The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!) (Cy Endfield, 1950)

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hearthesilence
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:22 am
Location: NYC

The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!) (Cy Endfield, 1950)

#1 Post by hearthesilence » Tue Nov 05, 2013 12:25 pm

As part of their annual Save and Project film restoration festival, MoMA is screening Cy Endfield's The Sound of Fury (later retitled Try and Get Me!) tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4 p.m.. I saw their sold-out Saturday night screening of this, and I highly recommend catching tomorrow's screening as this film has never been available on DVD and it isn't showing on TCM (at least not the restoration).

Bear in mind that TCM has hosted film screenings in the past of new restorations that have yet to be broadcast on their network, and MoMA's festival has screened plenty of restorations that yet to be transferred to home video, including some high profile ones like Wanda and (outside of an OOP Madman reissue) the Film Foundation's work on The Leopard. So don't count on catching this elsewhere anytime soon!

I never heard of this film until Jonathan Rosenbaum championed it in his "List-o-mania" feature (which is by far the most widely-read article he's written, according to the Chicago Reader). I didn't realize it was so poorly circulated until now.

It was restored last year with the help of the second For the Love of Film blogathon, and one of the participants, the Self-Styled Siren, was actually present at the screening. Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation gave a great introduction and talked about the film afterwards. This was an actual 35mm print and FWIW, the opening credits they wound up using had the title Try and Get Me!, not The Sound of Fury.

Rosenbaum wrote an excellent appreciation for the filmmaker (as well as for this particular title), correcting some misinformation that's been published about Endfield and mentioning this tidbit:

"It was [Orson] Welles who gave Endfield his first film job, as an assistant on The Magnificent Ambersons (later, after Welles left to make a film in Brazil and the studio eviscerated Ambersons, it’s said that Endfield may have been responsible for saving one key sequence, a stairway scene between Tim Holt and Agnes Moorehead)."

I haven't seen Endfield's other films, and I don't have the same enthusiasm for this one as Rosenbaum, but while it's not without its flaws, it's still quite good, especially the final act which is pretty magnificent, especially if you're unaware of the story's origins.

mteller
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:23 pm

Re: The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!) (Cy Endfield, 19

#2 Post by mteller » Tue Nov 05, 2013 1:16 pm

It's a pretty good flick, but much much better is Endfield's The Underworld Story.

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