Howard Tyler Frank Lovejoy is a family man living in California who cant seem to get by financially He meets up with a smalltime but charismatic hood Jerry Slocum Lloyd Bridges Soon Slocum convinces Tyler to participate in gas station robberies to get by Later they kidnap a wealthy man in hopes of getting a huge ransom Things go wrong when the man is murdered by Slocum then thrown in a lake Tyler reaches his limit emotionally and he begins drinking heavily He meets a lonely woman and confesses the crime while drunk The woman flees and goes to the police When the two kidnappers are arrested a local journalist Richard Carlson writes a series of hatefilled articles about the two prisoners which eventually lead to a brutal lynching The despair of the lower middleclass A family man ashamed of being unemployed allows himself to be convinced by a gangster to take part in a kidnapping The police arrests them both and the anger of the small towns population is unforgiving THE SOUND OF FURY is a dark crime movie that builds up to an apocalyptic storm but never loses sight of social realities thus telling a lot about the daily despair of the workingclass A masterpiece it was Cy Endfields last film before he felt compelled to move to Britain
