Fritz Lang’s first and best Hollywood film, 1936’s Fury, has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Archive.

The Austrian born director of the German classics Metropolis and M would go on to make such well regarded Hollywood films as The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat, but none would achieve the greatness of Fury.

Based on an actual lynching in San Jose, California, several years earlier, the Oscar-nominated story by the usually light-hearted Norman Krasna (The Devil and Miss Jones, White Christmas), Fury is about a happy-go-lucky auto mechanic from Chicago (Spencer Tracy) who is stopped by a small-town deputy sheriff (Walter Brennan) on his way to marry his fiancé (Sylvia Sidney) in another nearby small town. Suspected through circumstantial evidence to be part of a gang that kidnapped a child, he is held without bail or even the ability to make a phone call while the sheriff (Edward Ellis) tries to get hold of the district attorney (Walter Abel) to investigate. The idiot deputy lets the local barber know what is going on at the jailhouse, leading to a frenzied mob led by Bruce Cabot that sets fire to the jail when their attempted lynching of Tracy is thwarted by the sheriff.

Sidney, who has been unaware of what has been going on, hears of Tracy’s arrest on the radio and makes her way to the jailhouse where she sees Tracy surrounded by flames just before the building explodes.

The world thinks that Tracy, who is exonerated when the real kidnappers are caught, is dead but he survived while his dog (The Wizard of Oz’s Toto) died in the explosion. He appears only to his brothers (Frank Albertson, George Walcott), who are also his partners in his garage. The brothers work with district attorney Abel to bring 22 identified members of the mob to trial for murder but everyone including the sheriff denies that any of them took part in the crime. A newsreel reveals the contrary. Lang’s use of newsreel footage to solve a crime was done before such footage was used in a real court case.

Sidney figures out that Tracy is still alive and follows his brothers to his hideout, imploring him to see the judge before the 22 men and women are found guilty and hanged for a crime they didn’t commit. He refuses at first but makes a surprise appearance in the courtroom just as the verdicts are being read.

Tracy’s speech to the judge has relevance for events currently playing out in wake of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. He says “I know that the law says they’re not murderers because I’m still alive, but the law doesn’t know that a lot of things that were important to me, like a belief in justice, and an idea that men were civilized, and a feeling of pride that this country of mine was different from the others, were burned to death within me that night.”

Fury appeared on numerous top ten lists for 1936, including that of the National Board of Review. The film, Lang’s direction, and Tracy’s performance were finalists in the voting for the second New York Film Critics’ awards, but Oscar nominated it in just the Original Story category. MGM had five of the ten films nominated for Best Picture including two with Tracy, Libeled Lady and San Francisco, along with Romeo and Juliet, A Tale of Two Cities, and the winner, The Great Ziegfeld, but not Fury. Tracy was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar instead for San Francisco in which he played in support of Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald.

Also new to Blu-ray from Warner Archive are The Last of Sheila and Ladies They Talk About.

Directed by Herbert Ross (The Turning Point, The Goodbye Girl), The Last of Sheila is a clever mystery co-written by composer Stephen Sondheim (Into the Woods) and actor Anthony Perkins (Psycho). It’s about the aftermath of the death of a movie producer’s hit-and-run accident the year before.

James Coburn is the producer who has invited six Hollywood-type suspects to his yacht in the Mediterranean to determine which of them ran down his wife. They are writer Richard Benjamin and his wife Joan Hackett, actress Raquel Welch and her husband Ian McHane, and director James Mason. It’s all fun and games until there is a second death and then a third before the mystery is solved.

Although I love Agatha Christie-style mysteries of which this is one, the difference is that in all of Christie’s short stories, plays, and novels and the films made from them, there is at least one sympathetic character. In this, there are none. They are all terrible people, leaving us no one to root for. While it looks and sounds great on Blu-ray, it still leaves me cold. It’s fun, but forgettable.

Ladies They Talk About is a bit of an odd duck of a film. Based on the play Women in Prison by convicted murder accomplice Dorothy Mackaye, it was co-directed for no discernible reason by Howard Bretherton and William Keighley. It references real San Francisco Bay Area locations including the former California state capital, Benicia, where Barbara Stanwyck’s bank robber character and Preston Foster’s evangelist character grew up, and San Quentin when it housed both male and female prisoners, but doesn’t use either realistically. The plot in which Stanwyck and her boyfriend/accomplice Lyle Talbot are sent to San Quentin where he is killed in an attempted escape for which she blames Foster is almost as idiotic as her shooting Foster when she gets out, his covering for her, and her agreeing to marry him in the film’s rushed conclusion.

See it for Stanwyck and Lillian Roth (I’ll Cry Tomorrow) as her fellow prisoner, but don’t expect a lot.

Recent films on Blu-ray include Respect and Pig.

Jennifer Hudson is Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin in Respect, which covers her life from the age of ten in 1952 to the height of her stardom in 1972. Directed by Leisel Tommy, the film doesn’t shy away from depicting Franklin’s pastor father (Forest Whitaker) and producer first husband (Marlon Wayans) as despicable tyrants, it glosses over what appears to be a rape by a pedophile from her father’s church and leaves unnamed the men who were the fathers of her first two children, one of whom she had at 12, the other at 15.

Hudson’s performance is excellent. Acclaimed for her singing in her Oscar-winning performance in 2006’s Dreamgirls, but not so much for her acting between songs, here she is superb at both. A second Oscar nomination could well be in the cards.

Nicolas Cage, whose films of late have been disappointing, gives his best performance since 2013’s Joe as a truffle hunter whose companion pig is stolen in Pig, co-starring Max Wolff and Adam Arkin. Directed by Michael Sarnoski, the highly atmospheric film builds slowly to a devastating climax. A third Oscar nomination for Cage (Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation) might be a long shot but it wouldn’t be a total surprise.

This week’s new Blu-ray releases include National Velvet and Ragtime.