When it comes to my movie collection purchasing, I don’t fancy myself a gambling man. However, every now and then, something will catch my eye, give me a little smile, tastefully bare a little leg, and promise me a good time for a reasonable price – and, sight unseen, I succumb to temptation.
Those become my blind-buys. Movies I decided were worth the few bucks’ worth of risk to add to the collection knowing nothing about them other than what I can see on the front, back, and IMDB page. Of those, these are the ones that panned out.
Imagine you’ve been separated from your fiancée for months; have worked night and day trying to earn enough money to afford getting married and building a future. Then, finally, after meeting your goal, you’ve packed your car and driven hours to meet back with your beloved, only to get pulled over by a small town law enforcement officer who suspects you as an accomplice in a child kidnapping case.
Then, while in custody, the town finds out what you’re suspected of, and they decide the movement of the judicial system is just a little too slow. So, they converge at the police station, and burn it to the ground – with completely innocent little you locked up inside of it.
If that happens to you, and you miraculously survive it, what do you do next? I tell you what you do next: You don your fedora, you fashion yourself a glove with long, sharp finger blades and then you vow to haunt the dreams of all of the children of the town and murder them in their sleep.
Perhaps you would if you weren’t Spencer Tracy, but you are Spencer Tracy. You still want revenge, and justice, but you have to do it how an unhinged Spencer Tracy would do it. The first step is the same though, you still have to put on your fedora, but stop short of razor-sharp finger blades.
What Did It Cost? – $49.99 (Warner Bros. Controversial Classics DVD Collection)
What Sold Me?
The studio. In the mid-2000’s, there was one studio/distributor whose DVD output of classic titles I would anticipate being released, and then would target the Sunday electronic store ads to see if the newest titles for the coming Tuesday would be on sale.That studio was Warner Bros. No other studio had the kind of high quality catalogue necessary to put out thematic collection sets with regularity like WB was doing. I purchased so many of those sets having never previously seen one single picture in the set, and not only was I never disappointed, it’s how I found what would become some of my all-time favorite films.
Some of the pictures in some of the sets I might have already been aware of, most commonly from the Film Noir collections. This set, The Controversial Classics (A Face in the Crowd, Blackboard Jungle, Bad Day at Black Rock, Advise and Consent, The Americanization of Emily, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, and Fury) wasn’t one of those, but contained some of those eventual all-timers. In the set I began with this title, because it was directed by Fritz Lang, and at the time I would have been just recently floored by M and Metropolis. With Fury he found another terrifying “M” word – Mob.
Why It Was Worth It?
Fury is inarguably a product of its time. You do have to give it some grace in its reliance on the audience’s acceptance of some unlikely, coincidental occurrences, time period-specific ignorance on a mass level, and early cinema acting and writing. Not to mention, something that even bothers me today with the occasional occurrence in modern film where somehow images from the movie you’re watching are used within the film itself. Not the same scene but filmed from a different angle and different type of camera, one more likely to be within the space of the moment “in” the movie, but literal scene extracts from the movie you’re currently watching. It’s very Spaceballs.
However, despite that and not because of it, Fury is still masterful at really getting under your skin and boiling gallons of blood. You can cook an egg on your face with how furious you’ll find yourself becoming as the townspeople succumb to peer pressure, misinformation, blanket stupidity, and then basking in baseless violence. Then, when it’s discovered that the man was entirely innocent, acting as if they never had anything to do with it.
Against the town’s best intentions to see a suspected kidnapper burn to death, the man manages to escape without anyone seeing. Before doing so, his presence in the cell is recognized by his future spouse (who hears about what’s going on far too late), and the events are all captured on film by a covert news crew, who are so good at their job as fly-on-the-wall camera operators they can get sophisticated Orson Welles-like footage with close-ups and low-angle shots all from a single, stationary point two-to-three stories off the ground.
It’s with those two pieces of irrefutable evidence, and with the help of his two brothers (the only ones who know he’s still alive), that our hero will exact his revenge from above the grave, while everyone else buries themselves in the lies for which they’re soon to be exposed. It’s even more satisfying than it sounds.
And that’s the power in the film. It doesn’t really matter how dated much of the content is, it still manages to anger you just as it intends to, and still manages to satiate your call for justice just as you want it to. It’s the kind of movie you show to kids about why you don’t listen to everything you hear, don’t spread around what you know nothing about, don’t fall in line behind Johnny Dickhead, and never stop the car in a town populated by less than ten-thousand people. You’re either going to be Johnny Dickhead’s scapegoat, or victim.
If the kids don’t get the message then you show them A Nightmare On Elm Street.
