take a gruesome, murderous turn. Howard’s shock and guilt begin to consume him, as conveyed via Dutch angles and blurred lenses, until he’s compelled to confess to the police so they can lock him up. Known for playing the underappreciated everyman, Lovejoy depicts psychological collapse masterfully in a scene with a lonely wallflower named Hazel played by a mesmerizing Katherine Locke, whose emotional state shifts from tender longing to downright terror as Howard breaks down and reveals to her what he’s done. When the newspaper reports that Howard and Jerry might plead insanity, the townsfolk descend on the main square to take justice into their own hands; the storming of the jail is a genuinely thrilling and horrifying sequence. The angelic Kathleen Ryan plays Howard’s wife Judy as a saintly figure, her husband’s sole source of redemption.