Fury and the Victim Film

In Vittorio De Sica’s great Italian neorealist movie The Bicycle Thief
(Ladri di biciclette, 1948), Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is
a deliveryman whose bicycle, on which his new job depends, is
stolen. With his little boy, Bruno (Enzo Staiola), in tow, Ricci scours
Rome in search of the stolen bicycle, asking questions of dozens of
people, but he fails to recover it and is nearly arrested himself when
he tries to steal another bicycle he is mistakenly convinced is his. The
film ends with father and son walking forlornly down the street away
from the camera, accepting the fact that they will never see the bicycle
again.

Legend has it that De Sica and his screenwriter, Cesare Zavattini,
briefly shopped the idea of the film to Hollywood, only to be told that
no studio would be interested unless Cary Grant were cast in the lead
role. Whether or not it is true, this anecdote illustrates a fundamental
contrast between European cinema and Hollywood genre films. If
every crime story depends on a victim, a criminal, and an avenger, the
victim is the structuring absence in American crime movies. The role
of the victim of crime is so perennially unfashionable in Hollywood
that it is hard to think of a single victim-hero, for example, in the years
between 1919, when D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms shows Lucy Burrows
(Lillian Gish) destroyed by her abusive boxer father (Donald
Crisp), and 1944, when Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer) tries to drive
his bride Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) insane in Gaslight so that
he can ransack her house for the jewels he failed to find when he
murdered her aunt. In order for victims to be acceptable to American
viewers, they have to played by the likes of Cary Grant, presumably

Fury and the Victim Film
because no matter how miserably Grant’s character might suffer, he
would still be the imperishably debonair Cary Grant.
This is not to say that there are no American movies about victims.
Gaslight, for example, shows the influence on crime films like Notorious
(1946) of the so-called weepies – dramas from the 1930s through
the 1950s, intended for female viewers, in which variably innocent
women suffered injustice at the hands of faithless men – by revealing
that the man in question is not merely a cad but a killer. There have
also been countless movies for nearly a hundred years whose main
characters have been the victims of crimes, from the defeated southern
gentry of The Birth of a Nation (1915) to the teenaged innocents
of Friday the 13th (1980) and Scream (1996). Viewers have seen Hollywood
stars of every stripe as victims of the nanny from hell (The Hand
That Rocks the Cradle, 1992), the roommate from hell (Single White
Female, 1992), the cop from hell (Unlawful Entry, 1992), the temp from
hell (The Temp, 1993), the lawyer from Hell (The Devil’s Advocate,
1997), and the loose-cannon government operatives from hell (No Way
Out, 1987; Absolute Power, 1997; Enemy of the State, 1998). It is no wonder
that Charles Derry, following Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s
definition of the suspense novel as “le roman de la victime,” emphasizes
the focus of “the suspense thriller” on “the innocent victim
or pursued criminal.”

Even though these heroes and heroines may begin as victims, however,
and even though viewers continues to perceive them as imperiled
or embattled long after they have outgrown their early doormat
status, their stories transform them from victims to far more traditional,
more active heroes, usually by enabling them to kill their initially
more menacing tormentors. In The Accused (1948), mousy psychology
professor-turned-murderer Wilma Tuttle (Loretta Young) assumes, as
Robert Ottoson has noted, the roles of “both Destroyer and Victim.”2
Even Babe Levy, the inoffensive graduate student played by Dustin
Hoffman who is repeatedly set against his globe-hopping secret-agent
brother Doc (Roy Scheider) in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man
(1976), ultimately kills the sadistic Nazi dentist (Laurence Olivier) who
has so memorably tortured him.

The film that most economically encapsulates Hollywood’s determination
to recast the passive victim as heroic avenger is D.O.A., first
released in 1950, little more than a year after The Bicycle Thief, and
later remade as Color Me Dead (1969) and under its original title (1987)
[Fig. 16]. In the original version, Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) is a
small-town accountant who is slipped a poisoned drink at a crowded,
noisy San Francisco bar. By the time he learns he has been poisoned,
nothing can be done to stop the poison’s action – he will be dead in a
day or two – but Frank, after the initial denial, shock, and depression
Fury and the Victim Film 81
16. D.O.A. (1987): The doomed hero gets a new lease on life. (Meg Ryan, Dennis
Quaid)
brought on by this revelation, decides to use his last hours tracking
down his killer. “I’m already dead,” he says exultantly; and his death
sentence, far from sidelining him in passive stoicism, gives him a new
and unparalleled freedom of action.

The extended flashback that encloses Frank’s entire story, from his
initial poisoning through his detective work in tracing his killer back
from the big bad city to an innocuous deed he notarized months ago
to his final shootout with the man who killed him, might seem to guarantee
a bleak tone to the film. Despite the often despairing look and
fatalistic construction cinematographer-turned-director Rudolph Maté
provides, however, it is clear that downing a lethal dose of poison
is the best thing that ever happened to Frank. Only the inescapable
threat of a death not merely impending but already accomplished
frees Frank to ignore the social taboos that would otherwise prevent
him from bullying the suspects who might know why he was poisoned,
his inhibitions about his feelings for his loyal secretary Paula Gibson
(Pamela Britton), and the institutional restraints against taking the law
into his own hands. As a result of getting murdered but still being
alive, in fact, Frank not only enjoys a unique indemnity against danger
(since there is nothing anybody can do to him that will make his situation
any worse) but has the opportunity to occupy all three major
positions associated with crime fiction: victim, detective, and criminal
(or at least dispenser of vigilante justice unencumbered by the law).
In terms of the film’s black-and-white morality, Frank’s death is none
too high a price to pay for the exhilarating privilege of serving as
judge, jury, and executioner of the man who killed him. The film thus
makes Frank’s victimhood a position to be celebrated because it liberates
heroic tendencies Frank has never before been able to show. The
best victims, D.O.A. suggests, are those who come back fighting, exploiting
the fact that their status as victims licenses in advance their
most violent excesses – a premise adopted by both its remakes as
well.

American films’ preference for treating victims not as nobly stoic
sufferers at the hands of criminals but as worms who turn on their tormentors
suggests that Hollywood finds the status of victim inherently
unstable and unsatisfactory. There are several reasons why this is so.
The most obvious is the formal or structural incompleteness of the
victim’s story, which Aristotle recognized two thousand years ago required
some reversal of fortune to be complete.3 Viewers do not want
to watch static heroes; either they want their heroes to fall from a
precarious height and become victims, like the outsized gangsters of
Little Caesar (1930) and Scarface (1932), or they want heroic victims
to move from suffering to action, like the wimps played by Dustin Hoffman
in Straw Dogs (1971) and Marathon Man, and by Charles Bronson
in all five Death Wish films (1974–94) [Fig. 17].

In fact, Hollywood’s fondness for violent climaxes offers an even
more compelling reason for its lack of interest in victims who consistently
remain victims. Crime on American screens is played first and
foremost for entertainment, and a criminal action is not simply an affront
to the social order but a media event as distinct and formulaic
as a Fred Astaire dance number. A film like The Bicycle Thief, treating
an offscreen theft virtually unaccompanied by violence, then or later,
would have even less chance in Hollywood today than in 1948. The
violence of Hollywood crimes plays on viewers’ ambivalence toward
independence and institutional power, making these media events
visually and aurally exciting even as it underlines their breach of the
social order. More subtly, the opening violence prepares for still greater
violence at the hands of the heroic avengers, even if they are yet
to be introduced. After all, it is not just criminals who are violent antiestablishment
figures. The historic American cult of independence
and Americans’ long attachment to strong heroes unbeholden to any
system or community that might trammel their freedom or sap their
resolve – from Huckleberry Finn to Han Solo – is faithfully expressed
through Hollywood’s prejudice in favor of antiauthoritarian, antiinstitutional
good guys played by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Steven Seagal. When ruthless criminals meet equally uninhibited
avengers, the stage is set for climactic acts of violence that will outdo
anything in the early reels, fulfilling viewers’ desire for a crescendo
of excitement.

Even so, neither viewers’ desire for structuring reversals of fortune
nor Hollywood’s interest in violence as a way of making crime both
emphatic and entertaining fully explains the American crime film’s relative
neglect of victims. Victims who act like victims appear throughout
the genre; they are simply edged out by characters whose roles
are more important, more dramatic, or more satisfying. In Call Northside
777 (1948), reporter P. J. McNeal (James Stewart) becomes determined
to clear Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte), who is serving time for
killing a police officer. The film neglects many opportunities to linger
over the victims of both the original crime and the miscarriage of justice
McNeal is trying to correct; but since one is dead and the other
in prison, it regards their suffering as static, simply a pretext for the
hero’s more dramatically satisfying detective work. One reason whodunits
on and off the screen have focused for so long on murder is that
murder is the only crime that utterly annihilates its victims, absolving
the audience from worrying about them, and freeing viewers or readers
to treat all the remaining characters as suspects locked in a potential
duel with the detective in a contest that guarantees active roles
for every participant. In man-on-the-run films from Saboteur (1942) to
The Fugitive (1993), it is not enough for the wrongly accused heroes
played by Robert Cummings and Harrison Ford simply to elude their
pursuers; it is a cardinal rule of the genre (though one rarely observed
by real-life fugitives from the law) that they must also clear themselves
by turning detective in order to track down the real criminals [Fig. 18].
Whether they concentrate on criminals, avengers, or victims, Hollywood
films focus on similar fantasies of active empowerment, from
Frank Bigelow’s license to execute his killer in D.O.A. to the apparent
justification of D-FENS, Michael Douglas’s unemployed defense contractor
in Falling Down (1993), for taking down all the urban enemies
who get in his way. The difference between the rousingly unlikely
Everyman heroics of the doomed hero of D.O.A. and the pathetically
unconvincing self-justifications of D-FENS in Falling Down indicates
that American movies do not necessarily approve this kind of empowerment;
but they are clearly fascinated with it, whatever its costs,
even at its most sociopathic [Fig. 19].
Fury and the Victim Film 85
18. The Fugitive: Instead of simply escaping from the police, Dr. Richard Kimble
(Harrison Ford) must track down the real criminal.
From their beginnings, then, American crime films have been less
interested in winning viewers’ sympathies for innocent victims than
in exploring the possibilities of action available to those victims, the
more apparently hopeless the better. These possibilities make an ideal
subject for Hollywood because they provide a dramatic framework
structured by an Aristotelian reversal and offer a wide range of powerfully
straightforward emotional appeals (sympathy for the downtrodden,
hope for their change to a more active role, exultation at their triumphs)
while examining the problematic relations between passive
and active roles, typically dramatized in crime films not only through
the opposed roles of the victim and avenger but also through the opposition
of victim and criminal. In showing victims rising to their own
defense by striking back, crime films simultaneously reinforce strong,
simple emotions proper to the given roles of victim, avenger, and criminal,
and complicate these roles by showing how closely they are related.
Whenever a victim turns avenger, chances are some element of
the criminal will enter into this figure as well.
The reason why is obvious. Although there are a few movie criminals
whose behavior is so vicious that viewers are never encouraged
to see them as anything but monstrous (e.g., Michael Rooker’s title
character in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 1990), and a few others
who are clearly saintly victims forced into crime rather than choosing
it (Fredric March’s Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, 1935), most Hollywood
criminals fall somewhere between these two extremes. Bonnie
and Clyde, Vito and Michael Corleone, and the sociopathic teenagers
of Kids (1995) are all criminals, but their films all make some attempt
to explain, and in some cases to justify, the choices that have made
them as they are, in order to explore the relations between actions and
reactions. To what extent are criminal actions simply reactions to the
powerful forces of circumstance? The question of which actions count
as actions, and which count only as reactions to the actions of others,
is perhaps the most urgent moral question American movies ask, and
one to which crime films give a unique pride of place.
Moreover, just as movies can scratch almost any criminal and find
a victim who pleads the irresistible forces of poverty or family ties or
bad companions or the system, movies can scratch the most passive
victim and find a potential criminal. One way of drawing viewers into
a greater intimacy with victims is to emphasize the pathos and injustice
of their sufferings; another is to allow them to fulfill viewers’ fantasies
of heroic retaliation against the forces of evil; still another is to
show how deeply they have been brutalized by making them cross the
line that separates law-abiding avengers from criminals. It would be
surprising if Hollywood did not try all three tactics, often in the same
movie.
Victim films turn on the questions of why bad things happen to
good people, and what good people ought to do when they do happen.
Although Hollywood has rarely been interested in the stoic acceptance
of victimhood portrayed in The Bicycle Thief and Broken
Blossoms, several options remain to Hollywood victims. They can suffer
and die in an implicit indictment of their complicity with an immoral
culture, as the heroines of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and Star
80 (1983) are punished for having so internalized the woman-hating
norms of their patriarchal cultures that they are incapable of breaking
away from the men who prey on them. Alternatively, they can hire freelance
avengers like the durable criminal attorney Perry Mason, guaranteeing
a happy ending at the price of agreeing to have their suffering
upstaged by their avengers.
Although Mason’s clients fade comfortably into the woodwork once
they place the burden of their cases on their infallible advocate, few
victims who place their fate in the hands of the justice system find that
system nearly as responsive. Rape victims Chris McCormick (Margaux
Hemingway) in Lipstick (1976) and Sarah Tobias (Jodie Foster) in The
Accused (1988) win legal vindication only after enduring harrowing legal
ordeals that amount to a second violation. Heroes and heroines
who lack the funds or the wit to call on the likes of Perry Mason, like
the innocent suspects of such Hitchcock films as I Confess (1952),
Dial M for Murder (1954), and The Wrong Man (1956), must be rescued
by prayer or fate or sympathetic investigators or the criminal’s overreaching.
Victims who willfully reject institutional justice to take a more active
role in their own defense inevitably become both more heroic and
more disturbingly complicit in the violence that threatened them in
the first place. The surest way to guarantee their continued innocence
is to isolate them completely from the justice system that ought to be
redressing their grievances. Man-on-the-run films like Saboteur and
North by Northwest (1959) work by estranging their heroes from both
the criminals and the police. So too the blind heroine of Wait until Dark
(1967), the embattled mathematician of Straw Dogs, and the pacifist
graduate student of Marathon Man, all forced to their own defense by
being cut off from the authorities on whom they are counting for help,
strike back at the ruthless criminals who have been tormenting them
without besmirching their straight-arrow credentials.
An especially potent image of this moral whitewash is the outlaw
film, whose victims-turned-superheroes enjoy a continuing moral privilege
whatever crimes they may commit against victims and a system
more corrupt than they are. The Hollywood archetype is Robin Hood,
the outlaw who defies the bullying Guy of Guisborne and the usurping
King John by taking the blame for killing one of the king’s deer, assembling
a band of men that will represent a truer English society than the
corrupt court, vindicating his counterculture’s social credentials by
winning the heart of the aristocrat Maid Marian, ransoming England’s
lawful king Richard the Lionheart from captivity, and earning pardon
for all his merry men. Yet superheroes from Batman (1989) to Darkman
(1990) and The Crow (1994) begin as victims too, and their victimhood
gives their summary justice its moral authority.
Even avengers less noble will assume something of the superhero
if the justice system they defy is sufficiently bankrupt. The heroines
of Thelma & Louise (1991), forced to become robbers and fugitives by
the men who victimize them, achieve heroic apotheosis when they
drive their car off a cliff into the Grand Canyon, sealing their status as
legendary fighters against patriarchy rather than insignificant, privately
motivated killers and thieves. In the western Bad Girls (1994), the
four heroines – less powerful, more dependent on men, but finally
more successful – are equally dedicated to avenging the injustices visited
on them by powerful men who take advantage of their physical
weakness and their sexual vulnerability.
When victims work within the system, viewers’ loyalties are typically
divided between the hope that the system will be vindicated and
the thirst for cathartic vigilante justice. A common way to resolve this
conflict is to transform victims into heroic avengers whose vigilantism
revitalizes a moribund justice system, as in Marked Woman (1937),
Saboteur, or Key Largo (1948). The battleground of the defense or critique
of the justice system can be as intimate as the American family.
Although Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) kills her murderous uncle
at the end of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), marking the final
stage in her accelerated, enforced maturation, she does nothing to disturb
the rest of her family’s sense of him as kindly and charming, and
her community mourns him as a saint. But William Wyler’s The Desperate
Hours (1955) uses the threat of victimization as a pretext for circling
the wagons of domestic patriarchy when Dan Hilliard (Fredric
March) finally succeeds in repelling the escaped convicts who are
holding his family hostage by asserting his paternal authority over
that of his criminal parody, authoritarian father-figure Glenn Griffin
(Humphrey Bogart), and incidentally over his family itself, proving
that, unlike his violent counterpart, father knows best.
D.O.A., substituting the fatally wounded individual’s vengeance for
that of the justice system (which is called upon in the final scene to
provide tacit approval of his revenge), dramatizes the most common
pattern among American victim films: reversing the hero’s status as
victim by showing the hero moving from victim to vigilante with both
the system’s and the viewers’ implicit approval. But other films complicate
the hero’s progress from victim to avenger or criminal, as well
as viewers’ attitude toward that progress, in order to develop a critique
of the relationship between action and reaction, social justice
and private revenge. In I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Paul
Muni plays aspiring contractor James Allen, who is unjustly sent to
prison in a carefully unnamed southern state. After bestial treatment
by the prison trusties who supervise the chain gangs on which he is
forced to work, he finally makes a successful escape, rising to become
a noted contractor before he is identified and rearrested. Agreeing to
return to serve one more year in the hated prison as a condition of
clearing his record, he is denied release by the vindictive state authorities,
stung by his public revelation of their prison culture’s brutality.
Escaping again from prison, Allen dynamites a bridge his pursuers
must cross to reach him, annulling his dreams of constructive building.
When he makes one final stealthy farewell visit to his former girlfriend
Helen (Helen Vinson), she asks as he backs fearfully into the
shadows, “How do you live?” Allen’s chilling reply – “I steal” – is delivered
over a black screen that emphasizes the film’s radically unresolved
ending, as if it were confessing its helplessness to conclude the
story of this good man now eternally on the run because the state’s
brutality has made him a criminal.
Although James Naremore has aptly observed that, in later socialproblem
films like Crossfire (1947), “problems never appear systemic”4
but rather seem to be aberrations that can be ascribed to individual
psychopathology or maladjustment, in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain
Gang and other social-problem films, especially common at Warner
Bros. throughout the 1930s, the portrayal of the victim turned criminal
is balanced by impeaching the system as the greatest criminal of
all. Such films as Black Legion (1936), Dead End (1937), and Each Dawn
I Die (1939) offered an obvious appeal to Depression-era viewers already
suspicious of authority figures: politicians uninterested in the
plight of the unemployed, industrialists indifferent to everything but
their companies’ profits, bankers reconciling their balance sheets by
foreclosing on shaky mortgages, and courts and police officers dedicated
to enforcing punitive laws. Instead of relying on the justice system
of the constitutional government to provide moral authority for
judgments about criminal action, such films dramatized the crisis of
a system so deeply flawed that its fearsome powers had become separated
from the moral authority that ought to give them their force.
In a world where the justice system is monstrously unjust, what
is to prevent an innocent victim from turning into a criminal? Alfred
Hitchcock’s men on the run, like the hero of D.O.A., are never confronted
with this question because they enjoy the moral luxury (though
the pragmatic handicap) of independence from a justice system that
is indifferent to their plight and interested only in hunting them down.
The only Hitchcock heroes and heroines whose moral decisions come
under such remorseless scrutiny are those first presented as free
agents. Alice White (Anny Ondra) has to live with her knowledge that
not only did she kill the man who tried to rape her in Blackmail (1929)
but that the attempt of her policeman-boyfriend, Frank Webber (John
Longden), to protect her has sent Tracy (Donald Calthrop), a man innocent
of that crime (though not of blackmail), to his death in her
place. Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), who avenged her Nazi father’s
spying against the America she loved by agreeing to spy on the
Nazis in Notorious, is married off to former suitor Alexander Sebastian
(Claude Rains) by government agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant), who expects
her to betray her bridegroom to him even though he will not admit
he loves her himself. In Rear Window (1954), L. B. Jefferies (James
Stewart), who begins by snooping on the neighboring apartments to
pass the time while he is recuperating from a broken leg, becomes obsessively
determined to prove that one of his neighbors has killed his
wife. Retired police detective Scottie Ferguson (Stewart again), maddened
by grief when he apparently let Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak),
the woman he was hired to watch, fall to her death in Vertigo (1958),
re-creates her living image as ruthlessly as the killer who first manufactured
her alluring image by using her lookalike Judy Barton (also
Novak), who loves him as hopelessly as he loved the dead Madeleine.
Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), whose boyfriend Sam Loomis (John
Gavin) refuses to marry her at the beginning of Psycho (1960), steals
$40,000 from a lecherous client and runs off to meet the boyfriend. In
every case Hitchcock asks just how far a victim can be pushed before
losing the law’s protection or the viewers’ sympathy.
Hitchcock’s most penetrating study of victimhood, Suspicion (1941),
is his most ambiguous. Its passive heroine, Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine),
is so enamored of her importunate suitor (later, husband) Johnny
Aysgarth (Cary Grant) that she cannot believe that he is actually a
liar, a cheat, and a thief. Eventually, however, she becomes convinced
that he is planning to kill her. At this point in the film’s source, the 1932
novel Before the Fact by Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley), Lina,
pregnant with Johnny’s child, accepts the role of victim and martyrs
herself to Johnny’s scheming. The film, however, ends very differently.
When Lina confronts Johnny with her suspicions, he convinces her he
has planned suicide, not murder, and they return to the luxurious, unaffordable
house he has rented for her with no plans for their future
vicissitudes but a resolve to face them together. Whether Johnny is as
innocent as he claims or as guilty as he acts, the film’s title refers not
only to Lina’s attitude toward him but also to the film’s attitude toward
her. If Johnny is really as innocent as he claims of murderous impulses,
then Lina’s suspicions amount to a paranoid sense of persecution.
Is Lina an innocent victim or a paranoid schemer? In most cases,
a film’s logic would make the answer clear, at least at the fadeout; but
Suspicion develops several different logics that seem to require contradictory
endings. Viewers’ sympathetic trust in the accuracy of her
perceptions demands that Johnny be guilty, but their empathetic desire
for Lina’s happiness requires that he be innocent. The many indications
of his guilt are so closely woven into the fabric of the film’s
representational vocabulary that he must be guilty; yet his guilt is so
obvious from the beginning that the story requires an Aristotelian reversal
that can be supplied only by his innocence. In removing Lina’s
impending death from the ending, Hitchcock guaranteed that whatever
ending he provided would be read as inconclusive, because no
possible alternative would be congruent with the film’s contradictory
logics. Once the film admits the possibility that Lina may be anything
but a pure victim, her status becomes problematic.5
Though Hitchcock is more closely associated with the figure of the
innocent victim than is any other filmmaker, the one who probes the
ambiguous status of victims most profoundly is Fritz Lang. Hitchcock’s
films typically entangle heroes like Guy Haines (Farley Granger),
in Strangers on a Train (1951), with killers who bring them under
suspicion of guilt by the police even though they have done nothing
wrong. Lang, however, more often follows the logic of the 1950 Patricia
Highsmith novel Hitchcock adapted, in which Guy, overwhelmed by
the insistence of Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) that Guy repay the
favor of Bruno’s murdering his wife by killing Bruno’s tyrannical father,
eventually gives in to the pressure, kills the father, survives to mourn
the villain’s accidental death, and is eventually arrested. Lang’s You
Only Live Once (1937) covers some of the same territory as Suspicion
and Strangers on a Train. Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda), an ex-con repeatedly
foiled in his attempt to put his past behind him, is eventually
arrested for a fatal robbery he did not commit. Placed on Death Row,
Eddie begs his wife Joan (Sylvia Sidney) to smuggle him a gun and
uses it to break out of prison, killing in the process the priest who has
come to bring him news of his pardon. Although the moody visuals
of both the robbery and the breakout are shrouded in ambiguity – in
a touch that might have come right out of a more hard-boiled version
of Suspicion, Lang shows a gas-masked robber who may or may not
be Eddie6 – Eddie has clearly become a killer by the film’s end. What
is ambiguous is not whether he is guilty but exactly what his guilt
means, who bears responsibility for it, and how different he is from
any other citizen caught in the law’s toils.
Lang first made his mark in the German silent cinema. The writerdirector
originally assigned to direct the groundbreaking The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, 1920), he was prevented
from shooting the film, for which he provided the framing scenes that
revealed its troubled narrator as insane, by his work on his first commercial
success, the master-criminal tale The Spiders (Die Spinnen,
1919–20). Critical success followed with his allegorical Destiny (Der
müde Tod, 1921). Through projects ranging from Wagnerian myth
(Die Niebelungen, 1924) to science fiction (The Woman in the Moon /
Die Frau im Mond, 1929), Lang showed a particular gift for dramatizing
psychopathology through architectural composition. This tendency
reached its apotheosis in the futuristic dystopia of Metropolis (1927),
whose mob scenes are choreographed with a precision that makes
every one of hundreds of human bodies onscreen move like part of a
single monstrous organism. Given Lang’s fondness for projecting his
characters’ darkest fears and imaginings onto an oppressive mise-enscène,
it is no wonder that he returned repeatedly to two favorite stories.
The first, The Spiders’s tale of a criminal conspiracy to conquer
the world, pervades his German films (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler /Dr.
Mabuse, der Spieler, 1922; Spies /Spione, 1928; The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
/Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933). The second, Caligari’s tale
of a man hounded beyond endurance by nightmarish visual settings
that figure both tyrannical administrators and the demons of his own
mind, comes to full flower in his American films.
The theme of the man whose expressionistically rendered physical
surroundings insistently reflect his own deepest terrors, which Lang’s
frame story made fundamental to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was at
the heart of his favorite film, M (1931), in which the psychotic child
murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) is pursued both by the police
and by the professional criminals whose livelihood has been threatened
by the official crackdown he has provoked. Trapped by cluttered
frames and menacing objects that mark him from the beginning as
dangerous, the sweating Beckert – caught in a claustrophobic storage
room by the criminals, who carry him off to a kangaroo court where
he pleads an irresistible compulsion for the crimes he finds as repugnant
as do his accusers – eventually stands revealed as the ultimate
criminal-victim, whose inability to resist his impulses reflects the compulsive
criminality of his whole society. M reveals Lang as the supreme
architect of the troubled soul imaged by geometric visuals and monstrously
threatening objects.
Although the nightmarish expressionism of M is more naturalized
in the Hollywood films Lang directed after fleeing the Nazis in 1933,
vigilantism and institutional justice are still set against each other,
each indicting the other’s shortcomings. In Man Hunt (1941), Captain
Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon), an English sportsman who is hunted
down by Nazis after playfully stalking Hitler in Berchtesgaden, must
acknowledge the violence within himself not only by killing his ruthless
pursuer Quive-Smith (George Sanders), but by admitting that he
did indeed want to kill Hitler after all. In The Woman in the Window
(1944), Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson), in the middle
of an innocent but compromising meeting with Alice Reed (Joan Bennett),
whose painting he has especially admired in a shop window, is
attacked by her sometime lover, kills him in self-defense, and spends
the rest of the film sinking deeper into guilty lies. In The Big Heat
(1953), Sgt. Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), whose wife has been killed by
mobsters trying to stop him from looking into a dirty cop’s suicide,
nearly strangles the cop’s widow, Bertha Duncan (Jeanette Nolan) before
his guilt is taken over by the widow’s double, spurned gangster’s
moll Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame), who obligingly murders Mrs.
Duncan herself.

Two of Lang’s three westerns, The Return of Frank James (1940) and
Rancho Notorious (1952), show heroes torn between their peaceful
natures and their thirst for revenge; Vance Shaw (Randolph Scott) in
the third, Western Union (1941), is a reformed outlaw whose heroic attempt
to avoid both falling under the sway of and informing on his villainous
brother marks him early on as a sacrificial victim to progress.
In his more frequent tales of urban crime, Lang constructs moral
mazes that begin by setting criminals against victims and end by muddying
the distinctions between the two beyond any hope of reconstruction.
In While the City Sleeps (1956), avid reporters compete for
a promotion promised to the first to identify the sex killer who is terrorizing
their city. One of them, Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews), ends
up staking out his unwitting fiancée, Nancy Liggett (Sally Forrest), as
bait for the murderer (John Barrymore Jr.), whose pathetically irresistible
compulsion to kill, like Beckert’s in M, makes him the film’s
most sympathetic character. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) stars
Andrews again as Tom Garrett, a writer whose attempt to construct a
misleadingly conclusive web of circumstantial evidence against him-
self in a recent murder backfires when Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer)
– Garrett’s editor, prospective father-in-law, and sole partner in
this investigative ruse, who plans to deliver exculpatory evidence at
Garrett’s trial – is killed in a car accident. Fortunes are reversed once
more when Spencer’s daughter, Susan (Joan Fontaine), the loyal fiancée,
realizes Garrett truly is guilty after all. In Scarlet Street (1945), the
disquietingly named Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson), seduced
by streetwalker Kitty March (Joan Bennett) into stealing from
his employer, ends by killing her, allowing her abusive boyfriend, Johnny
Prince (Dan Duryea) to take his punishment, and is left wandering
the streets in a suicidal daze.

Lang’s most notable films marry Hitchcock’s portraits of heroes
under the intense psychological strain of their moral complicity in
crimes of which they are legally innocent to a broader analysis of institutional
justice. In the first and greatest of all his American films,
Fury (1936), Lang uses the conventions of the social-justice formula
to link questions of individual and social complicity in crime. Socialjustice
films were popular throughout the 1930s because they fueled
low-level paranoid fantasies by casting a critical eye on the moral
authority of institutional justice; meanwhile, they anticipated Naremore’s
description of their diagnoses as unsystemic by implying that
the worst abuses of institutional justice were taking place elsewhere,
in California or some unnamed southern state. Fury, the most distinguished
of all social-justice films, follows this pattern by attributing
the most egregious abuses of the justice system to the fictitious faraway
town of Strand, presumably but never explicitly on the California
coast. At the same time, Fury achieves a resonance exceptional
among social-justice films by subjecting its innocent victim to equally
unsparing scrutiny.

Like Frank Capra’s iconic Depression comedy It Happened One Night
(1934), Fury features a pair of lovers separated by a big country one
of them must cross to be reunited with the other. In both films, too,
the course of the lovers’ reunion is disrupted by their adventures
among a group of quintessential Americans that lead to a discovery
of an America they never suspected. But unlike It Happened One Night,
which uses the image of the community singing together aboard the
night bus to suggest that American society is at heart one big happy
family, Fury – cowritten by Lang and Bartlett Cormack from an Oscarnominated
story by the more habitually comic screenwriter Norman
Krasna – unmasks America as a mob whose bloodthirsty instincts are
barely constrained by laws they are only too eager to pervert to their
own vengeful ends.

The film begins with a lovers’ farewell that establishes Chicago factory
worker Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) as an American Everyman.
Joe loves peanuts and dogs, wears a rumpled raincoat with a tear his
all-American fiancée Katherine Grant (Sylvia Sidney) repairs with blue
thread, and accepts the fact that, although he and Katherine have
paused to fantasize in front of a shop window displaying a newlyweds’
suite, he cannot marry her until the two of them have enough money
to live on – a particularly poignant Depression wish. In this opening
scene, however, every mark of Joe’s endearing normalcy – his love of
peanuts, the tear in his raincoat, his childish habit of mispronouncing
the word “memento” as “mementum,” the distinctive ring he accepts
from Katherine – will end up betraying and entrapping him, first as the
kidnapper the mob mistakes him for, then as the vindictive killer Katherine
realizes he has become.

Having saved enough money from a service station he has opened
with his brothers Charlie (Frank Albertson) and Tom (George Walcott)
– whom he has shamed into quitting their errands for a local gangster
– Joe, on his way to claim Katherine, is stopped by deputy “Bugs” Meyers
(Walter Brennan) as he approaches Strand. Taken into custody as
a suspect in the kidnapping of a young woman, Joe is trapped by the
Everyman status that makes him – and “a million men,” as he scoffs –
fit the suspect’s generic physical description. The trap snaps shut
when Sheriff Tad Hummel (Edward Ellis) informs him that traces of
salted peanuts were found in the envelope containing the ransom
note, and Bugs matches a five-dollar bill Joe is carrying with one of
the serial numbers from the ransom payment.
Despite Hummel’s assurances, the law and its officers offer Joe
scant protection from the hysterical rumors of his guilt that sweep
through the town. Just after Lang cuts from a shot of three women gossiping
about Joe to a close-up of chickens clucking, one woman asks,
“But are you sure he’s not innocent?” provoking the haughty response,
“My dear young woman, in this country, people don’t land in jail unless
they’re guilty.” This ironic critique of America’s presumed uniqueness
reveals the totalitarian tendencies found even in places remote
from Nazi Germany.
Just as Joe had earlier lectured his brothers by defining himself as
everything they were not, the citizens of Strand can establish their
self-righteous sense of themselves as ordinary, decent, hard-working
Americans only by contrasting themselves with a criminal scapegoat.
Driven to a self-righteous fury, the townspeople take to the streets,
surrendering their individuality to the identity that best suits them:
members of a mob. After an ominous silence that ends with an alarming
overhead shot of their assaulting the door with a battering ram,
they storm the sheriff’s office, where they overwhelm the few defenders
and knock out the sheriff. Unable to reach the cell in which Joe,
isolated and frantic with anxiety, is locked, the mob burns down the
building. Katherine hears news of Joe’s arrest that brings her running
to the scene just in time to faint when she sees him at a barred window,
surrounded by flames, as the eerily silent citizens look on in rapt
approval. This scene, exploiting Lang’s unparalleled gift for choreographing
crowds, finally frames particular citizens of Strand as individuals
once again; but the iconic poses in which cinematographer
Joseph Ruttenberg freezes them – as gargoyles throwing stones,
munching apples, hoisting babies to see the show, or simply watching
in gleeful satisfaction – reveal how eager they are to surrender their
individual moral judgment to the mob.
Yet Joe, whose innocence had been the focus of such intense pathos,
is as capable of vengeful fury as his tormentors, as he reveals
when he miraculously appears to Charlie and Tom and relates how he
escaped from the explosion that destroyed the burning jail. He tells
his brothers, “I’m legally dead, and they’re legally murderers. . . . And
they’ll hang for it. . . . But I’ll give them the chance they didn’t give me.
They’ll get a legal trial in a legal courtroom. They’ll have a legal judge,
and a legal defense. They’ll get a legal sentence, and a legal death.”
What Joe sees as legal justice, of course, is a perversion of the justice
system, which, he plans, like the mob, to hijack to suit his thirst
for personal vengeance. Learning of the criminal lawsuit the brothers
have urged against the twenty-two townspeople identified as part of
the lynch mob, the citizens of Strand, though now claiming the protection
of the law they had earlier trampled, continue to act like a mob
by refusing to identify anyone as guilty, concocting false alibis for each
other, and hiring out-of-town lawyers to make legalistic speeches
about the corpus delicti. Now, however, Joe is recast as a tragic vigilante
himself. As the trial wears on, Lang repeatedly cuts to reaction
shots of Joe sitting in an anonymous rooming house raptly listening
to news reports on the radio. The sparseness of the furnishings, the
composition of the shots, and Joe’s tense poses – first he is sitting
hunched forward with his hands on his knees, then lying on a bed
whose barred headboard is the most prominent background motif,
then sitting in front of the headboard – precisely echo the physical details
of the shots that figured his helpless isolation when he was in jail,
gripping the bars as he strained to hear every offscreen sound that
might telegraph the mob’s next move. Now he is free and out of danger
but still equally imprisoned by his own obsession with vengeance,
which keeps him shut up alone, trapped in the frame, afraid to go out
lest he be recognized, and compulsively listening for offscreen reports
about the very same mob – until he smashes the radio in a fury that
produces a silence just as ominous as the silence preceding the storming
of the police station in which he had been imprisoned.
Joe is isolated even from Katherine, whom Charlie and Tom are
keeping ignorant of his resurrection in order to make her a more effective
witness to his death. But the strain that had maddened Joe with
a thirst for revenge maddens Katherine in more clinical terms, first
leading to her breakdown, then setting her against Joe. She has already
noticed Tom wearing Joe’s raincoat, whose telltale torn pocket
she had mended with blue thread. Shortly after her testimony, she
recognizes Joe’s misspelling “mementum” on an anonymous note he
sends to the judge, with the ring Katherine gave him, to establish his
death beyond question; and she appears accusingly before him in the
same low-angle full shot in a dark doorway as Joe’s own return from
the dead.

Joe’s furious revulsion from Katherine’s plea for mercy, his solitary
evening on the town, is the film’s apotheosis, a tour de force that epitomizes
Lang’s use of innocuous visual details to register the hero’s
frenzied isolation. Joe’s dinner at a local restaurant is spoiled by the
establishment’s oppressive silence [Fig. 20]; he is troubled by a shop
window whose display of furnishings for a newlywed couple echoes
that of the window that had provided the film’s opening image; he
is haunted by a startlingly literal echo of Katherine’s voice from the
opening scene – “Are you planning to do a lot of running around in this
room?” – reminding him that instead of running after Katherine, as he
had promised, Joe is now running from himself. Seeking solace in a
crowd, he finds that the cheerful noises he hears coming from a nearby
bar are nothing but a radio; the bar is empty save for a bartender
who, noting that midnight has brought a new day, inadvertently tears
two sheets from his calendar instead of one. This accident leaves Joe
staring at the number 22 – the number of defendants that his plot
threatens with death.

Realizing that his irrational quest for legalized vengeance is dehumanizing
him as surely as the mob surrendered its own humanity, and
that they are presumably as haunted by his specter as he is by Katherine’s,
Joe is ready to show himself in the courtroom, in a final revelation
– he drops the pretense of his death and Katherine returns to him
– that was criticized from the film’s first release as abrupt and unmotivated.
7 This ironically convenient ending is unsatisfactory precisely
because it admits that the film’s ruthless unmaskings have raised contradictions
too deep to resolve. Not only have both middle America
and Joe been revealed as morally inadequate in the eyes of the law;
but the law itself, though it has persistently been set up as the force
that protects individuals from each other and, ultimately, from their
own most catastrophic impulses, has been unmasked as fallible and
corrupt.8
Immediately after Sheriff Hummel first places Joe under arrest, Bugs
goes to a barbershop in which one customer notes that “it’s not pos-
Fury and the Victim Film 99
20. Fury: Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) is alone wherever he goes, even in this
intense face-off with a girl in a nightclub (Esther Muir), cut from the ending
of the completed film.
sible to get a law that denies the right to say what one believes.” One
of the two barbers knows that freedom of speech is protected by the
Constitution because he had to read it when he became a citizen; but
the other, Hector (Raymond Hatton), is not such a defender of individual
freedom: “People get funny impulses. If you resist them, you’re
sane. If you don’t, you’re on your way to the nuthouse, or the pen.”
Confessing that he has often been tempted, in shaving his customers,
to cut their throats instead, he succeeds in frightening his customer
into bolting his chair. Is the law an effective protection against the irrationally
destructive impulses of individuals, or simply a guarantor
of individual freedoms whose effect is to privilege a majoritarian mob
as We the People? Such a question goes to the heart of a peculiarly
American solicitude for individual rights under the law. In recapitulating
the Founding Fathers’ debate over the drafting of the Constitution,
however, Lang seems far less confident than James Madison that laws
enacted and enforced by individuals can rescue people from themselves,
or from the mobs to which their selfishness and hysteria drive
them.

The failures of law in the film are due in part to local corruption, a
perversion of legal principle by private interest. As Sheriff Hummel
waits helplessly for the National Guard to answer his call while the
mob grows outside, Lang cuts away to show the ineffectual governor
(Howard C. Hickman) overridden by the oily political advisor Will
Vickery (Edwin Maxwell), who is concerned only for the governor’s
political popularity. But legal institutions are subject to far more insidious
and systemic forms of perversion as well. Once Charlie and Tom,
secretly fed information by Joe, succeed in building their case, they
sit back and watch as woodenly noble District Attorney Adams (Walter
Abel), at first frustrated in his appeal to the jury’s “patriotism”
by the staunch refusal of his witnesses to implicate anyone, brings
into court a newsreel that shows key members of the mob in damning
close-up. The episode has often been discussed as an example of the
way cinema uses its evidentiary value to validate or to question its
own fictional representational practices,9 a confusion fostered by Joe’s
bitter observation to his brothers that he has watched movie footage
of his death repeatedly in a theater even though he did not really die.
The scene places less emphasis on cinema as the ultimate arbiter of
legal truth, however, than on institutional justice clouded by personal
vindictiveness; for as Adams smugly proclaims, he has called his witnesses
only in order to entrap them in perjury before unveiling the
photographic evidence that has presumably been available to him all
along. Every champion of justice, however pure his or her motives
may be, is actually, like the mob, out for revenge [Fig. 21]. In calling
on cinema as evidence in order to question not so much its own signifying
practices as the motives behind its use, the film raises the question
of whether justice is ever anything more than legally sanctioned
revenge.

Along with its indictment of the American citizenry as at heart a mob,
its Everyman hero as maddened by his quest for vengeance, and the
justice system as arbitrary, corrupt, and vindictive, Fury indicts its
viewers as equally complicit in the thirst for violence revenge that
sweeps through Lang’s world like a contagion. At the same time as the
film shows the catastrophic results of Joe’s obsession with vengeance,
it encourages viewers to share that obsession by painting the defendants
as such hateful targets, subversively re-creating the same atti-
21. Fury: His brother Tom (George Walcott) is taken aback by the vindictive
satisfaction Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) takes in cinematic evidence against
the mob, in another scene cut from the film.
tude in viewers that the lynch mob had originally adopted toward Joe.
Thus, even as the film unmasks the obsessive hatred behind Joe’s
fury, it urges that fury on the audience. By the film’s climax, viewers
who are in tune with the conventions of victim films are caught in the
impossible position of wanting the twenty-two members of the lynch
mob to be punished, even though they can see that the twenty-two are
innocent of murder, and of wanting Joe to get revenge for his suffering,
even though they can see that getting revenge will destroy him. Like
Hitchcock in films from Suspicion to Psycho, Lang traps his viewers
in the morally complicit judgments his dramatization of the victim’s
story has invited them to make.
Fury’s greatest achievement, in fact, is not its dramatization of the
evils of lynching or its unblinking representation of the way Joe’s obsession
with legal revenge has made him indistinguishable from the
mob. Rather, it is Lang’s creation of a lynch-mob mentality within viewers,
who are forced by the film’s disconcerting ending to acknowledge
both their own implication in the impossible totalitarian dream of personal
revenge cloaked as justice, and the uneasy knowledge that all
institutions of justice are fueled by the desire for revenge. More ruthlessly
than any other victim film, Fury forces its audience to choose
between a collective identity that reduces them to a lawless mob and
an individual identity as the equally lawless vigilante who alone can
right the wrongs the system cannot punish.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org