Strange fruit indeed.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: Reel World

STRANGE FRUIT, also known as the Negro Holocaust, saw an estimated 4,000 black men, women, and children murdered by lynch mobs between 1880-1950. Victims also might be tortured before hanging or set aflame. So, what was Hollywood doing during the latter sound era portion (1930-50) of this barbarism? Given this period largely was dominated by the Depression and World War II nationalism, the film industry primarily was concerned with mind candy escapism. Moreover, Hollywood's 1934 censorship code would not allow such racist-targeted cinema.

However, a few movies subtextually attacked the phenomenon, just as the South African science fiction film "District 9" (2009) encaged other world aliens to suggest the seeds of Apartheid and the Holocaust are more dormant than dead: Fritz Lang's "Fury" (1936), John Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln" (1939), and William Wellman's "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943).

Sometimes it takes a foreign artist to best address another country's transgressions. Such is the case with Lang, arguably Germany's greatest filmmaker. Moreover, as a Jew when Adolf Hitler came to power, Lang was sensitive to intrinsic hate and persecution. Fittingly, "Fury" was his first American film. An Everyman (Spencer Tracy) wrongly is accused of kidnapping--and perhaps killing--a little girl. When a lynch mob fails to get Tracy out of custody, they set fire to the jail. Their victim manages to escape and goes "underground," in order that a trial will convict the alleged murderers en masse. He eventually cannot go through with it, but not before a frightfully visceral in-film trial documentary showcases how hatefully entertained the mob was by its actions.

Lang later told fellow filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich that to really make a film about lynching, "One should have a white woman raped by a colored man [and] still prove lynching is wrong." However, "Fury" was as close as MGM would let him go. Indeed, the studio even cut a scene of a black couple listening to the trial on the radio and nodding in agreement when the district attorney notes the country's unconscionable number of lynchings. Whether in Europe or the U.S., when people "become a mob ... they have no personal conscience anymore," Lang emphasizes.

This clearly is born out in "Young Mr. Lincoln," when a fictionalized story has the future president (Henry Fonda) defending two young men wrongly accused of murder. Almost immediately, Lincoln must face down a jailhouse lynching party--He succeeds by...