The Sound of Fury

Howard Tyler is out of work, cannot support his family and is in debt. He meets a man called Jerry: well dressed, confident, offering a job. They start with small robberies. Then Jerry plans a kidnapping and it ends in murder. Howard drinks and tells a woman everything. The local paper puts it on the front page and a wave of anger runs through the town. The crowd marches on the jail. Cy Endfield directs. Frank Lovejoy plays Howard and Lloyd Bridges plays Jerry. The source is Jo Pagano's novel and a real event: the lynching of two suspects taken from the jail in San Jose, California, in 1933. The target is the press rather than the killer. The journalist shows how headlines inflame the town and the narrative places responsibility there directly. Howard is built not as a criminal but as a man dragged along by desperation; the film takes on poverty in postwar America directly. Cy Endfield was blacklisted shortly after this, left America and began working in Britain; the film is remembered together with the political pressure of that period. The final section is among the harshest in the genre and the lynching is shown directly. Who it is for: viewers who like noir and American films that carry a social argument. Who it is not for: the film is bleak, none of the characters is saved, and the last section is hard to watch.