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"A lynching every third day," Fritz Lang at MGM dissects one, ferociously. Mechanic (Spencer Tracy) and teacher (Sylvia Sidney) in love, their dream is a reflection on a store display window, their nightmare is a searing lesson on justice and injustice. He's mistaken for a kidnapper, gossip spreads until Nietzsche's "most ruthless of tyrants" is in full bloom and baying for blood. (The remarkable build-up takes note of the strikebreaker inflaming the saloon hotheads and the Black shoeshine man who leaps in terror out of their way.) By the time the heroine arrives there the crowd is silent, contemplating the jailhouse going up in flames with her beloved inside. Death and resurrection, the escaped schmoe is a charred soul, "I could smell myself burn!" Fleeing fascism in Europe, Lang locates it in America as a carnival of hatred waiting for a reason to erupt. "Funny impulses," the barber confesses to one while holding a razor to a customer's throat, sanity hinges on the gulf between thought and action (cf. Bergman's From the Life of the Marionettes). Crime and punishment dictate the structure, a whole town on trial. People lie, that's where cinema comes in—newsreel footage is entered as evidence in the courtroom, and the accused can't recognize their monstrous selves in incriminating freeze-frames. The victim can turn executioner simply by remaining hidden, his fiancée appeals to a lonely conscience: "I couldn't marry a dead man." The return to life is ultimately a necessary anticlimax, not a vengeful consummation but a reaffirmation of compassion before judge and camera. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt two decades later completes the analysis. "My dear, in this here country people don't land in jail unless they're guilty." Cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. With Bruce Cabot, Walter Abel, Edward Ellis, Walter Brennan, Frank Albertson, George Walcott, Arthur Stone, Morgan Wallace, George Chandler, and Esther Dale. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |