Sunday next, May 26th -- 35mm program -- 10 a.m. sharp at the New Yorker Theatre, 88th St. and Broadway -- NY premiere (!) of the unreleased James Cruze-Fatty Arbuckle feature LEAP YEAR (1921); plus rare 2-reelers with Charley Chase and Monty Banks.

Tuesday next, May 28th: MARRIED? (1925) with Constance Bennett and Owen Moore; TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS (1919) with Ben Wilson, Neva Gerber; 'TWAS HENRY'S FAULT (1919) and IT'S A GIFT (1923) with Snub Pollard.

May 21 1968

The Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society

BBC's "Film Review" program often comes up with some extremely interesting sessions devoted to producers and directors, and clearances for lengthy excerpts being easier to obtain in Britain, they never have to settle for second-rate material or skimpy clips backed by stills. The Disney Legend was actually two half-hour programs, but they link together well, their mid-way break stressed only by the superimposition of credits at the end of the first segment. The film concentrates on the Disney features from Snow White on, live action and documentary as well as cartoon, and provides a good coverage not only of the best Disney material, but also of that which is most illustrative of the various new techniques that Disney introduced. Disney representative and artist James Alger is a most affable interviewee, although he really doesn't offer too much new knowledge. Obviously high enough up in the hierarchy to be supremely confident that everything he says will be accepted without question, he also has both eyes carefully fixed on his own future security, and is careful to say nothing which might stamp him as an unreliable company man. It's often extremely funny to watch him smoothly downplaying accusations of Disney's sadism as though it didn't exist -- while the show's producers deliberately regale us with Uncle Walt's most sadistic and horrific moments, including the witch's metamorphosis in Snow White, Lampwick changing into the donkey (surely one of the screen's supreme moments of horror!) and the battle of the monsters from Fantasia. Apologies for Disney's sadistic bent, explanations that it all derives from old fairy-tales, claims that it is a useful "pressure valve" for youngsters, all seem completely pointless. Disney's ability to evoke horror was one of his supreme and best exploited achievements, and was always far more cinematic than his heavier-handed excursions into sentiment and charm. It's rather like dismissing all of Val Lewton's horror films for Rko, and asking us to judge him by his Apache Drums instead. Incidentally, although we would normally clip such things out, we have left in the BBC's pre-title leaders, as they are quite fascinating and look like an infernal machine out of a Lang-Mabuse film!

- intermission -

FURY was Lang's first American film and indeed, apart from LILLIOM, made in France, his first film since THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE in Germany. Although it was something of a sensation, launching his Hollywood career with a vengeance and boosting Tracy's, it would be some years before he joined the mainstream of Hollywood production. He made only two more films during the rest of the 30's - YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (which remains his favorite American film) and the similar but less realistic and more conventional YOU AND ME. It wasn't until the 40's that he began to turn out Hollywood films prolifically with a stress of course on crime thrillers that drew many of their roots from his "Mabuse" days. MANHUNT, SCARLET STREET and THE BIG HEAT are three of the most interesting films from an unusually productive period (1940-58) that even included three westerns. His post-Hollywood career was limited to a remake of THE INDIAN TOMB, filmed in India for a German company, and a third Mabuse film - THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE - which, for a film made in the 60's by a man in his 70's, was remarkably lively. Although still full of scenario ideas, it is unlikely that he will direct again. His eyesight is failing badly, which may be one of the reasons that he now espouses plot over style, and insists that METROPOLIS is "silly" and an inferior film to his late Hollywood thriller, the neatly written but pictorially dull BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT.

Like so many social melodramas of the 30's, and especially Lang's own YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (which one just can't take seriously any more, for all of its great pictorial style and its unquestioned influence on later American films), FURY tends to rather load the scales. The combinations of plot coincidences and illogically vicious anti-social types is sometimes just a bit much for absolute conviction; nor is the film helped by visual metaphors (admittedly much fresher in the 30's than they are now) and type-casting -- that perennially oily Edwin Maxwell once again playing the corrupt politician for example. But few of the social dramas of the 30's, placed as they were in a framework of melodrama, really ring true today. (LeRoy's They Won't Forget is a notable exception). And in any case, one feels that Lang never had any really strong convictions against social injustices, especially in a land as alien to him as America, and that he only used such themes to further the ends of his crime tales. YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE is the only Lang film that really falls flat today, and interestingly it is the only one where social protest outweighs the cops-and-robbers aspect. FURY in any event is very neatly divided into two halves, and Lang disposes of the social protest angle in the first half, dealing with the events leading up to the apparent lynching. In the second half - despite the occasional speech-making by Walter Abel, then often cast as a crime-busting crusader because of his resemblance to Dewey - Lang is much more at home on his more familiar ground of meticulous scheming and vengeance seeking, and dimly lit streets that suggest UFA rather more than MGM. There is even the obligatory shot of all Lang protagonists - from DR. MABUSE through to SCARLET STREET - of the mentally tortured hero surrounded by the ghost images his victims! Despite being his first American film, FURY is both an easy transition from his former works, and a partial blueprint for later ones. Unlike Hitchcock, who took normal and likeable people and flung them into abnormal situations against realistic and often humdrum backgrounds - and didn't care whether the audience believed it or not as long as they were seduced by it - Lang always created his own black, nightmare world, and was very much concerned that the audience believed every word of it. Tracy and Sidney are a far cry from such Hitchcockian duos as Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane: superficially "normal" perhaps, they seem doomed and humorless from the start. And despite some concessions to "realism" in the first half, Lang's nightmare world soon closes around them. This was his first non-fantasy or supernatural thriller, with the sole exception of M - which certainly used the stylised mood of his earlier films - and it was the first one in which he made any concessions to such every-day things as sunlight. Quite a few of the earlier scenes are played in daylight, or on rural roads, as the more realistic script demands. Lang's early films were consistent in playing everything against unobtrusive backgrounds of darkness - night, twilight, dimly-lit interiors. It is a real shock in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse when, about two-thirds of the way through, someone looks outside a window and we see normal sunlight, streetcars, people, and routine everyday activity. So completely have we been taken in by Lang's own black world that we have quite forgotten that there is another and happier world! Last week's non-Lang The Return of Dr. Mabuse, rousing and thoroughly enjoyable melodrama that it was, failed to recapture Lang's poetry simply because it reminded us of normalcy all too often - assassinations, street fights, chases frequently took place in broad daylight, before witnesses, against recognisable locations - becoming outrages in a civilised world. Lang's world was always so consistently nightmarish that we accepted the outrages as commonplace, and therein lay their claustrophobic horror. But once Lang sets his stage in Fury, his own world envelops it all again. In the last half of the film, there isn't a single daytime exterior, nor any shot of the sun -- except as it occasionally peeps through the courtroom windows. (Even Lang couldn't stage a big Federal case in the night hours!) It is again a world of darkened streets and dim rooms, of shadows and - briefly - phantoms.

Still a powerful social essay, though a much better thriller, FURY as a whole stands up surprisingly well. If it dates at all, it is only in the typical MGM gloss of the period. The newsreel sequence of the lynching seems far too smooth and cinematic - but of course Citizen Kane's reconstructed newsreel has provided an insurmountable yardstick. And accustomed as we are today to so much location shooting and hand-held camerawork, the gliding camera cranes, well organised mobs and careful lighting in the prison-burning scene do rather smack of the studio, and one has the uncomfortable feeling of a squad of laborers waiting in the wings to clean up the street for Dr. Kildare or Andy Hardy. This apart, FURY can still rank as one of Lang's best American works, marred only by an inconclusive (though not altogether compromise) ending that betrays the benign supervision of Louis B. Mayer.

-- William K. Everson --