Fury

“A mob doesn’t think; it hasn’t time to think.” The horror of mob mentality is brilliantly and brutally animated in early proto-noir Fury, the first American film directed by German émigré and noir icon Fritz Lang. Spencer Tracy convincingly transforms from starry-eyed young lover into angry, bitter avenger as Joe Wilson, an average guy who’s wrongfully accused of child kidnapping, held in jail, attacked by a bloodthirsty mob, and presumed to have been burned alive. Joe’s fiancé Katherine Grant (Sylvia Sidney), who suspects he escaped, joins up with Joe’s brothers (Frank Alberton, George Walcott) as the state prepares a murder trial for 22 members of the mob who were caught on news reel footage. Somehow effectively combining allegory and intimacy, Fury exposes the irrational hate that lurks inside the human heart (the kind of hate that was about to ravage Europe). The film’s prescience and relevance to today’s social media environment can’t be overlooked: the rapid spreading of misinformation (Lang superimposes gossiping women with clucking hens), the toxic groupthink, the viral reach of outrage.