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What is the plot of Fritz Lang’s Hollywood film Fury?

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Fritz Lang directing Woman in the Moon (1929) — Fritz Lang Although it took Fritz Lang some 21 years to make 22 Hollywood films, arguably at least half of them are noirish masterpieces of menace. His time in Hollywood, which began in 1934, followed a directing career in Germany during the 1920s that included several landmark films.

In the 1936 American film Fury, Spencer Tracy stars as Joe Wilson, a hardworking man who is wrongfully arrested after being mistaken for a kidnapper. As news of his alleged crime spreads, an angry lynch mob surrounds the jail and sets it on fire, presumably killing Wilson.1

Although he is badly injured, Wilson survives the attack and escapes. Consumed by a desire for vengeance, he secretly plots to ensure that every member of the mob responsible for his supposed murder is brought to justice and sentenced to the death penalty.1

Directed by Fritz Lang as his first American project, the film serves as a powerful critique of mob violence and societal injustice. Lang, having fled the Third Reich, intended the film to challenge the tolerance of lynchings in the United States, though the studio ultimately altered the ending against his wishes.12