Go on, try
“Go on, I dares ya! I’m a sixty-foot-tall wobbly Lloyd Bridges — what’re ya gonna do if ya DO get me?”
This film is better known — although not well known — as THE SOUND OF FURY, and it’s the last film Cy Endfield made stateside before the blacklist nudged him across the pond, where he made Brit classics HELL DRIVERS and ZULU.
So I must see this, clearly.
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January 25, 2009 at 8:30 pm
TRY AND GET ME is based on the same real life story of lynching which was the source for Lang’s FURY.
Like many of Endfield’s it was made on a low budget and so it was safe from making the compromise self-effected by MGM which was to make the guy about to be lynched an innocent man. Of course Lang’s film moves beyond that to make a more intellectual and philosophical examination of the problem but TRY AND GET ME is more direct and sober. Although personally I think FURY is the better film.
January 25, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Fury has stunning sequences, some slightly silly bits… overall it’s incredible. I suspect the Endfield will be more CREDIBLE in some way. But Lang really hits a peak of hysteria that’s impressive as hell.
January 25, 2009 at 11:37 pm
It’s much more credible. Fury is far from chopped liver, but Try and Get Me is genuinely frightening. It’s climactic lynching will make your hair stand on end.
It’s part of a whole cycle of incredbly bleak postwar films that appeared just as the blacklist was getting started. Losey’s M and The Big Night belong to this group as does Abe Polansky’s no-holds-barred masterpiece Force of Evil and John Berry’s Garfield swan songHe Ran All the Way.
Lloyd Bridges gives the performance of his life as an incredibly charming psychopath full of a the sort of phsyical energy that Belmondo would make famous years later in A Bout de Souffle. He involves a hapless Frank ovejoy in his schemes in a manner suggestive of a low-rent Patricia Highsmith character.
Once seen this one is never forgotten.
January 25, 2009 at 11:59 pm
I’m on it!
It’s tragic that guys like Endfield and Dassin were pushed out just as their work started to really kick in. A relief that they managed to do great stuff elsewhere, though.
January 26, 2009 at 12:37 am
True.
And then there’s Losey who had the greatest expariate career of them all.
January 26, 2009 at 12:44 am
Certainly of the blacklistees. Kubrick certainly gives him some competition in the expat stakes.
January 26, 2009 at 12:57 am
I’ve seen this more than once, but it’s been a few years. Lloyd’s a real sonuvabitch in this one, and Lovejoy’s well, Lovejoy. Although to be fair, he is quite convincing in his role as the innocent swept along for the ride. I’d forgotten Richard Carlson was in this, but what really struck me the first time I watched it was seeing Kathleen Ryan, who only three years prior to this was shot down along with James Mason at the end of Odd Man Out. And speaking of Lovejoy, who out there has seen Shack Out On 101? A very bad movie, but rather good in its badness. Lee Marvin’s an undercover commie who goes by the name is Slob and is employed as a short-order cook in a greasy spoon owned by Keenan Wynn. Wynn spends a good deal of time lifting weights on the premises of his restaurant. A truly ridiculous film, but worth seeing for that reason.
January 26, 2009 at 1:07 am
It’s an amazing film-it was only on British tv about 5 years ago.
. The film creates a gritty cynical world where everyone gets scrrewed over with the protagonist at the very bottom (even bartenders and stage magicians look down on him). The lynching scene is justly famous, the cutting gets so intense But my favourite scene is the “seduction”, when Lloyd Bridges talks about his sex life, takes off his shirt and asks Stillman to check out his muscles.
January 26, 2009 at 1:36 am
That sounds MOUTHWATERING.
And Shack Out on 101 always appealed because it has such an alluring title. I’m gonna download the pair of them, soon!
January 26, 2009 at 3:09 am
The difference between Kubrick and Losey is that the latter inegrated himself into two different foreign culures, producting one of the most important of all British films (The Servant) and one of the most important of all French films (Monsieur Klein). Kubrick while technically residing in England created a world of his own. Kubrickville bears only a passing resemblance to life as we know it.
That’s one of the reasons I find Eyes Wide Shut so fascinating. He’s consumed with nostalgia forthe New York he left behind in the late 50′s and never returned to. So he reactes 8th street from memory onthe grandest scale imaginable on a Birtish sound stage. Weird.
January 26, 2009 at 7:51 am
Eyes Wide Shut is my favourite Kubrick.
January 26, 2009 at 9:41 am
A friend said he heard that Kubrick booked every single yellow cab in England (maybe about a dozen?) for use on his set, for a year. In the finished film, only about two cabs are ever seen at a time. But Kubrick didn’t ever want to find himself short a few cabs in case he needed them.
January 26, 2009 at 10:22 am
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But Kubrick didn’t ever want to find himself short a few cabs in case he needed them.
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Ever the obsessive.
January 26, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Can you imagine, if he suddenly found he didn’t have enough cabs? He might miss a day’s filming!
Out of his 15 month schedule.
So better to keep all the cabs on standby all the time, just in case.