Word: lange
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...LANG'S FIRST American masterpiece begins peacefully and proceeds in catch its protagonists in parallel mechanisms external situation and internal drive. Its Joe Doe hero (Spencer Tracy) is mistakenly jailed as a kidnapper by a small-town sheriff. The local hicks get wind of his arrest and through hatred, greed, and xenophobia storm the jail to lynch...
That current history makes this dilemma more intense testifies to the acuity of Lang's social vision. It shows the effectiveness of his direct montage. which ties social conditions together. When cutting away from the trial Lang shows people in three different milicux, listening to a broadcast of the proceedings, before arriving at the person to whom he is cutting. The large number of plot transitions like this one lets Lang create a unique cross-section of society, for his transitions use things that actually tie society together: newspapers, radios, photographs and images...
...Lang's presentation of social facts and events is equally direct. Lang says he tells his cameramen to give him nothing fancy, just "newsreel photography." The compositions of Fary, however, go beyond realism to present situations so explicitly that they verge on symbolic caricature, as in Eisenstein. We are repeatedly struck by shots of the raving lynch mob, Tracy, and the defendants looking into the camera. Even more powerful are the shots wherein the camera tracks right in on characters, or equivalently where characters run almost into the camera, then stop...
...Lang's use of these frontal shots goes beyond direct assault on the audience. Toward the middle. Fury begins to show film as an instrument of exposure, hence an instrument of justice. An incredible courtroom sequence brings projectors into the courtroom to show newsreels of the lynch mob. Lang's camera placement, which directs our attention straight into the frame and rivets it to some person deep in the shot, culminates in this sequence. The projectors are wheeled straight in, high-angle; cut to reverse-angle as the screen is pulled down high-angle as the projectors are set running...
...totals represented new seasonal highs for Foster. O'Leary, Lang, Kelly and Blackstone...