Except in brief flashbacks, 1947’s Brute Force takes place entirely within an intimidating fortress of a prison. Like some medieval castle, there’s even a drawbridge at the entrance, which is described by one inmate as, “I was once married to a dame like that bridge. Wonderful structure, but up in the air most of the time.” Art Smith, playing a doctor in the facility, describes the facility as “one big human bomb”.
One thing contributing to the general ill will is how overcrowded it is. For example, there’s six men confined in cell R17, which is where we’ll find Burt Lancaster, Howard Duff, Jeff Corey, John Hoyt, Jack Overman and Whit Bissell. The group is notorious within the prison walls, a gang loyal enough to Lancaster that they conspire to kill a stool pigeon who helped put their leader in solitary for a few days. That involves some of the men corralling the doomed man using blowtorches until he stumbles backwards into a metal press.
Needless to say, this is a violent picture. What is astonishing is how violent it is even by today’s standards. The key difference is you don’t see much, if any, of the results after any of the violence. As a lesson to today’s filmmakers, I’d like to point out how much more shocking something becomes when the aftermath of an event is left to the viewer’s imagination.
Much of that violence is courtesy of chief guard Hume Cronyn. Normally known for more bookish roles, it is startling to see the actor in a performance where he does things like beating an inmate to death with a rubber hose while Wagner blares on the turntable. That his uniform suggests that of an SS officer is surely not a coincidence.
Cronyn wants to become warden, displacing the nervous, cowardly Roman Bohnen. The possibility of that is terrifying, as the sadistic guard admits to such predilections as getting “a kick out of censoring the mail”, an act he performs to drive one man to commit suicide. As Smith tells Cronyn, his current employer is the only place he could belong: “Where would you find another place where there’s so many flies to stick pins into?” One moment that hit me the hardest is when Bohnen is ordered to announce on the PA Cronyn has finally succeeded in replacing him as warden, and the look on the poor guy’s face recalls such moments as Ellen Burstyn’s in The Exorcist when she watches her daughter spiderwalk down the stairs.
One of the many punishments Cronyn has in his repertoire is sending men to work on the excavation for a new drain pipe. The conditions down there are so bad that it keeps putting men in the infirmary and even a few into the grave. But what Lancaster learns is that excavation might provide the only possible cover for an escape. You see, there’s a rail-mounted machine gun in the turret at the main gate. Despite that gun’s ability to be repositioned quickly, the person behind it can really only focus on either what is happening outside the wall or what is going on inside. By coordinating with those on the inside, he and his crew may have a chance on the outside.
The performances throughout this are astonishing, and I felt I really got to know these characters, despite there being so many crammed into a runtime just north of 90 minutes. What I find interesting is we never really learn that much about any of these people, even Lancaster, but we’re given just enough background to make them seem more real.
One of the most fleshed-out characters is Smith’s prison doctor. While he is technically a free man, some statements he makes, as well as his resigned demeanor, tell the viewer there is no other employment option available to him. He’s as much of a prisoner as his patients.
Something which is startling about this film is how sympathetic it is to those prisoners. The only character we see who is truly a violent psychopath is the guard played by Cronyn. The prisoners are instead more like the gentle Calypso, played by the awesomely named Sir Lancelot, who I believe sings every line he has. Aside from Lancaster, the hardest-edged inmate is played by Chales Bickford, and even that character is simply stern and pragmatic.
And there are even more characters worked into the plot, courtesy of flashbacks of the various men confined to cell R17. Each of these is triggered by one of the guys musing on the illustration of a woman’s face they have pinned up. I would not call this a pinup girl, as it is only a face and a rather haughty one that appears to be either asleep or dead.
These reminiscences are pure melodrama, but they are still quite effective. The only one that isn’t tragic is Hoyt’s tale of getting robbed at gunpoint (with his own gun!) by Anita Colby. He recollection has a great punchline: “I wonder who Flossie’s fleecing now?”
Brute Force is one of the very best noirs I have seen, and definitely the best of that unusual sub-genre, the prison film. The characters, though not given a remarkable degree of depth, are interesting. Nobody in real life is as clever as the dialogue here, but how I wish this was how we conversed in reality. It has moments of base melodrama, but these give the film the emotional heft it needs. Scenes of intense violence give the picture an electric charge, but these moments are never portrayed as something to enjoy. Taking everything into consideration, this work is nothing less than miraculous.
Dir: Jules Dassin
Starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn
Watched on Criterion Collection blu-ray