“Something women have in common: they’re
all partial to the same colour – green”
Foreshadowed
by the chilling cries of a baying crowd, Endfield’s disaffected drama is one of
a group of films that used the visual landscape of noir to protest social and
political intolerance in the US. As the
poverty-stricken Howard Tyler falls under the spell of small-time hood Jerry
Slocum, the film presents “a virtual documentary exposition of the social
causes of crime”.[i]
Never the most charismatic of actors, Lovejoy’s ordinariness works in his favour as a man struggling to feed his family. A chance meeting with the dynamic Slocum sets into motion a chain of events that will lead to him becoming the scourge of his community, its desire for revenge outweighing respect for the process of law.
Never the most charismatic of actors, Lovejoy’s ordinariness works in his favour as a man struggling to feed his family. A chance meeting with the dynamic Slocum sets into motion a chain of events that will lead to him becoming the scourge of his community, its desire for revenge outweighing respect for the process of law.
Right
from the credits, noir shadows intrude. As Howard hitches a lift with a fellow
war veteran, their small talk is interrupted by jarring shots of headlights and
bursts of car horns on a darkened road, portents of the disquieting, fateful
journey Howard is about to undertake. Meeting Slocum in a bowling alley offers
him a chance of both friendship and employment.
Slocum regales him with tales of his experiences in Europe during the
war – making money from selling cigarettes, entertaining women in the major
capitals (“Paris – ooh lala”). Self-assured, with youthful, angular features,
Slocum possesses a vitality all too absent from the pudgy faced Howard, and
it’s this quality, allied to Bridges’ magnetism, that makes his ‘seduction’ of
Howard so convincing.
The
complex nature of their relationship is spelt out during a scene in Slocum’s
hotel room. As Slocum puts on a sharply cut suit, of a quality out of reach of
the blue-collar Howard (“You look good, Jerry”), Endfield hints that Howard’s
infatuation is more than friendly. When Howard learns that the work Slocum has
lined up for him is to be his getaway driver, he refuses. But Slocum forcefully
questions his friend’s loyalty and an intricate bond is struck built on
admiration, intimidation and – possibly – homoerotic attraction.
Not
content with simply highlighting the shortcomings of a society that can propel
a decent man like Howard into a life of crime, Endfield casts a vitriolic eye
over the crass sensationalism of the press. When their first paltry robbery
hits the paper as a “Crime Wave in Santa Sierra”, the duo becomes the talk of
the town. The script levers in laboured debates between a European professor,
advocating rationalism, and Gil Stanton, Santa Sierra’s newspaperman, which
upset the pacing of an otherwise riveting film and deny the audience the
opportunity to draw their own conclusions. When Slocum’s plan to kidnap the son
of a rich industrialist leads to murder, with Howard an impotent bystander, the
front-page stories become increasingly irate.
Howard’s
life becomes a maelstrom of paranoia – a terrific scene in a nightclub is full
of Dutch angles and looming faces. Unable to return to his wife and racked with
remorse, Howard finds sanctuary in the home of one of Slocum’s floozies.
Drunkenly, he confesses all, and inevitably he and Slocum find themselves
awaiting trial.
Whipped
up by the press, the townsfolk ignore the pleas of a street preacher and turn
feral. The final scene strikes with the exhilarating power of documentary
realism – parallels can be drawn with Phil Karlson’s hard-hitting Phenix City Story (1955) – as the crowd
charge down the doors of the police station. Endfield employed bystanders in
these crowd shots and their sheer magnitude makes it all the more terrifying,
the angry mob a “manifestation of the fascist tendency that liberals saw as
dominating American political life”.[ii] In one of the most harrowing images committed
to postwar celluloid, Howard is passed, on his back, over a sea of people into
the street.
While
Endfield does not spare us from their crimes, he does believe that Howard and
Slocum have the right to a trial. However, his was a pessimistic vision of an
America where politics, he felt, was failing the poor and where the right to be
heard was increasingly denied. Blacklisted the following year, the director
eventually found a niche in the UK carving out genre films, including his most
celebrated picture, Zulu. The Sound of Fury was not well received;
maybe it was just too uncomfortable for traditional audiences to watch. After a
screening, the director’s good friend Joseph Cotten turned to Endfield to
express his dismayed reaction: “The America you know is not the America I
know.”[iii]
Clark Hodgkiss
[i] M. Keith Booker, Film and the American Left: A Research Guide,Greenwood
Clark Hodgkiss
[i] M. Keith Booker, Film and the American Left: A Research Guide,
[ii] Krutnik, Neale, Neve,
Stanfield, ‘Un-American’: Politics and
Film in the Blacklist Era, Rutges
University
[iii] Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics, University of California
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