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We got the right to live a little, too
Cy Endfield's Try and Get Me! (1950) can't be the most pessimistic film noir I've ever seen, but it makes a bleakly persuasive bid for it. It's grim enough when it's just ticking off the ways in which the American dream will nickel and dime its subscribers to death; then it turns its attention to the civic fervor with which God-fearing citizens march out to murder their neighbors and it becomes apocalyptically timeless.
The prologue sets the storm-coming tone, opening cold on the hubbub of a crowd as a blind street preacher's audience deserts him for something we cannot see beyond the tight angles of sidewalk and storefront, streaming ever more obliviously past until they knock him flat with his leaflets flying as he cries out, "How much is each of you guilty for all the evil in the world? Why do you do the things you do? Why?" It could be an allegory; it could just be the end of the world. For much of the runtime, it is nonetheless possible to imagine that things will end within normal parameters of badly for Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy), the hard-luck everyman we meet hitching a ride home from the northern part of the state where he hasn't been able to find a job, either. Flush with the promises of the postwar boom, he moved his family from Boston to Santa Sierra and now they live in a housing development so flimsily thrown together it has mud and duckboards instead of yards, their prefabricated bungalow sits behind wires like a prison hut. Nine-year-old Tommy (Donald Smelick) whines in vain for a quarter to attend the baseball game with the rest of his class; his brave-faced mother Judy (Kathleen Ryan) doesn't dare see a doctor about her pregnancy for fear of the medical bills. Their kitchen shelves are bare of all but the cheapest groceries and when they want to watch TV, they crowd their folding chairs into the makeshift theater of the living room of the one neighbor with a set and an aerial. The film is merciless in detailing the American equation of earning power with human worth, the casual humiliations suffered by the Tylers when a bartender wrings an extra two bits out of Howard for the upmarket beer he didn't ask not to be served or a neighbor sneers not quite out of earshot of Judy, "People who can't afford children shouldn't have them." It makes the decent, dejected ex-GI, already suckered into the sunk costs of the Californian suburbs, an easy mark for Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), a slick, preening narcissist whose habit of checking himself out as blatantly as a pin-up would be risible if it weren't such a red flag; he flaunts his silk shirts and his platinum cufflinks and his $6.50 cologne as if he's seducing Howard like one of the "big German fraulies or the little French dollies" he brags about having his pick of back in Berlin and effectively double-dog-dares the needier man into driving the getaway car for his small-time stickups, knocking over liquor stores and mom-and-pop motor courts. It comes at a cost of lying about the night shift at the cannery and anesthetizing his conscience with a drink or two, but it's the dream paying off at last in peaches and baked ham, the promise of doctors and a TV. Howard's parting words to his wife as he heads off to a supposed one last job with Jerry are the good provider's "Buy whatever else you want, huh?" When he returns later that night, she will murmur sleepily of a dream in which shopping and childbirth were mingled, interchangeably affordable and painless: he will listen from the other side of a nightmare, the irreversible moment when Jerry who really didn't have the brains to graduate to kidnapping for ransom panicked at the first hitch in his plan, shoved their bound captive down a bouncing slope of gravel, and smashed in his skull like Cain with a stone at the bottom. We didn't see the gore; we didn't need to, with the sweat-sheened tragedy mask of Howard's face telegraphing each crunch for us. What we expect from here on is a conventionally downward spiral, ending perhaps when Jerry's self-preserving sociopathy sacrifices his unraveling partner before becoming himself disposable in one of the bottom-feeding ironies that follow when thieves fall out. We get something much worse. You don't want a movie about mass violence as the inevitable product of capitalist society, you want to back off from this story now.
Originally released as The Sound of Fury, Try and Get Me! was adapted for the screen by Jo Pagano from his 1947 novel The Condemned, a sociologically minded retelling of the 1933 kidnap-murder of Brooke Hart and the subsequent lynching of the two men charged with the crime by a crowd of thousands in downtown San Jose. The film resets these events provocatively in the present day, where they would have remained immediately recognizable to viewers with even a passing familiarity with the cause célèbre of the so-called last lynching in California. Not being one of those people before this week, I was primarily aware that the plot seemed to be widening from the working-class noir of the Tylers to encompass, first with cynicism and then with horror, the commodification of violence like groceries or homeownership or the freedom of the press. Columnist Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson) isn't a penny-ante hack hustling for the gutter press, he can afford a lovely barbecue at his Spanish-style home for a dinner party of cultured guests, but he's as susceptible as the next employee to the inducement of a bonus when his editor at the Santa Sierra Journal leans on him to build a handful of robberies into a sensational feature about a crime wave, ignoring the sheriff's matter-of-fact diagnosis of "local roughneck[s]" in favor of the better-selling boogeyman of an "Eastern gang." Ethics in journalism is a matter of profit: "People love to be scared to death. The more you scare them, the more papers they buy." But fear drives up more than circulation. As Howard stumbles like his own shadow through a world tilting increasingly coarse and weird—as if it's not enough that the meat-mallet thunks of a tenderized steak reproduce the rhythm of murder, the waitress shorthands the order with the cadaverous slang of "cow on a slab"—he hooks up almost vestigially with Hazel Weatherwax (Katherine Locke), the tremulous lonelyhearts of a manicurist whom Jerry's equally flashy, equally superficial girlfriend Velma (Adele Jergens) keeps around to look better by comparison with. She kisses him deeply and naively and nurtures a slick-paper dream of regenerating a sad, hard-drinking man, but when she sees the latest headline about the murder of Donald Miller, this type specimen of the shrinking violet remarks at once, "You know, people who do things like this should be—" When the sheriff tries to temper the incendiary tone of the coverage, the editor boasts that the paper is helping to clean up the town. The mayor hails their yellow journalism as a public service. Even Gil falls prey to his own publicity, inflamed by the coroner's report which hinted at cold-blooded sadism—erroneously, but perhaps the never-seen coroner was primed in turn by the specter of professional killers, the ouroboros of the news cycle feeding on itself—into issuing full-fledged calls for vigilantism like "Brutal Kidnap Murder May Go Unpunished" and "Will Justice Be Cheated?" For justice, please read, as in the accompanying cartoon of citizens facing off against crime, "Public Indignation." Everything rests on that blurring line between what a lot of people want and what's right. The film has kept its finger on the pulse of American violence, documenting how the cap-pistol games of children and the honor-culture Westerns playing on TV and Jerry swanking around like Prettier Boy Floyd are all constellated in this country's Gadsden flag mythos; it doesn't feel like an accident that its strongest countervailing voice comes from even farther than the East Coast. However much Gil doesn't want to listen in pursuit of the almighty dollar and the confidence that it can't happen here, the nationality of his houseguest Dr. Vito Simone (Renzo Cesana) suggests to us that he knows whereof he speaks when he warns about the dangers of dehumanization and the distortions of the press and the potential for violence in every person that can be controlled or encouraged by the society in which they live. Too late to do anything but wring his hands about it, the American star reporter is shocked by the strange fruit of his appeals to "thoughtless emotionalism," but the Italian intellectual had seen its trees before. The trouble is, so have we.
No movie can be seen after seven decades as it was on first release, but Try and Get Me! may be more frightening to watch in 2021 than it was in 1950. Shot vérité-style at night with scripted scenes embedded within the tumultuous ad lib of a packed plaza of extras outside Phoenix City Hall, the lynching forms a terrifying climax to the film, far exceeding the murder which gave it an excuse. Neither Endfield's direction nor the cinematography by Guy Roe permits the crowd to melt into the comfort of facelessness where everyone and no one is guilty at once; the camera is always picking out faces, reminding us of the individual motives that have led damn near an entire town to come together, as at a church social, for extrajudicial murder. Some of them look as righteous and ravenous as we would conventionally expect, some just as hepped-up as a tailgate party before the big game. When it catches the street preacher in his black string tie, crying unheeded about the world going to the Devil in a dive bomber, we realize the narrative has wrapped around to Teiresias. "We live in a democracy," the sheriff tries one last time to disperse the raucous, swelling crowd, "and in a democracy there is no place for mob violence," but the faces underneath his window don't just boo the very notion of the rule of law, they pull down the loudspeakers with an expertly, ominously thrown lasso. "There's no law against what's right!" one man hollers with his hands cupped round his mouth. Another demands and is cheered for it, "Are you passing laws against justice?" There are women jeering and shaking their fists, children brought to see the moral lesson, college students in the van as the crowd surges forward through the tear gas to blast the defending police off the steps with fire hoses and heave the doors of the jail open with ropes like a medieval siege, clean-cut all-American boys in their varsity jackets and T-shirts for the University of Santa Sierra. We can argue—or not—about the persistence of lynching beyond the Civil Rights Era, but at the time of the film's production there was something deliberately atavistic in this spectacle of a kind of violence which had declined since the spikes of the Depression and World War II, a confrontational assertion that even in a decade already mythologizing its middle-class peacetime prosperity, none of the sociocultural mechanisms that end in people dragged from government buildings and hanged in a self-serving rage of entitlement had gone anywhere. It is less atavistic these days. Leo Frank was more than a century ago, but January 6th was less than a year. I would not be surprised if there is as little appetite now for what this film shows about America as there was when it was cut by state censor boards and flopped commercially and critically and was re-released within months under a sexier title to no avail, then because audiences didn't want to believe it, now because we know it to be true. Even without the patina of the world-historical which it is not the film's fault it has accrued, however, the scene is objectively rough and should be approached accordingly. There's no heroism, no reprieve, no restoration of justice on even the symbolic level. The self-satisfaction of the lynch mob is as nauseating as their swiftness to beat their human prey half to death and string them up the rest of the way, their claims of justice as chilling as their complaints of being cheated. The press is complicit, the law is complicit, the innocent are helpless and the guilty don't deserve what they get. It's a desperate, despairing vision: it has no solution for the chain reaction it sees of economics and violence and demagoguery and cowardice. It's unspeakable and it's America.
While I do not consider it disingenuous of the film to model itself after the historical case that it does—in which both victims were white—given the overwhelming history of anti-Blackness in America, I should note that it may still be jarring to watch a movie about a lynching in which racism plays no part. It may be more useful to think of Try and Get Me! as a movie in which a lynching serves as a broader indictment of the society which licenses and enables such outbreaks of coordinated, unlawful and self-policing violence, dodging the question of race and zeroing in on capital and class. It can be a bit Marxism 101, but any amount of Marxism stands out a mile in a mid-century Hollywood film. Less than a year after its release, its director would be named by witnesses before HUAC and flee Hollywood's blacklist for an eventually successful career in the UK. Persons attempting to find McCarthyism in this narrative will not be disappointed, just depressed. Persons not attempting to find McCarthyism will be depressed, to be honest. I do not believe Try and Get Me! was designed to convey much other effect, but it is remarkably undiluted by the Production Code and as such it has a kind of nihilistic blaze. Even the closing echo of Dr. Simone pronouncing the sentence of a message picture can't expunge the terrible sound that swept across the screen with the title card, the annihilating roar of the lynch mob. Besides, as generically sententious as he sounds when he says things like "This is the real problem, between nations as well as people, and it must be solved by reason, not by emotion, with understanding, not hate," he's not wrong. God knows how. This justice brought to you by my democratic backers at Patreon.
The prologue sets the storm-coming tone, opening cold on the hubbub of a crowd as a blind street preacher's audience deserts him for something we cannot see beyond the tight angles of sidewalk and storefront, streaming ever more obliviously past until they knock him flat with his leaflets flying as he cries out, "How much is each of you guilty for all the evil in the world? Why do you do the things you do? Why?" It could be an allegory; it could just be the end of the world. For much of the runtime, it is nonetheless possible to imagine that things will end within normal parameters of badly for Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy), the hard-luck everyman we meet hitching a ride home from the northern part of the state where he hasn't been able to find a job, either. Flush with the promises of the postwar boom, he moved his family from Boston to Santa Sierra and now they live in a housing development so flimsily thrown together it has mud and duckboards instead of yards, their prefabricated bungalow sits behind wires like a prison hut. Nine-year-old Tommy (Donald Smelick) whines in vain for a quarter to attend the baseball game with the rest of his class; his brave-faced mother Judy (Kathleen Ryan) doesn't dare see a doctor about her pregnancy for fear of the medical bills. Their kitchen shelves are bare of all but the cheapest groceries and when they want to watch TV, they crowd their folding chairs into the makeshift theater of the living room of the one neighbor with a set and an aerial. The film is merciless in detailing the American equation of earning power with human worth, the casual humiliations suffered by the Tylers when a bartender wrings an extra two bits out of Howard for the upmarket beer he didn't ask not to be served or a neighbor sneers not quite out of earshot of Judy, "People who can't afford children shouldn't have them." It makes the decent, dejected ex-GI, already suckered into the sunk costs of the Californian suburbs, an easy mark for Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), a slick, preening narcissist whose habit of checking himself out as blatantly as a pin-up would be risible if it weren't such a red flag; he flaunts his silk shirts and his platinum cufflinks and his $6.50 cologne as if he's seducing Howard like one of the "big German fraulies or the little French dollies" he brags about having his pick of back in Berlin and effectively double-dog-dares the needier man into driving the getaway car for his small-time stickups, knocking over liquor stores and mom-and-pop motor courts. It comes at a cost of lying about the night shift at the cannery and anesthetizing his conscience with a drink or two, but it's the dream paying off at last in peaches and baked ham, the promise of doctors and a TV. Howard's parting words to his wife as he heads off to a supposed one last job with Jerry are the good provider's "Buy whatever else you want, huh?" When he returns later that night, she will murmur sleepily of a dream in which shopping and childbirth were mingled, interchangeably affordable and painless: he will listen from the other side of a nightmare, the irreversible moment when Jerry who really didn't have the brains to graduate to kidnapping for ransom panicked at the first hitch in his plan, shoved their bound captive down a bouncing slope of gravel, and smashed in his skull like Cain with a stone at the bottom. We didn't see the gore; we didn't need to, with the sweat-sheened tragedy mask of Howard's face telegraphing each crunch for us. What we expect from here on is a conventionally downward spiral, ending perhaps when Jerry's self-preserving sociopathy sacrifices his unraveling partner before becoming himself disposable in one of the bottom-feeding ironies that follow when thieves fall out. We get something much worse. You don't want a movie about mass violence as the inevitable product of capitalist society, you want to back off from this story now.
Originally released as The Sound of Fury, Try and Get Me! was adapted for the screen by Jo Pagano from his 1947 novel The Condemned, a sociologically minded retelling of the 1933 kidnap-murder of Brooke Hart and the subsequent lynching of the two men charged with the crime by a crowd of thousands in downtown San Jose. The film resets these events provocatively in the present day, where they would have remained immediately recognizable to viewers with even a passing familiarity with the cause célèbre of the so-called last lynching in California. Not being one of those people before this week, I was primarily aware that the plot seemed to be widening from the working-class noir of the Tylers to encompass, first with cynicism and then with horror, the commodification of violence like groceries or homeownership or the freedom of the press. Columnist Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson) isn't a penny-ante hack hustling for the gutter press, he can afford a lovely barbecue at his Spanish-style home for a dinner party of cultured guests, but he's as susceptible as the next employee to the inducement of a bonus when his editor at the Santa Sierra Journal leans on him to build a handful of robberies into a sensational feature about a crime wave, ignoring the sheriff's matter-of-fact diagnosis of "local roughneck[s]" in favor of the better-selling boogeyman of an "Eastern gang." Ethics in journalism is a matter of profit: "People love to be scared to death. The more you scare them, the more papers they buy." But fear drives up more than circulation. As Howard stumbles like his own shadow through a world tilting increasingly coarse and weird—as if it's not enough that the meat-mallet thunks of a tenderized steak reproduce the rhythm of murder, the waitress shorthands the order with the cadaverous slang of "cow on a slab"—he hooks up almost vestigially with Hazel Weatherwax (Katherine Locke), the tremulous lonelyhearts of a manicurist whom Jerry's equally flashy, equally superficial girlfriend Velma (Adele Jergens) keeps around to look better by comparison with. She kisses him deeply and naively and nurtures a slick-paper dream of regenerating a sad, hard-drinking man, but when she sees the latest headline about the murder of Donald Miller, this type specimen of the shrinking violet remarks at once, "You know, people who do things like this should be—" When the sheriff tries to temper the incendiary tone of the coverage, the editor boasts that the paper is helping to clean up the town. The mayor hails their yellow journalism as a public service. Even Gil falls prey to his own publicity, inflamed by the coroner's report which hinted at cold-blooded sadism—erroneously, but perhaps the never-seen coroner was primed in turn by the specter of professional killers, the ouroboros of the news cycle feeding on itself—into issuing full-fledged calls for vigilantism like "Brutal Kidnap Murder May Go Unpunished" and "Will Justice Be Cheated?" For justice, please read, as in the accompanying cartoon of citizens facing off against crime, "Public Indignation." Everything rests on that blurring line between what a lot of people want and what's right. The film has kept its finger on the pulse of American violence, documenting how the cap-pistol games of children and the honor-culture Westerns playing on TV and Jerry swanking around like Prettier Boy Floyd are all constellated in this country's Gadsden flag mythos; it doesn't feel like an accident that its strongest countervailing voice comes from even farther than the East Coast. However much Gil doesn't want to listen in pursuit of the almighty dollar and the confidence that it can't happen here, the nationality of his houseguest Dr. Vito Simone (Renzo Cesana) suggests to us that he knows whereof he speaks when he warns about the dangers of dehumanization and the distortions of the press and the potential for violence in every person that can be controlled or encouraged by the society in which they live. Too late to do anything but wring his hands about it, the American star reporter is shocked by the strange fruit of his appeals to "thoughtless emotionalism," but the Italian intellectual had seen its trees before. The trouble is, so have we.
No movie can be seen after seven decades as it was on first release, but Try and Get Me! may be more frightening to watch in 2021 than it was in 1950. Shot vérité-style at night with scripted scenes embedded within the tumultuous ad lib of a packed plaza of extras outside Phoenix City Hall, the lynching forms a terrifying climax to the film, far exceeding the murder which gave it an excuse. Neither Endfield's direction nor the cinematography by Guy Roe permits the crowd to melt into the comfort of facelessness where everyone and no one is guilty at once; the camera is always picking out faces, reminding us of the individual motives that have led damn near an entire town to come together, as at a church social, for extrajudicial murder. Some of them look as righteous and ravenous as we would conventionally expect, some just as hepped-up as a tailgate party before the big game. When it catches the street preacher in his black string tie, crying unheeded about the world going to the Devil in a dive bomber, we realize the narrative has wrapped around to Teiresias. "We live in a democracy," the sheriff tries one last time to disperse the raucous, swelling crowd, "and in a democracy there is no place for mob violence," but the faces underneath his window don't just boo the very notion of the rule of law, they pull down the loudspeakers with an expertly, ominously thrown lasso. "There's no law against what's right!" one man hollers with his hands cupped round his mouth. Another demands and is cheered for it, "Are you passing laws against justice?" There are women jeering and shaking their fists, children brought to see the moral lesson, college students in the van as the crowd surges forward through the tear gas to blast the defending police off the steps with fire hoses and heave the doors of the jail open with ropes like a medieval siege, clean-cut all-American boys in their varsity jackets and T-shirts for the University of Santa Sierra. We can argue—or not—about the persistence of lynching beyond the Civil Rights Era, but at the time of the film's production there was something deliberately atavistic in this spectacle of a kind of violence which had declined since the spikes of the Depression and World War II, a confrontational assertion that even in a decade already mythologizing its middle-class peacetime prosperity, none of the sociocultural mechanisms that end in people dragged from government buildings and hanged in a self-serving rage of entitlement had gone anywhere. It is less atavistic these days. Leo Frank was more than a century ago, but January 6th was less than a year. I would not be surprised if there is as little appetite now for what this film shows about America as there was when it was cut by state censor boards and flopped commercially and critically and was re-released within months under a sexier title to no avail, then because audiences didn't want to believe it, now because we know it to be true. Even without the patina of the world-historical which it is not the film's fault it has accrued, however, the scene is objectively rough and should be approached accordingly. There's no heroism, no reprieve, no restoration of justice on even the symbolic level. The self-satisfaction of the lynch mob is as nauseating as their swiftness to beat their human prey half to death and string them up the rest of the way, their claims of justice as chilling as their complaints of being cheated. The press is complicit, the law is complicit, the innocent are helpless and the guilty don't deserve what they get. It's a desperate, despairing vision: it has no solution for the chain reaction it sees of economics and violence and demagoguery and cowardice. It's unspeakable and it's America.
While I do not consider it disingenuous of the film to model itself after the historical case that it does—in which both victims were white—given the overwhelming history of anti-Blackness in America, I should note that it may still be jarring to watch a movie about a lynching in which racism plays no part. It may be more useful to think of Try and Get Me! as a movie in which a lynching serves as a broader indictment of the society which licenses and enables such outbreaks of coordinated, unlawful and self-policing violence, dodging the question of race and zeroing in on capital and class. It can be a bit Marxism 101, but any amount of Marxism stands out a mile in a mid-century Hollywood film. Less than a year after its release, its director would be named by witnesses before HUAC and flee Hollywood's blacklist for an eventually successful career in the UK. Persons attempting to find McCarthyism in this narrative will not be disappointed, just depressed. Persons not attempting to find McCarthyism will be depressed, to be honest. I do not believe Try and Get Me! was designed to convey much other effect, but it is remarkably undiluted by the Production Code and as such it has a kind of nihilistic blaze. Even the closing echo of Dr. Simone pronouncing the sentence of a message picture can't expunge the terrible sound that swept across the screen with the title card, the annihilating roar of the lynch mob. Besides, as generically sententious as he sounds when he says things like "This is the real problem, between nations as well as people, and it must be solved by reason, not by emotion, with understanding, not hate," he's not wrong. God knows how. This justice brought to you by my democratic backers at Patreon.
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I'm not even sure reading about it was a wise thing for me to do right now.
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I saw it cold. It was certainly an experience.
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Yeah.
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I can see why it flopped. It's way too close to the bone.
People don't want to understand their worst side.
But it must be one helluva movie.
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It is. I am not sorry that it was made, or that it was restored by the Film Noir Foundation, or that I watched it. It says more than many better-regarded entertainments of its year. It's just not easy to listen to.
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Also from his British period is Hell Drivers- a gritty, sweaty actioner about crime and corruption in the trucking industry- starring a host of big name British actors- including, way down the roster, a very young Sean Connery.
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I've wanted to see that movie for years for its cast alone. If I can get hold of it, I think it should be the next Endfield I see. I've felt less strongly about Zulu despite Michael Caine, but I am glad it holds up as it does.
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*hugs*
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No, it's true, I know it's not a unique problem. Endfield was just making his movie about the American manifestation, and it's the recognizable country I am living in.
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I can think of noirs that have upset me more for other reasons, but I can't think of anything that ends like Try and Get Me. I can't on some level even figure out how, in its time, it got made.