German Director Fritz Lang's Film: Fury
Lang's US Debut with Spencer Tracey: Justice and the Legal System
Sep 3, 2008
Jury, directed by Fritz Lang and released in 1936, was the German auteur's first American film, made after his flight from his native land in 1933. In it, Spencer Tracy stars as Joe Wilson, an innocent man accused of a crime he didn't commit, imprisoned, and left for dead in a burning building by a vindictive lynch mob. Joe, surviving, takes justice into his own hands, seeking revenge on those responsible.
Justice
Lang's preoccupation with justice as dispensed by the law of an organized society is displayed in sharp focus in this film. Here, like in his German masterwork M (1931), a man is subjected to the law of the mob, and, also like M, narrowly avoids it. The major exception in Fury, however, is that the man in question is actually innocent of the crime, whereas the criminal played by Peter Lorre in M is a known killer of children. It seems as if Lang, having reached the conclusion in his previous film that a criminal, however odious, must not be punished by a mob fueled by a meme of hysteria and violence, has set out in the latter to show how even more dangerous such a mob can be by pitting it against an innocent man. It is as if to say, we as a people, as a society, may feel justified in doling out homemade justice on a man as vile as a child killer, but see what happens when a mob's actions are misdirected, are in error, and are focused on an individual who is not a criminal at all. Does Lang posit the infallibility of the legal system? Not at all; if the system were perfect, the injustice suffered by Joe in Fury would have been avoided altogether. Is it, however, the best we currently have? Would our society fall into chaos without it? Absolutely yes, says Lang.
Nazi Germany
Yet, it seems there is something else on Lang's mind than the legal system and the unfortunate existence of the deadly mob, and that is Nazi Germany. Lang's last German film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), earned the director a place under the strengthening regime's watchful eye with its depiction of society's breakdown at the hands of a criminal madman, and how, with the correct organization, such a madman might see his chaotic dreams come to fruition through the power of suggestion. Further and less thinly-veiled exploration of that theme would not have been possible for Lang in his Germany, but in America, using court drama as a disguise, he was free to explore and reveal the dangers of mob mentality and the power of suggestion, showing just how easy a situation can get out of hand when guided by the power of a strong enough idea.
