E83 Fritz Lang's Fury and the Brooke Hart Kidnapping

Gladio Free Europe

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In 1936, acclaimed German exile director Fritz Lang made his American debut: Fury. The ripped-from-the-headlines story of a deadly false accusation was acclaimed by critics as the best drama of the year, but audiences and studio executives shunned the film for its dark content and uncomfortable social commentary: particularly how Lang shed light on the crimes of his adopted country, including the brutal crisis of lynching.

With Spencer Tracy playing the accused, and by setting the film in the Midwest, Fritz Lang would fear for the rest of the life that he was a "coward" for not addressing the inherently racist character of lynchings in the South. But this film was based directly on a true series of murders, and one which — though lacking a racial angle and committed outside the South —helped spur the fight to end lynchings everywhere.

These murders began with the disappearance of Brooke Hart, a popular San Jose 22-year-old whose bright future was cut short in 1933 when he was kidnapped and held for ransom. Before any money could even change hands, the police traced the ransom call to two locals with a shady past who confessed to not only kidnapping Brooke Hart, but killing him that same night. Incensed, everyday citizens of Bay Area, including many respectable professionals, stormed into the local jail and subjected the two suspects to horrific torture before hanging both men from a tree. This event, often hailed as the "last lynching in California," was not condemned but celebrated by members of the press and even the governor. This blatant murder of the two suspects, a complete miscarriage of justice, eventually made its way into the national press. The early American Civil Liberties Union led a push to raise awareness of the killings of these men, an awareness which helped fight the broader plague of lynchings in all parts of the nation.

This episode of Gladio Free Europe explores those three San Jose murders and the production of Fury within the broader cultural context of the 1920s and '30s. Although these killings may not resemble our idea of a lynching today, they were part of a centuries-long American tradition of rabid violence in the name of revenge and domination. Fritz Lang's film helped shed light on these atrocities, and remind Americans that this was not a problem isolated to the South. Since the 18th century, lynchings have been committed in all parts of the country. And some of the most brutal lynchings, many of which were just as racially motivated as the reign of terror in the South, were committed in Hollywood's backyard.