Try and Get Me also known as The Sound of Fury is a remarkable film noir, like its director a victim of the McCarthy-era blacklist. Made in 1950, the picture is an ambitious work rife with novelistic detail. The director, Cyril Endfield makes didactic points about poverty and crime, yellow journalism, and mob violence -- there is a great deal of preaching in this film, although the subjects of Endfield's sermons are perennially relevant; indeed, watching the film in the wake of the assault on the American Capitol on January 6, 2021 is revelatory -- the threats to our republic that Endfield anatomizes in this movie remain persistent and lethal to this very hour.
As if in recognition of the film's instructive tone, the movie begins with a blind preacher ranting about the end of days. The man stands outside a church where a crowd has gathered to hear him condemn them as responsible for the evil in the world. The tone is apocalyptic and disturbing -- there's no clear moral perspective: we can't tell if the film sympathizes with the preacher or despises him and his alarming message. The camerawork uses low angles to emphasize the blind man with ravaged eye-sockets raging against the sky. He falls off his rostrum and tracts printed with his message are scattered on the sidewalk, trampled by the crowd in a shot that presages the equally apocalyptic imagery at the end of the movie.
A man named Howard Tyler is down on his luck. He's unemployed and worried about his pregnant wife and his son back home. He hitches a ride with a truckdriver, a narrative device that allows the scriptwriter to provide a lot of background in an economical fashion as the two men talk. This sequence is shot in high contrast nocturnal black and white. Characteristic of the film are odd little details, for instance, the truckdriver's insistence that men are trapped by women who force them to deny their fundamental natures. At dawn, the truck driver drops Tyler off at his home in a small city that seems modeled on Sacramento or Bakersfield. Tyler's wife and child (an unidealized spoiled little boy) are happy to see him back at home. But Tyler's wife is clearly worried by his joblessness and has been denying herself pre-natal care to economize so she can feed the family. They live in a sort of dilapidated bungalow with a a chicken coop in the desolate back yard. Looking for work, Tyler runs into a charismatic man at a bowling alley. The man buys him a drink and invites him to his apartment. This guy is a flashy dresser, boastful, and, as he claims, popular with the ladies -- he's a predatory seducer. Like Tyler, Jerry Slocum (the bowler) served in the war and claims that he spent most of the conflict chasing women. Jerry is magnetic but sleazy -- he wears loud clothes and little short ties and he's obviously some kind of psychopath. There's a peculiar homo-erotic subcurrent in the two men's relationship -- Jerry preens before the mirror that Howard holds for him and there's lots of banter about colognes and hair-styling. As it turns out, Jerry, despite his affectations, is just a small-time hoodlum. He specializes in armed robbery of gas stations and tourist motels. Jerry needs a driver and Howard, desperate to make some money, reluctantly agrees to act as his accomplice. Not at all integrated with this narrative are sequences focusing on a newspaper writer named Gil Stanton. Like Howard, Gil is morally compromised -- his greed has led him to become associated as a columnist with a disreputable and sensationalist newspaper editor. Gil is a college man and he lives luxuriously compared to his counterpart, poor Howard -- we see him at a barbecue, apparently roasting an entire lamb, with a beautiful and gracious wife and a best friend who is an Italian nuclear scientist prone to speaking in moral homilies. Gil and Howard's stories proceed on separate tracks, but, of course, the plot promises to draw them together.
Howard participates in some robberies of mom and pop (literally) businesses that Gil exploits for columns claiming that the city is threatened by a crime wave. Jerry Slocum, tiring of these penny-ante exploits, enlists Howard to help him kidnap the son of a wealthy man. The kidnapping goes wrong and the young man is brutally murdered -- this takes place on an abandoned military base on what seems like an enormous midden of clam shells. The dead man is thrown into a rancid-looking pool and Jerry persists in the plot, preparing a letter demanding ransom with the respect to their crime victim. For some reason not completely clear to me, Jerry forces Howard to go with him on a double-date. Jerry has a mercenary blonde-bombshell show-girl moll. This woman enlists her manicurist, a mousy little dame who seems pathetically lonely, to be Howard's companion. The couples go to a spectacularly vulgar night-club with a floor-show featuring half-naked girls and an aggressive insulting comedian who publicly humiliates Howard. Howard, afflicted by guilt has become a drunk -- he's now pouring booze down his throat as an eye-opener. Howard doesn't want to besmirch his wife with an admission of his crimes and so he goes to the pathetic, lonely manicurist's apartment and confesses to her that he was involved in the murder of the kidnapped young man (The woman hopefully thinks Howard is trying to seduce her and the scene is a remarkable mixture of lust and sorrow). Howard flees home and the cops chase him in a ridiculous and abject pursuit around his house into his chicken coop while his crying wife and little boy watch. These sequences have a sickening power. Howard is arraigned and thrown in the hoose-gow and the cops hunt Jerry down. The film now enters its final and most didactic act. A mob gathers to lynch Howard and Jerry. Gil Stanton realizes that his incendiary columns on law and order have triggered the mob's fury. (The Italian nuclear physicist, who has blood on his hands as well, has been hounding Gil about his journalistic ethics.) A huge crowd gathers at the courthouse. The sheriff lets the other inmates out so that they will not be slaughtered in the riot about to ensue. The mob attacks the courthouse and, at first, is driven back by tear gas. But someone hooks a firehose to a hydrant and sprays the cops on the courthouse steps, knocking them down, and the crowd surges into the jail, beating back its defenders in a number of scenes of brutal violence (it looks just like the attack on the American Capitol). Jerry and Howard are seized by the mob and passed along the top of the screaming crowd. Howard's little boy wakes up screaming from a nightmare. There are some pious sentiments expressed about mob violence and the film ends.
Try and Get Me is notable for its performances and small details that decorate its stark narrative. Lloyd Bridges, eyes popping with maniacal fury, plays the part of Jerry Slocum and he is memorably sleazy but charming in a smarmy sort of way. At the end of the film, when he is raging against both Howard and the mob, Bridges is genuinely frightening. Frank Lovejoy plays Howard Tyler -- he's a hapless every man, fretting and sweating, his way through his scenes. Lovejoy is someone who was in hundreds of movies and TV shows -- he's beefy and doesn't have matinee idol good looks,but you recognize him immediately. There's a strong edge of hysteria to his performance -- this is characteristic of the early fifties; I think this strain of male madness may have something to do with pervasive post-traumatic stress disorder from combat in World War Two. (You can see this edge of masculine hysteria in many of Jimmy Stewart's performance from this period -- Lovejoy is like a bargain basement Jimmy Stewart.) The hapless manicurist and Howard's wife are both superb -- the manicurist is a shy girl and, when she has to pose next to the platinum blonde show-girl in the courthouse (the Press has stalked them to that place), she starts crying. The movie is full of remarkable little details -- the murder scene on the huge pile of clam shells or whatever they are is extraordinary. Tyler's wife has had a dream about giving birth to a little girl without any kind of pain. After the little girl is born, mother and daughter go shopping together in this dream vision. When the crowd gathers to storm the courthouse, they charge past the blind preacher. The kidnap victim's car is found parked in a palm grove where a Mexican laborer is mucking around in an irrigation ditch -- the scene has an extraordinary documentary intensity. Endfield portrays an American scene corrupted by constant representations of violence: the little kids carry cowboy guns and shoot at one another incessantly. In Howard's neighborhood, there is a single TV set and everyone gathers in the darkness to watch it -- what are they watching? We heard wild whoops and gun shots -- it's a TV western, of course. The film is marred by preaching, but some messages, I think deserve sermons and I didn't really find the picture's themes of empathy and compassion offensive in any way. The movie rejects the notion of personal responsibility -- we are all creatures of our environment, culture, and the economic system.
Cyril Endfield (1914-1995) was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He attended Yale and worked in Hollywood until blacklisted in the early 'fifties. He, then, directed films in England. (Lloyd Bridges was also blacklisted). Endfield made many pictures -- some of them are well-esteemed now, including the British noir The Limping Man and Hell Drivers which was awarded a BAFTA prize for best screenplay in 1957. Endfield's picture Zulu (1964) shot during the height of apartheid with thousands and thousands of native extras is one of the greatest combat pictures ever made -- it is probably racist, however, and I think not likely to be publicly screened although you can see it on DVD. Anyone who saw this picture as a child has never forgotten it. His allegorical Sands of the Kalahari (1965) is also a movie that has remained in my memory ever since I saw it on TV in the late sixties. His films, I think, deserve re-evaluation.
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