Fury

A gas station owner is arrested as a suspect in a kidnapping he had nothing to do with. The town turns into a lynch mob and burns down the jail. He survives, tells nobody, and with his brothers decides to stage his own death and have the men who started it tried for murder. It was Fritz Lang's first American film and the only one he made for MGM. The studio rejected his ending and forced him to add a reconciliation between Spencer Tracy's character and his fiancée. The film's sharpest idea is using cinema itself as evidence: newsreel footage of the lynching is played in court and identifies the faces in the crowd one by one. The reviews were fierce. Frank Nugent called it a mature, sober and penetrating investigation of a national blight; Graham Greene wrote that it was the only film to which he had wanted to attach the word great. It was nominated for Best Original Story and entered the National Film Registry in 1995. On a 604,000 dollar budget it took 1.3 million in rentals and netted 248,000. Who it is for: viewers interested in how a crowd forms and then evades responsibility. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a moral resolution in the last ten minutes. That reconciliation is the studio's decision, not Lang's, and it does not belong to the rest of the film.