Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Loui Blair It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

grantss Powerful examination of mob (in)justice.A man, Joe Wilson (played by Spencer Tracy), travels across state to meet his fiancé/girlfriend, Katherine (played by Sylvia Sidney). Along the way he is mistaken for a kidnapper, arrested and held in the local jail. The local townspeople, through gossip and stupidity, then take it upon themselves to punish him, burning down the jail, with him in it. However...The buildup to and execution of the lynching scene are brilliant. Famed director Fritz Lang builds the feeling of injustice and powerlessness on the part of the authorities and accused to do anything about it. By the time the scene occurs, the viewer's anger levels are sky-high. Very powerful storytelling by Lang.At this point the movie was a damning indictment on mob mentality. Politicians, shown pandering to the media and thinking about elections rather than the safety of their citizens, don't come off looking too good either. So far, so good - very true to life.However, the remainder of the movie, while still good, was not as convincing, focused or powerful. What follows feels a bit contrived, and even makes the victim into the villain. The ending was more about sentimentality than profundity and was a bit unsatisfying.Overall, a good movie, but could have been a masterpiece.

Robert J. Maxwell It's Fritz Lang's illustrated gloss on Aristotle's observation that "At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst." Lang himself, an escapee from the Nazis, was a fascinating director, given to striding around in riding breeches and boots, shouting orders through a megaphone, seeing things through a monocle. He directed a couple of pot boilers but seemed attracted most to stories of revenge -- taken too far. You can see it in "Rancho Deluxe" and "The Big Heat." Sometimes the work looks a little crude today but it's sublime in comparison to modern revenge movies like "The Punisher" and "Sudden Impact." "Fury", though it has its crude moments, is a fine moral lesson and a decent study of human nature. Spencer Tracy is in love with Sylvia Sidney, who is leaving him in Chicago for a better paying job out West, where he will join her after saving a bit of money. This is 1936 and everybody is broke. The two of them ache for marriage. He finally drives west but is coincidentally caught up in a man hunt for four kidnappers and held by a hick sheriff because, like one of the miscreants, he's fond of salted peanuts and happens to be carrying a five-dollar bill with the same serial numbers as one of the ransom notes. This is probably an echo of the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder, a sensation in the early 30s.Before he can be tried, the local newspaper convicts him and gossip spreads through the small town, exaggerating the thin evidence against him. Lang adopts a silent-movie technique and during a montage of women gossiping inserts a shot of a clutch of hens clucking.At any rate the mob attacks the jail in which Tracy is being held. Unable to reach him in his cell, they set fire to the building and in a striking shot, Lang shows us the frantic Tracy pressed against the window bars, surrounded by flames, while the crowd stands outside and watches him in utter silence, grinning, until they drive him from the window with a shower of stones.Briefly, Tracy secretly escapes and through the agency of his two brothers brings two dozen mob members to trial for murder. Where the money for this suit came from is a mystery. But the experience has burned Tracy, body and soul. He skulks in his brothers' apartment, grinning demonically as the trial proceeds and the twenty-two defendants wriggle and squirm. They're supposed to be suffering from monumental remorse as well, but we see little of it. If given the MMPI they'd probably produce the "caught psychopath" pattern -- high in psychopathy and high in depression, because after all they've been caught. Tracy is turning into an obsessed maniac himself, forging evidence, going unshaven, drinking, bitter, looking like Mister Hyde.I won't reveal the end. It's a rather long film but not one that's liable to put you to sleep. Some of the courtroom dialog is rather sophisticated, or at least so it sounds to untutored ears. The "crudities" I mentioned earlier include some confusion about what's taking place and where. The little town is called Strand. But at one point, when I thought Tracy was sneaking around the streets of Strand, he stops and peers through a shop window that's in Chicago. Capital City is mentioned but if anything takes place there I missed it.None of these carps detract from an interesting film involving some tough moral choices.

gavin6942 Auto mechanic Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) is accused of a kidnapping because of his love of peanuts. When he barely survives a lynch mob attack and is presumed dead, Wilson vindictively decides to frame the mob for his murder.Spencer Tracy is a big name in Hollywood, but strangely enough not one I am really familiar with -- I could not pick him out in a line-up.Fritz Lang directs, and it is odd having a German direct a film that involves the American legal system. According to modern sources, Fritz Lang was the first filmmaker to use newsreel footage as a courtroom device in a motion picture, and may have done so before it was used in an actual court case. This was also Fritz Lang's first American movie, having arrived from a year in Paris after he fled the Nazi regime in Germany.The style is almost film noir, though the subject matter says it is not. This is not surprising, given Lang's dip in to noir.Also notable is the appearance of the dog that played Toto in "The Wizard of Oz" -- that guy gets around!

Putzberger A movie about an innocent man unjustly accused of murder seeking vengeance against the mob that tries to lynch him runs the risk of being either melodramatic (think Mel Gibson) or preachy (think Frank Capra). "Fury" manages to be both, but brilliantly. Spencer Tracy plays Joe Wilson, the wrongly imprisoned man, in a performance that would be legendary if this movie weren't too disturbing to be considered a Hollywood classic. Joe, a down-on-his-luck auto mechanic in love with a pretty schoolteacher, would be almost cloyingly naive (he eschews tobacco for peanuts) if Tracy weren't so restrained and naturalistic. There isn't a hint of darkness or menace to this good, simple man, which makes his transformation into a scheming, manipulative liar after he's arrested and assaulted even more unnerving. A good actor could play a wounded innocent (think Tom Hanks) or a bloodthirsty avenger (think Lee Marvin). Only a genius could play both, and that's what Tracy does when he becomes the "fury" of the title. Of course, he's assisted by one of the greatest directors in film history, Fritz Lang (think "Metropolis"). Lang didn't shy from the grotesque -- you need a strong stomach to get through Peter Lorre's extreme close-ups in "M" -- and here he depicts the mob that burns down the prison holding Tracy as a bunch of freaks from a Bruegel painting. Was Lang lampooning the Nazi scum who had recently chased him out of native Germany, or was he ridiculing the rednecks and yokels in his adopted home of America? I'm not sure, but I do know that the lynch mob's assault on the county jail is pretty sickening without the blood, gore and throbbing music that modern directors would pile onto it. The movie climaxes with an eerily prescient count sequence which is clearly a battle of legal chicanery, not good vs. evil. There's even a foreshadowing of trial by mass media. Staggering.There are, sad to say, a couple of genuine if non-fatal flaws in the form of two Hollywood legends -- Sylvia Sidney and Terry the Terrier. Sylvia plays Katherine, Joe's love interest and ultimately his conscience. She's pretty, and she's not a bad actress, but she can't overcome the operatic swooniness of her role, which makes her a bit coarse and cartoonish in contrast to Tracy's depth. If Kate Hepburn had already left RKO for MGM by 1936, she could have made Katherine complex, credible and formidable, and she and Tracy could have made one undisputed masterpiece together. (Hollywood legend she may have been, Hepburn was always a romantic heroine -- she never stared into the face of evil like Sylvia has to do here.) Terry the Terrier, who would achieve immortality as Toto in "The Wizard of Oz," is onhand as Joe's dog Rainbow, who is a slightly too obvious symbol of his kindness. She's cute, but a little saccharine and unnecessary, but she handles her miscasting well and is clearly on her way to better things.