In THEY WONT FORGET (1937) a frenzied mob takes the law into their own hands after the hottest girl in town is murdered and the ambitious local D.A. (Claude Rains) has spurred on the hysteria with the help of an unscrupulous journalist. And when the woman killed is a 16 year-old Lana Turner in her film debut, the queasy sick effect triples. The camera catches her every bounce in a tight sweater as she struts through the blindly celebratory Memorial day crowd before her death. Audiences remembered the sweater, not so much the grisly murder forgotten in the stampede for lynching and right there one must shudder at America's cold, lusty, lethal gaze. How implicated are we in the audience via the fact Lana's sweater bounce won her fame and fortune via the ultimate in sacrificial volcano virgin unwilling martyrdom?
FURY (1936), THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943), and THEY WON'T FORGET (1937) were recently shown back-to-back on TCM, a lynch mob triple feature. It may be some wise old programmer's subliminal nod to the crazy mobs outside Casey Anthony's trial; a wry answer to the hoopla and hysteria as the rubes got red in the face when the word came back that Casey was 'not guilty' and 'justice' wouldn't be done yet gain. The news machine ably suckered in the attention of slack-jawed yokels, church-crazy old women bitter from lifelong sexual frustration, anyone who grew up with a shitty, self-absorbed mom, focused by the attention-hungry media onto one woman's trial: Casey Anthony = increased circulation, and boosted careers. Just as in the stacked deck of rube eggin' in OX-BOW, with Fonda in his pious 12 ANGRY MEN lecture mode: "Hangin's any man's business that's around."
In Casey's case trials for killing daughters are everyone's business regardless of being around. Old Henry delivers his OX-BOW recitations well, but I actually preferred old Ma Joad's to the most blubbering of the three lynch victims: "Keep yer chin up. You only die once, son." Yeah, don't we wish?
These three films - did people outside of the liberal media elite (Oscar voters) ever want to see them? What's the hook in lynch mob message pictures? Even the media elite shouldn't want to actually pay money to sit down in a theater and learn how skeezy and easily led the throngs around them in the audience are. If you see them in a cinema and there was a fire you realize seeing all this mob rule you would surely get trampled on your way to the exit. But at the same time, they are riveting, compelling viewing, and that's the answer. Nothing gets us feeling personally involved-- gives us the feeling something is at stake--than an abused, missing, or murdered child. Hollywood films aren't crammed with revenge against sleazy pedophiles and ruthless kidnappers for nothing. When films like THEY WON'T FORGET come around, they're like Hollywood's chance to preach against what the studios themselves practice, or would shortly, starting around the 1970s with DIRTY HARRY AND DEATH WISH --the anti-liberal backlash mob action they both cause with their rabid headlines and tut tut with their sober message movies.
Lynch mobs seem less abundant in an age where we don't need a marriage license to check into a hotel room --but the repressed, frustrated ugly main street populace still don't haven't fought for the right to party, and they still get mad at those who do. Now, instead of Claude Rains' fame-hungry D.A. we have Nancy Grace, tireless in her hounding the accused mom, Casey Anthony. When a child's involved it's the business of any accusatory hysteric that's around, and when it's a dead blonde girl child and the mom looks good even in the harsh overhead lighting of the courtroom; and--something even more shocking for the strictly sober Christian wives out there--you can show pictures of her orgymongering, that's where careers like Grace's are made.
The three anti-vigilante violence films TCM screened all get a royal four stars from the obedient Leonard Maltin, which is not surprising. They're all well done enough to be solidly entertaining despite the sermons. But the liberals of the Hollywood media aren't necessarily right just because they can make a movie about people being wrong. The liberal media has never hid its contempt for the red state working man. Just show an American flag, some jeans, a cowboy hat, an endangered toddler, a lite beer, and as far as New York's advertising elite are concerned, the suckers are hooked, but meanwhile, who's keeping them stupid? The game is just as fixed in FURY as it is on Fox News; as fixed in Stanley Kramer's films as it is at a carnival pitch game.
Still, my rage at these cretins FURY director Fritz Lang depicts is so blazing it threatens to engulf me, even though I know it's a fixed game, that Lang hates them more than I ever could, and if my rage is so easily inflamed, how much better am I than the mob? Just because I am more 'educated' and and 'debauched' I may feel I am free to join Fritz Lang in his cosmopolitan revulsion towards the provincial reactionaries of these films, little better than the Nazis he left behind in Vienna, sheepdogs for whom the law is like a leash, roping them by the neck to a master they hate and fear. With the leash comes off they only answer to the general consensus of the rumor mill which is by nature predisposed towards exaggeration and a common enemy, and no sense of future responsibility.
And nothing blinds oneself to one's own faults quite like rage, just as self-awareness obstructs fascism's growth, or awareness of one's own inner struggle is the only way to survive it. On hindsight, how many of our evil transgressions were done to impress someone, even if they only spoke to us through radio or TV? Next time, let us think of Claude Rains in THEY WONT FORGET, a man smart enough to know that mobs don't want truth, they want blood. Let us try, in the heat of the moment, to never cast even the second stone... without first stoning... ourselves... let us not condemn drugs until we have tried them. Get a straight cat high day! It's coming...
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