Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1956)

Anne Bancroft and Aldo Ray in Nightfall

Cast: Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Brian Keith, James Gregory, Rudy Bond, Frank Albertson, Jocelyn Brando. Screenplay: Stirling Silliphant, based on a novel by David Goodis. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Film editing: William A. Lyon. Music: George Duning.

Nightfall is a well-made thriller strengthened by ingenious plotting: It never lets the viewer know too much too soon, keeping the motives and even the identities of its characters hidden until the right time to reveal them. Beefy Aldo Ray plays the protagonist, whom we know as Jim Vanning until his past is disclosed. Vanning, it turns out, is on the run, accused of murder but also trying to dodge the real killers, a pair of bank robbers played by Brian Keith and Rudy Bond, who think that Vanning has absconded with the loot from their heist. But Vanning doesn't know that he's also being tailed by an insurance investigator, played by James Gregory. In a bar, Vanning meets Marie Gardner, played by Anne Bancroft a few years before The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962) won her an Oscar and made her a star. She's a model and he's a freelance magazine illustrator, so they hit it off, not so fortunately for her because at that point the robbers show up, ready to beat the location of the money out of Vanning. Marie gets caught up in the plot as Vanning eludes the thugs and hides out with her. Eventually, they go on the run, joined by the insurance investigator, who is perfectly happy to help Vanning recover the money and prove his innocence. It all moves along swiftly, thanks to Jacques Tourneur's direction, and handsomely, thanks to the  cinematography of Burnett Guffey, who is equally adept at filming the noir shadows of the city and the bright snowy landscape of Wyoming where the chase winds up.

Fury (Fritz Lang, 1936)

The major Hollywood films about lynching -- this one and The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943) -- had white men as the victims, when the unfortunate fact is that black men (and a few women) were statistically by far the more frequent targets of vigilante mobs. Not until Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949), can I think of an American film that confronted the reality of the situation. But I don't think Fritz Lang, making his first American film, was thinking about the United States at all when he made Fury. He had seen rampaging mobs in Germany, which is why he left in 1933. That's why the film reaches its full actuality in its scenes of the mob in full cry. Those scenes alone are almost enough to establish the film as a classic, although much of the rest of Fury feels a bit scattered and aimless. It starts like a conventional romantic drama, with Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) and Katherine Grant (Sylvia Sidney) window-shopping for furniture for the home they hope to make when they're married. There's some sidetracking into Joe's relationship with his brothers, Charlie (Frank Albertson) and Tom (George Walcott), which although it seems like it will bear fruit -- Charlie has been associating with some shady characters, to which Tom objects -- is pretty much a narrative dead end. And after Katherine leaves for California, where Joe plans to join her when he makes some money, there's an injection of cuteness when Joe adopts a small dog he names Rainbow.* But when Joe finally gets to California his reunion with Katherine is interrupted by the law, who arrest him on the basis of circumstantial evidence as a suspect in a kidnapping. Gossips immediately take up the story and a mob led by a layabout named Kirby Dawson (Bruce Cabot) storms the jail and burns it down with Joe (and Rainbow) inside. Joe escapes (Rainbow doesn't) and goes into hiding, where he plots revenge. Eventually, when a trial leads to conviction of 22 members of the mob and their sentencing to death, Joe is presented with a moral dilemma: to reveal that he's alive, thereby saving the mob members from hanging, or to stay hidden and get his revenge. This being Hollywood, the decision is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Lang's direction is not so sure-handed as it was in his German films, but it keeps Fury watchable even when you spot the holes and compromises in the screenplay he co-wrote with Bartlett Cormack based on a story by Norman Krasna. Tracy is fine, though the character seems to split into two almost discrete roles: the affable Joe of the first half of the film and the obsessive revenge-seeker of the latter part.

*An oddly prescient name: Rainbow is played by Terry, who also played Toto in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939).