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The Sound of Fury (film)

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The Sound of Fury
Theatrical release poster
Directed byCy Endfield
Screenplay byJo Pagano
Based onThe Condemned
1947 novel
by Jo Pagano
Produced byRobert Stillman[1]
StarringFrank Lovejoy
Kathleen Ryan
Richard Carlson
CinematographyGuy Roe
Edited byGeorge Amy
Music byHugo Friedhofer
Color processBlack and white
Production
company
Robert Stillman Productions[2]
Distributed byUnited Artists[3]
Release date
  • December 12, 1950 (1950-12-12)
Running time
92 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$410,000[4]

The Sound of Fury (reissued as Try and Get Me!) is a 1950 American crime film noir[5] directed by Cy Endfield and starring Frank Lovejoy, Kathleen Ryan, Richard Carlson.[6] The film is based on the 1947 novel The Condemned by Jo Pagano, who also wrote the screenplay.

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

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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]

Cast

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Production

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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

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Critical response

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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]

In 1998, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader included the film in his unranked list of the best American films not included on the AFI Top 100.[14]

The film was mentioned in Thom Andersen's 1996 video essay documentary Red Hollywood.[15]

Accolades

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Nominations

Restoration

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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.

References

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  1. ^ "Robert Stillman". tcmdb. tcm.com. Retrieved 29 July 2023.
  2. ^ "Robert Stillman Productions". BFI. Archived from the original on October 17, 2021. Retrieved 29 July 2023.
  3. ^ "studio release". americanfilmnoir. Archived from the original on 1 November 2019. Retrieved 29 July 2023.
  4. ^ "Stillman's PA Veepee". Variety. 12 April 1950. p. 7.
  5. ^ "The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time". Paste. August 9, 2015. Archived from the original on August 12, 2015. Retrieved August 9, 2015.
  6. ^ The Sound of Fury at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films.
  7. ^ Neve, Brian (2015-07-21). The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and Zulu. University of Wisconsin Pres. pp. 77–92. ISBN 978-0-299-30374-7.
  8. ^ Meeting Evil: The Crowd and the Conductor in Try and Get Me - Art & Trash on Vimeo
  9. ^ "Stillman Indie". Variety. 10 May 1951. p. 4.
  10. ^ "Stillman's Fury running into strict censorship". Variety. 27 September 1950. p. 5.
  11. ^ Crowther, Bosley (1951-05-07). "'Try and Get Me,' Based on Novel, 'Condemned,' Has Frank Lovejoy and Kathleen Ryan in Leads". The New York Times (film review). p. 22. Retrieved 2018-04-29.
  12. ^ "Try and Get Me (a.k.a. The Sound of Fury) / Repeat Performance". UCLA Film & Television Archive. Retrieved 29 July 2023.
  13. ^ Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. Borde, Raymond; Chaumeton, Etienne (1955). A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953. City Lights Books. ISBN 0-87286-412-X.
  14. ^ Rosenbaum, Jonathan (June 25, 1998). "List-o-Mania: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love American Movies". Chicago Reader. Archived from the original on April 13, 2020.
  15. ^ Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s Red Hollywood - Film Comment Magazine
  16. ^ Emerson, Jim. "For the love of film (noir)". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved 14 February 2011.
  17. ^ "Noir and Neo-Noir TV Listings on TCM - The Film Noir Foundation". www.filmnoirfoundation.org. Retrieved 2020-01-26.
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