A man who is down on his luck falls in with a criminal.A man who is down on his luck falls in with a criminal.A man who is down on his luck falls in with a criminal.
- Nominated for 2 BAFTA Awards
- 2 nominations total
- Tommy Tyler
- (as Donald Smelick)
- Boy in Miller Car
- (uncredited)
- Man Exiting Optometrist
- (uncredited)
- Man in Crowd
- (uncredited)
- Barbara Colson
- (uncredited)
- Man on Street
- (uncredited)
- Vi Clendenning
- (uncredited)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaMartin Scorsese owned the only remaining 35mm print and authorized its use for the film's upgraded new print in 2013.
- GoofsDuring the opening credits, a shadow of a stage light and other equipment is visible on the first truck as it pulls out of the gas station.
- Quotes
Jerry Slocum: He averages twenty bucks an hour, five hours a night, you figure it out.
Howard Tyler: Twenty bucks an hour? What does this guy do? Run a diamond mine?
Jerry Slocum: What diamond mine? All he does is pick up five little cards. Just five little cards. Only he knows what they are before he picks 'em up.
Howard Tyler: That's some job.
Jerry Slocum: I know another guy that averages four, five hundred a week. Sometimes more. He'd be willing to split with the right partner. He's the guy I was thinking about for you.
Howard Tyler: For me?
Jerry Slocum: All you have to do is drive his car. Think you'd be interested?
Howard Tyler: What makes you think he'd want me for a partner?
Jerry Slocum: My personal recommendation. All you gotta do is drive his car. He does all the work.
Howard Tyler: What kind of work?
Jerry Slocum: Oh, you know, knock up a gas station, maybe a hamburger joint, a liquor store. Nothing risky.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Red Hollywood (1996)
Family man and returning vet Howard Tyler (played by the always low-key Frank Lovejoy) is recruited into a life of crime by no more than ordinary desires for the American Dream. Desperate and unemployed, he falls into the clutches of a swaggering stickup man superbly played by a preening Lloyd Bridges. (Notice how subtly Bridges bends Tyler to his will on their first meeting at the bowling alley.) Joining Bridges, Tyler finally gets the standing he desires, but the spiral he has entered dooms him and his family's share of America's promise. (Note that conspicuous among the lynch mob's vanguard are fraternity boys, true to the actual event on which the movie is based.)
Throughout, the lighting and photography effectively undermine the facile voice of reason that the producers probably felt obligated to include. Endfield may have wanted an anti- violence film, but the resulting visual landscape implies a world of endemic violence. A sense of powerlessness pervades the film, one that mere admonishments cannot overcome. As a result, the characters appear caught in some terrible metaphysical web from which there is no escape. Events march relentlessly on to a conclusion that remains one of the most harrowing in Hollywood history. This is film noir at its darkest and most frightening.
Something should be noted in passing about the compellingly exotic performance of Katherine Locke as Hazel the manicurist. Watch her facial expressions as this highly repressed plain-faced woman experiences yet one more rejection in what a paste-on smile shows to be a lifetime of rejections. Never has a blossom perched so precariously on a cheap hairdo conveyed as much lower-class longing as hers, while the car ride with a guilt-ridden Tyler could serve as tawdry inspiration for a dozen feminist tracts. What ever became of this unusual actress, I wonder.
Without doubt, however, the film's dramatic high point is the lynch mob. It's one of the most coldly unnerving 20 minutes in movie annals, far surpassing (in my view) the better-known Fury (1936) in its depiction of mass violence. The fact that the mob is made up of ordinary citizens brought to fever pitch is especially telling. Unthinking violence is thus shown as potentially present in us all.
At the same time, the screenplay refuses to take the easy way out. In fact, Howard and Jerry are guilty, unlike, say, the three unfortunate cowboys in The Oxbow Incident (1943). Thus, what repels us is not the fact that innocent men are killed for a crime they didn't commit. That would be too easy. Instead, I think we're unnerved by how the crowd appears to celebrate the brutality of vigilante justice. Endfield succeeds in making this aspect especially ugly. Yes, in a very general sense, justice is served—murderers are in fact punished for their crime—but if so, justice is served in a particularly barbaric way even if the act does have popular support. In my little book, Endfield has fashioned the most effective of all anti- lynching movies, in part because it doesn't take the easy way out.
That Endfield exiled himself to England and a conventional career with Stanley Baker, shows how much was lost among those purge victims whose disappearance, unlike many others, went generally unnoticed. Just a couple of years after the remarkable "Try and Get Me" (and Endfield's also provocative "Underworld Story"), Hollywood began sanitizing the screen with the escapism of period spectacles, Technicolor westerns, and full-cleavage sex goddesses. Indeed times had changed. As Endfield already knew, the studios had to fight the Cold War too. There would be no more thought-provoking Try and Get Me's.
- dougdoepke
- Jul 17, 2010
- How long is The Sound of Fury?Powered by Alexa
Details
- Runtime1 hour 31 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.37 : 1
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