OVP: Fury (1936)

Film: Fury (1936)

Stars: Sylvia Sidney, Spencer Tracy, Walter Abel, Bruce Cabot, Walter Brennan

Director: Fritz Lang

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Sylvia Sidney-click here to learn more about Ms. Sidney (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles. 

We will give Sylvia Sidney her due in a second & kick off her month below, but I cannot ignore the fact that this film feels weirdly prescient immediately after watching it.  I tend to write these articles, especially "Saturdays with the Stars" weeks, if not occasionally months, in advance of when they publish (I have only missed one Saturday in two years, and I had pneumonia & 103-degree fever when that happened, and I am not breaking that streak again).  As a result, I watched Fury days after the terrorist attack on the Capitol on January 6th.  I suspect (and hope) that is not old news for you even though it was a month ago that it happened (I would like to think that such an attack on democracy would not wither out of the news cycle so quickly), but it's bizarre to watch a film like this after such an attack, as it's really, really similar in some ways to what happened on January 6th.

(Spoilers Ahead) Here's what I mean.  We have a film about a guy-named-Joe (Tracy, and oh god, I just realized the main character is named Joe).  He's in love with a girl named Katherine (Sidney) and for reasons that aren't really clear, they have to spend a year apart.  As Joe is returning to Katherine, whom he is engaged to & will soon marry, he is stopped (by Walter Brennan in a small role, and why is it that I can never tell how old Walter Brennan is supposed to be?), and accused of the kidnapping of a child that has taken place nearby.  Joe fits the description of the kidnapper, specifically his love of peanuts, and is arrested.  The townspeople catch word of Joe, and start gossiping, working themselves up into a fury, eventually creating a mob that storms a government (based on lies that they've heard about Joe), and destroy the building, with no regard for whether or not the lies are true, or if Joe is actually guilty.

Eerie, right?  The rest of the film obviously isn't as connected to real life, as it turns out that Joe is really alive, but wants revenge, and lets the townspeople go to trial for his murder, but is convinced by Katherine (when she understands he's still alive), to free them before they're convicted of murder & hanged.  The film itself is good, but I'll admit right now it's too close to reality for me to be able to judge it properly.  I'm going with three stars because it's compelling (I was screaming at one point at the screen), and Tracy is solid in the lead, but the ending is disappointing (Fritz Lang hated the ending, as it pretty much exonerates the townspeople for their hand in Joe's attempted murder), and I was honestly so shocked by the similarities it threw me off from appreciating the film properly.

I don't want to neglect Sylvia Sidney here, as we only have four Saturday's in a short month to be able to invest in her.  In 1936, when Fury was made, she was just coming off of a divorce after a marriage to Bennett Cerf (if you've ever watched old reruns of What's My Line? you know who Cerf is), and was a pretty big deal.  She'd largely taken over the perch at Paramount that Clara Bow had once sat in, despite the two actresses having little in common in their onscreen personas, and was smartly playing opposite a lot of major leading men of the era, stoking her popularity in the process (audiences were enamored with her saucer-like eyes).  It was about this time that she started to become the most highly-paid woman in Hollywood, though her position at that perch was short-lived.  Sidney's a weird actress to profile for this series, as I alluded to when we kicked off our month devoted to her as she was very famous for a brief period of time (essentially just 1936 & 1937), and then took long sabbaticals from acting that were broken up by memorable movies.  This month we're going to just focus on those two years, but tell as much of her story as possible.  Here, she's serviceable-her character is badly written (as is much of the third act, which is where she gets a lot of her screen-time), but she has enough of a glow to her that I'm curious what she'll be like as we move into next week, and one of her biggest classics.