Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Fury/A Face in the Crowd ($19.97 each DVD) Controversy may sell tickets, but it doesn't bode well for the ages: Many a mediocre movie has had its stock elevated by trumped-up hullabaloo, and many a fine film's virtues have been obscured by a superficial din. (By the time Palindromes or The Brown Bunny arrived, it was impossible to just watch them.) Time has not been kind to all of the films in Warner Bros. "Controversial Classics Collection." Like many of Otto Preminger's movies, Advise and Consent wears its taboo-breaking (involving Hollywood's first gay bar and the sausage-making of Washington politics) tiresomely on its sleeve, while John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock, which addresses anti-Japanese racism in America during World War II, mars B-movie economy with stagy Cinemascope compositions. It's not enough for the movies to court controversy; they keep reminding us how bold they are.

No one could call Fritz Lang self-effacing, but Fury, which he directed in 1936 shortly after fleeing Nazi Germany, never pats itself on the back for its moral rectitude. Like Lang's M, Fury is an eloquent denunciation of mob violence, but Lang takes the story even further. M ends with Peter Lorre's child murderer rescued from an angry mob; in Fury, Spencer Tracy's guileless working man is lynched by a small-town crowd that falsely suspects him of kidnapping a young girl. Or rather, almost lynched: The jailhouse burns down around him, but he escapes, concealing his survival and allowing the townspeople to stand trial for his murder. Even after the mob has dissipated, its lingering hatred is enough to turn a good man bad.

Fury came early in Tracy's career, and there's something unformed about his performance; the movie's first section, which establishes him as an aw-shucks type trying to earn enough to marry his sweetheart, is a drag, largely because the studio required that Tracy's character be as sympathetic as possible. (Lang wanted him to be guilty.) But once the walls start closing in, Lang's merciless resolve turns the movie into a masterpiece. Then or now, no one understood the dehumanizing freedom of mob mentality better than Lang; a cut from a cluster of chattering yentas to a yardful of clucking chickens may be a relic of silent-movie technique, but it perfectly expresses their willing abandonment of conscience. Not all of Fury's townspeople are crazed vigilantes. As Tracy looks helplessly from the barred window of his fiery prison, Lang intersperses a devastating flurry of reaction shots: Tracy's horror-struck sweetheart (Sylvia Sydney); a mother pointing out the spectacle to her cradled infant; a man calmly eating a hot dog. In a world gone mad, ordinary life becomes insane.

Lang lets the audience believe for several minutes that Tracy is dead, long enough that his reappearance comes as a shock — not least because the Tracy who emerges from the jail is not the one who went in. The sweet, peanut-chomping yokel has become the embodiment of the mob's rage; every good thing in him, Tracy says, "burned to death with me that night." Knowing that Tracy still lives would be enough to discredit the trial that follows, but Lang makes the prosecuting attorney a speechifying dandy and sympathetically shows the terror in the townspeople's eyes. Where M ends with a tribunal restoring the rule of law, Fury shows how the machinery of justice can be hollowed out by one man's hatred.

A Face in the Crowd has a similarly double-edged theme. Directed by Elia Kazan in 1957, four years after he named names in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, Face is both a polemic against the mass-hypnotic power of television and a vindication of its power to discredit demagogues. Three years before The Andy Griffith Show, Griffith made a scathing debut as Lonesome Rhodes, an opportunistic drifter with an instinctive talent for manipulation. Plucked from an Arkansas drunk tank by radio reporter Patricia Neal, Lonesome quickly wins audiences with a combination of sly wit, cornpone wisdom, and the occasional roadworn ditty, establishing himself as an "ordinary" man while continually demonstrating that he is nothing of the sort.

Like most of Kazan's post-HUAC films, Face is ideologically slippery. The movie's skeptical take on the goodness of the working man bespeaks a break with Kazan's proletarian past, while Lonesome's televised comeuppance inevitably recalls Joseph McCarthy's. Most media satires treat the mass audience as easily gulled boobs, but there's nothing mysterious about Lonesome's popularity: Griffith may not be Elvis, but his battered blues shout has a winning conviction, and his devil-may-care charm is irrepressible, even when you know he's a skunk underneath. Griffith's howl-at-the-moon charisma makes up for the movie's rather lame rise-to-fame sequences, parodies of then-popular styles which now seem as dated as the stuff they razzed. Neal, torn between decency, ambition and the barely concealed lust that would win her the Oscar for Hud six years later, is stunning, although Walter Matthau is stuck in a colorless role as her upstanding alternate love interest. Like Fury, A Face in the Crowd is only incidentally topical, an attack on the growing television culture. Its more telling point, especially in the current climate, is how eager an American audience is to believe that public figures are "one of us" despite evidence to the contrary.

Checkpoint/Aftershock (Mon., June 27, 10 p.m., Sundance Channel) The checkpoints between Israel and the occupied territories play a central role in virtually every film dealing with contemporary Palestinian life. How could they not? The daily disruption and frequent humiliations, the hours-long waits and arbitrary refusals, are not only an incontrovertible fact of Palestinian existence, but also the most easily translated of their woes. Regardless of political orientation, everyone can identify with a man turned away carrying food for his family's Christmas dinner, or the mother barred from following her children to school.

Those sights are among the more heart-stirring in Yoav Shamir's documentary Checkpoint (shown on Sundance Channel in a cut 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical version). Shamir's film is a series of largely unfiltered encounters between Arab civilians and Israeli troops. Not surprisingly, the troops come off badly. One young Israeli soldier at the Ramallah checkpoint compares his vantage point to watching the Discovery Channel, telling the camera, "They're not human; we are." But while the film may be eye-opening, its narrow focus becomes restrictive over the course of an hour. It's not just that Shamir doesn't show the suicide bombings that Israel says make the checkpoints necessary; it's that we get no sense of how the soldiers end up acting and speaking the way they do.

Brief though it is, Yariv Horowitz's Aftershock provides some answers. Horowitz, a former cameraman for the Israeli army, combines previously censored footage of Israeli soldiers expressing anti-Palestinian sentiments with interviews shot 12 years later. Some, like Omri, who now lives in Seattle, are horrified by their former selves — "I saw the eyes of someone I didn't recognize," he says, looking at footage of himself. Some are merely discreet, like the man who, baby on hip, shushes the comrade who describes him as "a real basher," then opens up about the people his unit beat to death. In one particularly memorable encounter, a veteran and a current soldier trade tips for making rubber bullets more lethal: Where they once doctored the tips with shards of Coke cans, now they simply sharpen the bullets with knives. Dehumanizing one's enemy is, of course, as old as warfare itself. But Checkpoint shows how the process ultimately makes both sides less human, and the effects last long after the combatants have gone home.