The Pagano novel was based on events that occurred in 1933 when two men were arrested in San Jose, California for the kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart. The suspects confessed and were subsequently lynched by a mob of locals. The 1936 film Fury, directed by Fritz Lang, was inspired by the same incident.[7]
Plot
Howard Tyler is a family man from Boston, living in California with his wife and boy, who has trouble finding a job. He meets charismatic small-time hood Jerry Slocum, who hires Howard to participate in gas-station robberies. Later, Jerry concocts a plan to kidnap Donald Miller, the son of a wealthy man, to receive a large ransom. Things go wrong when Jerry kills the man and throws the body into a lake. Howard, who did not know that his and Jerry's criminal exploits would include murder, reaches his emotional limit and begins drinking heavily. He meets a lonely woman and, while drunk, confesses to the crime. The woman flees and informs the police.
When the two kidnappers are arrested, a local journalist writes a series of vicious articles about the two prisoners. A vicious mob assembles outside the police station, overpowers the guards and storms the building, seizing the two men in order to kill them.[8]
Joe E. Ross as Nightclub comic magician (uncredited)
Production
The film was the first independent production from Robert Stillman, who had worked with Stanley Kramer, and signed a six picture deal with United Artists.[9] The film starred Frank Lovejoy, who had been in Kramer's Home of the Brave.
Filming took place in Phoenix, Arizona.
The movie encountered censorship trouble in New York due to the last section.[10]
Reception and legacy
Critical response
New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther panned the film, writing: "Although Mr. Endfield has directed the violent climactic scenes with a great deal of sharp visualization of mass hysteria and heat, conveying a grim impression of the nastiness of a mob, he has filmed the rest of the picture in a conventional melodramatic style. Neither the script nor the numerous performances are of a distinctive quality,"[11] and that audiences had "to expend pity and resentment towards society in the cause of a common thief."[12]
Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, in a work on American film noir, wrote that "the prison assault remains one of the most brutal sequences in postwar American cinema."[13]
Among the final films made in the U.S. by blacklisted writer/director Cy Endfield before he relocated to England, The Sound of Fury has been restored by the Film Noir Foundation.[16][17] The restored version was aired for the first time on Turner Classic Movies on January 25, 2020, and was introduced by Eddie Muller.
^Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. Borde, Raymond; Chaumeton, Etienne (1955). A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953. City Lights Books. ISBN0-87286-412-X.
