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).  

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

If Hitchcock's name were not attached to this movie, would we remember it at all today? Perhaps as one of the last films of Carole Lombard -- it was the last released before her death in January 1942, though the posthumously released To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942) was the last one she completed filming. Or perhaps as one of the lesser examples of the romantic/screwball  comedy genre that flourished in the 1930s and '40s. But even hardcore Hitchcockians find it difficult to fit it into the director's canon. Hitchcock had said he wanted to work with Lombard, and when Lombard liked Norman Krasna's story and screenplay, the teaming was put into play. Lombard and Robert Montgomery play Ann and David Smith, who discover that their three-year-old marriage is invalid, owing to a legal technicality. Complications ensue, especially when David doesn't rush into remarriage as quickly as Ann likes. She kicks him out of the apartment, and then his law partner, Jeff Custer (Gene Raymond), makes a play for her affections. Lombard is very much at home in this kind of comedy, but Montgomery is surprisingly good at it too. The weak link is Raymond, who has the kind of role, the "other man" patsy, at which actors like Ralph Bellamy in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) and John Howard in The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) excelled. Raymond plays his part with a pinched, rather prissy manner that hardly sits well with the fact that he's supposed to have been the best fullback at the University of Alabama. In fact, the character seems to have been coded as latently gay: Witness Lombard's reaction when Ann learns that he decorated his own very tasteful apartment. Much of the film skirts around matters forbidden by the Production Code, including whether the now-unmarried Smiths should sleep together, which a director like Lubitsch or Hawks would have treated with more wit and finesse than Hitchcock does. This was only his third film made in Hollywood, and it was his first with a completely American setting; the first two, Rebecca (1940) and Foreign Correspondent (1940), were set in Europe and England. His unfamiliarity with American idiom shows up particularly in his treatment of Jeff and his parents (Philip Merivale and Lucile Watson), proper Southerners who are shocked at the suggestion that Ann has been sleeping with David. But whenever Hitchcock is working with Lombard and Montgomery, especially using Lombard's great gift for uninhibited physical comedy, the movie comes to fitful life.