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 him.

Having widened its scope so far, the plot continues to expand. It reveals more and more faults in American society, but within the conceptions of its time, 1936. This dated viewpoint becomes obvious when the townspeople are brought to trial, and the judge trying to pursue orderly justice is opposed to the bigots in the deck. A man in the audience gets up to support the defendants and denounce the trial: "This is a crying shame against the good name of our town . . ." The judge calls him to the bench and sentences him to ten days for contempt of court. "I protest this injustice!" Thirty days . . .

We know the townspeople are murderers who should be crushed. But it's disturbing to see them suppressed the way Seale and Dellinger were. We are caught in a montage of conflicting feelings about the ways of achieving justice which the situation offers. There is no easy way out of the montage: the alternatives remain within society's present possibilities and no transcedem solutions are admitted.

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; cut flat to the film as the newsreel begins. The defendants appear in the mob swinging rams and throwing fire-bombs; then Lang freezes the frame, holding on one still to identify a defendant. The shock of this freeze-frame shoves the fact into our faces. When the frame freezes on a second defendant his wife screams "It's not true!" But it is we just saw him there. She is crushed not by the law but by the truth.

WHILE FILM is the instrument of justice it is also the instrument of men's drives: so that the determination to reveal the truth is not a pure motive, but is qualified by hatred and revenge. Legal lynching, "the law that says if you kill somebody you gotta be killed," is no better than the extra-legal kind. Thus the tracks-in, which increase in number about the middle of the film, lose our complete acquiescence in moving forward.

Lang's tracking shots are unique. They never try to penetrate a situation, reach an open space, or leave people behind. They all are stopped. They end confronting people. They do not show ways to get free of real dilemmas. But while they move in on people they do not flatten and simplify the situation. Each track's last frame has as much depth as its first. What this signifies is that tracks, single drives pushing in one direction cannot on the one hand reduce the complexity of a situation, and cannot on the other hand salve the situation by leaving it behind. They are anti-transcendental: square in the middle of the frame: cut to reverse they lead only to a more direct and necessary engagement with the realities opposed to them. These meanings become evident in the film's last and greatest character-running into the camera shot, which I will not reveal.

THIS FORMAL analysis implies essential truths about the evolving situation of the protagonists. Lang is commonly called an Expressionist director who loves to trap characters in fate-filled plots. This view ignores Lang's persistent them of evidence of perception of the man who learns about the situation in which he is caught.

The romantic presumptions of Lang's heroes push them against others' survival. Whether Greek heroes or ordinary Jose, they are drawn gradually into a world in which every act is connected to every other. But this world is society, whose interconnections Lang develops more realistically than fatalistically.

His protagonists turn to furious, one-directional drives to break out of the apparent trap. It's then that they are really caught-locked into forward motion that leads to their destruction. Fury shows that they have to learn to see what they are in and what they are doing. When they recognize that the track in cannot ran over everything in its path, they will be able to live in a complex society.