Brute Force

BRUTE FORCE         B+                  

USA  (98 mi)  1947  d:  Jules Dassin

Those gates only open three times.  When you come in, when you’ve served your time, or when you’re dead!
—Gallagher (Charles Bickford)

The Macbeth of prison break films, as there’s no happy ending to soothe the audience’s built-up anxieties, instead there is only a film noir world of death and destruction.  Ostensibly a leftist, postwar reaction to fascism, Dassin’s film elevated the American prison picture to the role of a WW II POW film, where the sadistic chief prison guard is equated to the Nazi SS officers running the concentration camps.  The timing of the film is interesting, as it was released in the summer just prior to the first Hollywood blacklist instituted on November 25, 1947, the day after ten writers and directors were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Dassin rose to Hollywood prominence in the late 1940’s with a series of taut and moody pulp films, including BRUTE FORCE (1947), THE NAKED CITY (1948), and THIEVES HIGHWAY (1949), each distinguished by an inventive camera style and shadowy imagery capturing a bleak, sometimes sadistic vision of human nature.  Shortly after completing NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950), his career in America was finished when fellow movie director Edward Dmytryk testified before a congressional committee in 1951 that Mr. Dassin was a communist sympathizer, forcing him into self-imposed exile in Europe.  One of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, his family moved to New York City when Dassin was a small child, eventually settling in Harlem.  According to Dassin, “We were so poor it was ridiculous.  At that time Harlem wasn’t entirely black.  There were about three or four minority groups living in the ghetto, at each other’s throats all the time: Jewish, Negro, Irish, and some Italian, divided among themselves and taking out their wrath and their poverty upon each other.  I was conscious of this, and of the daily problem of eating.  And it was cold...it was always so cold.”  Left-wing artistic circles abounded in New York during the Depression, where he worked in New York’s legendary Yiddish Theatre, which was founded on Brecht along with the principles of agitprop theater based on the Soviet model, working with Elia Kazan, among others, on a 1937 WPA Federal Theater Production of Revolt of the Beavers, playing the lead in a Marxist musical for children that was terminated after only three weeks by the New York police commissioner.  For five summers during this period Dassin worked as an entertainment director of a Jewish camp in the Catskills, where, among other things, he engaged the young campers in productions of Shakespeare.  At this time he was briefly a member of the Communist party, heavily influenced by the revolutionary realism of Lee Strasberg’s Group Theatre (1931- 1940), the first acting company to introduce Stanislavski acting principles, but left the party in 1939 when Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet pact with Hitler.  From Alastair Phillips, Rififi, 2009, pages 5-11:

The cultural milieu in which Dassin thrived during this period provided a formative influence on his later political and cultural sensibilities.  It was during this time that he was exposed to New York’s vital left-wing theatre then flourishing in the progressive climate of the New Deal.  Dassin would later claim, for example, that he joined the Communist Party after seeing the Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets’s episodic drama, Waiting for Lefty, set among a community of taxi drivers on the verge of a strike during the Great Depression of the 1920’s.  Like Orson Welles, Dassin also worked in radio and it was his audio adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat that led to him being noticed by the Broadway producer, Martin Gabel, who subsequently invited him to direct The Medicine Show by Oscar Saul and H. R. Hays at the New Yorker Theater.  This, in turn, led to an invitation to work in Hollywood.    

Two of the actors from the Group Theater joined Dassin in this film, Roman Bohnen, the befuddled warden, and Art Smith, the alcoholic prison doctor who is really closer to the narrative center of the film, and both would later be blacklisted (two other actors as well, Jeff Corey and Sam Levene), with Bohnen suffering a fatal heart attack afterwards, while Smith was named by Elia Kazan from his work in the Group Theater.  Later in his life Dassin forgave plenty of people associated with McCarthyism, but one he never forgave was Elia Kazan.  Dassin was included among a group of younger, socially aware, left-wing directors that resorted to the use of film noir to help them explore psychological motives under the surface, including Robert Rossen, who directed Body and Soul (1947), Abraham Polonsky, who directed Force of Evil (1948), and Joseph Losey, who remade M (1951), directors whose work carried some weight and substance, as they had known hardship and struggle in their lives, having lived through extraordinary historical events whose experiences helped define their artistic vision, something Red Hollywood (1996) director Thom Andersen suggests is “characterized by ‘greater psychological and social realism,’ by a skepticism about the American dream, and by pointed reference to the ‘psychological injuries of class.’”  After becoming dissatisfied by the conservatism shown by MGM, Dassin signed with Universal Studios after his contract expired, specifically to work for a newly formed production unit under the helm of liberal crime journalist Mark Hellinger, who advocated a greater degree of social realism within the Hollywood crime film, having just produced Robert Siodmak’s Oscar nominated film noir THE KILLERS (1947), a film that introduced Burt Lancaster, an actor with outspoken liberal sympathies.  Prison movies were most popular in the 1930’s when dozens of films were made about men serving hard time, coinciding with the hard times experienced by the general public during the Great Depression, including George W. Hill’s THE BIG HOUSE (1930), Mervyn LeRoy’s I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932), Roland Brown’s HELL’S HIGHWAY (1932), Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (1932), and a host of others, all about men trying to survive under oppressive circumstances.  Other subjects explored by this liberal group of filmmakers were outspoken films that attacked racism, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, vigilantism, and the misuse of the criminal justice system.

Enter Jules Dassin, with a script written by Richard Brooks, from a story by Robert Patterson, opening with grim, black and white shots of a solitary, cathedral-like Westgate prison compound surrounded by water, like Riker’s Island, where the austerity of the cold stone walls with an armed security tower rising overhead are subject to a constant deluge of rain, the film aches with an unrelenting sense of despair.  Instead of dangerous prisoners in their midst, where it’s every man for themselves in a Darwinian world, the real enemy is the tyrannical rule of a notoriously brutal prison system run by a particularly disreputable, yet power hungry chief guard, Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn).  What’s immediately apparent is the camaraderie of the inmates, seen welcoming a fellow prisoner back from an extended stint in solitary confinement, where Joe Collins, in a dynamic performance by Lancaster, played with a battle hardened, inner-rage, always seething with intensity in a role that made him a star, immediately sets his sights on escape, driven by a single-minded purpose to get “out,” “Nothing’s OK.  It never was and it never will be.  Not ‘til we’re out, get it?  Out!,” as there’s nothing left for them on the inside, no hope, no future, and no life.  Seen as a tight-knit group, where the main characters are introduced, Collins gathers them around as soon as he’s returned back to the cell, including Howard Duff as “Soldier” Becker, John Hoyt as Spencer, a gambler, Jack Overman as Kid Coy, a professional boxer, Whit Bissell as Tom Lister, an embezzler, and Jeff Corey as “Freshman,” where they’re all-in with Joe’s plans.  But first there’s another matter to take care of, what to do about the squealer that got Collins sent away in the first place.  While Collins visits the prison doctor for an alibi, his cellmates menacingly surround the snitch (James O’Rear) in the metal shop, taunting him with blowtorches, forcing him backwards until he falls into a huge metal-stamping machine that instantly crushes him.  So much for prison justice.  But that’s just for openers.  We see that the beleaguered and ineffectual Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen) is getting threatened to improve discipline by some political hack (Richard Gaines) whose only interest is protecting the governor from scandal, preferring to avoid problems through the use of strong-armed tactics by Captain Munsey to supposedly keep the inmates in line, whose motto is “Kindness is a weakness.”  But the doctor, the only voice of conscious throughout the film, who witnesses first-hand the demoralizing effect this has on inmates, speaks up, “I know in medicine that you don’t cure a sick man by making him sicker.  In here, you’re returning a man into the world a worse criminal than he came in.” 

Realizing that he’s one bad press release away from assuming control of the prison, Munsey deceptively drives Lister to suicide, hounding him that his wife was erroneously filing for divorce, causing him to hang himself in his cell.  It’s sadistically cruel moves like this that drive the men to band together and revolt, suddenly scrounging for things they can use as weapons as they plan an all-out escape.  However, there’s a brief flashback sequence that connects several of the men to the women they knew on the outside, creating a series of romantic threads, which may or may not be real, as the men have plenty of time mulling over their fates, but they’re intriguing by the brevity, humor, and great camerawork of these sequences, where Spencer is fleeced at gunpoint by his stylish date, Flossie (Anita Colby), taking him for his money and his swanky new car, while Lister embezzles money from his company to give his wife (Ella Raines) a fur coat.  Collins needs money for a lifesaving cancer operation, as otherwise his girl (Ann Blyth), who refuses treatment unless Joe is with her, may spend the rest of her dwindling life in a wheelchair, while “Soldier” fondly recalls the Italian woman he met during the war (Yvonne DeCarlo), smuggling food to her resistance faction, willingly taking the rap after she shoots her own father, as he was about to expose the American to nearby Italian soldiers.  While essentially the inner thoughts of the men, they offer a completely different vantage point, as we see each of them prior to their arrests.  Another unique twist is the use of one inmate named Calypso (Sir Lancelot), who sings all his lines, like a Greek chorus sung to Caribbean Calypso verse — bizarre.  Easily the most surreal moment of the film takes place in Munsey’s office to the music of Wagner, Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture - Thielemann / Münchner ... - YouTube (14:42), a clear connection to Nazi concentration camps, as he brutally tortures a Jewish prisoner (Sam Levene) for information by beating him nearly to death using a rubber hose.  Featuring outstanding camerawork by William Daniels, once associated exclusively with Greta Garbo, but his work dates back to Erich von Stroheim, the musical score is by Miklós Rósza, one of the great film noir composers.  Adding to the visual landscape is the hellish place of work assigned to this group of prisoners, as underneath the prison compound is a giant sewer system, where like Sisyphus, they endlessly excavate for a mud-drenched drainpipe that supposedly goes from one end of the island to the other, but no one is really sure.  As this is their only opening to the outside world, this is their avenue of escape.  With Munsey agitating prisoners behind the scenes, using stool pigeons as informers, Collins was supposed to align his forces with those of fellow prisoner Gallagher (Charles Bickford), a man of discretion who only signed on after his upcoming parole was revoked “indefinitely.”  It becomes a fatalistic exercise in futility once they learn Munsey has taken over as Warden and is aware of their planned escape route, waiting for them with machine guns pointed straight at them, literally daring them to go.  Not to be deterred, Collins refuses to be stopped, as this is their only chance.  With blistering results, using another stoolie as a human shield, the ensuing battle scene chaos is remarkable, meant to resemble the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz where a prison riot ran out of control for two days following an unsuccessful escape attempt.  Fueled by a hatred for fascism, the Spartacus-like revolt was meant to educate and liberate the masses, where the spectacular gory violence of the finale predates Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) by twenty years, with Peck using slo-mo for even greater emphasis, where William Holden’s Pike Bishop declares, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” 

Atlantic City

ATLANTIC CITY           A-               

France  Canada  (105 mi)  1980  d:  Louis Malle

Guare practices a humor that is synonymous with lucidity, exploding genre and clichés, taking us to the core of human suffering: the awareness of corruption in our own bodies, death circling in. We try to fight it all by creating various mythologies, and it is Guare's peculiar aptitude for exposing these grandiose lies of ours that makes his work so magical.

—Louis Malle, in a foreword to a collection of screenwriter John Guare’s plays

An unlikely combination all around, a French-Canadian film production of an English language American film, written by New York playwright John Guare, but filmed by French director Louis Malle right around the time he married American actress Candice Bergen, though at the time he was just ending an affair with the lead actress of this film. Set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, known as a resort town and a city of dreams back in its heyday, a place where the high rollers came to be seen, also for its boardwalk along the beach overlooking the ocean, but the town suffered a lengthy period of economic decline after the prohibition era, as cars allowed people greater mobility where they could visit the casinos without actually spending the night.  By the late 1960’s it was largely a ghost town, as many of the resort's once great hotels were either shut down, converted to cheaper apartments, or demolished.  This film is set in the off-season during an era of busy reconstruction, a bridge between the future and the past, like a time warp, shot mostly on location by Richard Ciupka, where the town is busy tearing down the old buildings to make way for new projects, as they just legalized gambling, promising economic revitalization as they begin construction on new high-end Casinos, hoping to revive that all but forgotten dream.  The casting of the ageless but equally forgotten Burt Lancaster as Lou is a godsend, as if the film was written with him in mind, as he’s rarely ever shown this degree of fascination and effortless grace, light as a feather on his feet, yet old as the wind, a relic from the gangster days of yore, supposedly running with Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel.  Giving what is likely the most subtle and nuanced performance of his career, he is a near invisible numbers runner who stealthily moves through the crumbling neighborhoods, his ghostly existence is acting as a bodyguard, occasional lover, and handler of the hypochondriac and near bed ridden Grace (Kate Reid), the widow of a deceased gangster of some repute that Lou used to work for, as she humiliatingly flouts her money in his face, tauntingly calling him “Mr. Mastermind, Mr. Ten Most Wanted,” ringing a bell in her room that rings in his apartment directly above (that he often muffles with a cloth), where he is constantly at her beck and call.  The ring in your ears may be the sound of her screaming out continual instructions for him to carry out, like a drill sergeant, one right after another, which he occasionally ignores, but mostly he treats her like a queen.   

Working with Malle on a second consecutive film, following PRETTY BABY (1980), Susan Sarandon as Sally has that dizzyingly eccentric yet sexually open personality that works perfectly in tandem with Lancaster’s mannered yet overly polite gangster, where he gazes through the window as she performs a ritual over the sink in her apartment just across the way from his, where every night she cleanses her arms and bare breasts with lemons hoping to get the fish smell off her body, as she shucks oysters all day in the casino.  Without actually knowing her, he knows her, probably fantasizing being with such a young and voluptuous woman, but he keeps his distance.  An unlikely event changes all that, as literally sweeping into the picture is a hapless looking hippie couple, Chrissie (Hollis McLaren) and Dave (Robert Joy), who couldn’t look more out of place on the casino floor, eventually asked to leave by security.  But Dave is a drug dealer, thief, con man, and perpetual liar who happens to also be the ex husband of Sally (from Moose Jaw, Saskatchawan in Canada), but he’s run off and impregnanted her kindly naïve and flower child sister, Chrissie, a Hare Krishna devotee who attempts to remain in balance with the universe.  When Dave announces his arrival in town, needing a place to stay, Sally is none too happy, but considering her sister’s state, she puts them up for the night, which is all Dave needs, as he’s carrying a large stash of cocaine stolen from the mob in Philadelphia.  Dave’s seamy plans go awry when he can’t move the goods right away, as he’s dressed like a bum.  Lou, on the other hand, is dressed like a million bucks, so Dave uses him as the courier delivering the goods in exchange for $4,000 dollars in cash.  Dave unfortunately meets foul play with a nasty set of characters and can be seen carried out as a corpse on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance as Lou finalizes his business transaction in what looks like a continuously rolling 24/hours a day card game.  This leaves Lou sitting pretty with the money and the drugs, suddenly throwing his money around like the old days, infatuated with his new sense of power and significance, taking care of all the funeral arrangements for Sally, who leads a hectic enough life as it is, seen taking classes (led by Michel Piccoli) learning to be a croupier, a casino card dealer, where Piccoli is subtly steering her to learn French and come work with him in Monte Carlo where she can earn some real money.

As fate would have it, Lou starts taking care of Sally, wining and dining her, accompanying her on the streets, where they are quickly met by the Philadelphia guys who smack them both around on the street, but can’t find what they’re looking for, having already ransacked her apartment.  Lou is devastated that he couldn’t protect her, that he let her down, but continues to pile up cash making more deliveries to the card game and begins to carry a gun.  When the bad guys persist, literally hounding them, this time Lou accommodates, emptying his revolver into both guys, leaving them lying in the street.  Giddy with pride, laughing out loud at the unexpected result that feels more like a newly discovered state of euphoria, he and Sally quickly exit town in grand style with a load of dough in their pockets, taking the car of the newly deceased.  While shown in real time, this plays out like a fantasy sequence, as Lou suddenly envisions himself as “the Man,” the last of the big time spenders, becoming a legend in his own mind, where he’s just taken ten years off his life, suddenly revitalized and feeling brand spanking new.  Winner of Best Film at the Venice Festival in 1980 (in a tie with John Cassavetes’ GLORIA), though considered a foreign film by the Golden Globes, the film was nominated for all the 5 major categories at the Academy Awards, but was shut out.  The international flavor of the production company however really benefits this film, as it’s a hard to define mix of gangster film, crime thriller, film noir, and romance, while also offering a comment on the changing landscape of an all but forgotten resort town favored by gangsters in the past half century, a once thriving illicit enterprise that was a haven for outlawed activities.  Once the action died down, the town died with it, where just the name New Jersey is synonymous with the mob, as they initially left New York to get away from the police heat.  Malle brings all these themes together, influenced by American B-movies of the 1940’s, filmed with an effortless grace, making the improbable seem probable, perfectly blending Lancaster’s dignified maturity and sense of history, seen as an ageless relic, as if he were a walking museum piece, much like Jean-Pierre Melville’s portrayal of BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956).  The story itself is like a bittersweet reverie, a play on the best years of our lives, yet depicted with an unmistakable gloom of regret for missed opportunities, where history is just a brief moment in time, as everything quickly disappears in a flash, all sent to the trash heap, where lifetimes are just as easily forgotten.  

A Child Is Waiting

A CHILD IS WAITING          B                     

USA  1963  (102 mi)  d:  John Cassavetes  

I've always had a sweet spot for this 1963 film, made 5 years before the release of FACES, a more conventional film using footage of handicapped children from the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California, one of the first State facilities for mentally impaired children.  This is a remarkable attempt at realism, using moments of documentary style in a fictional film about mental retardation that refuses to look at the children in a group home as victims, but rather as human beings, each needing the help of others.  The film attempts to give the children as much screen time as the so-called stars, which caused something of a scandal on the set.  Apparently, Cassavetes’ message was too radical at the time, as he was fired from the film by producer Stanley Kramer, who then recut the film, ordering more close-ups, making it more sentimental.  Apparently both Lancaster and Garland appealed to him for help from Cassavetes' direction, both openly defying him on the set.  In Ray Carney's book, it is described as follows:  "Cassavetes' treatment of his stars was a textbook lesson in how to alienate everyone possible."  However, in Cassavetes' view, the children were more important in this film than the stars.  Despite some overglossed musical strings on occasion, it’s still a surprisingly unflinching look at a largely ignored problem—one might say a follow up to Frank Perry’s 1962 film, DAVID AND LISA.

Burt Lancaster is appointed by the State to run the home, and at first he appears hard and ignoble with the children, especially one problem child, Reuben (played by actor Bruce Ritchey), who he believes the system has failed, but his somewhat radical intention is to treat the children as responsible individuals.  Enter Judy Garland, of all people, as a troubled, down and out spirit who is looking to find a place where she might be needed.  Having no real qualifications, other than being a Julliard Music School drop out, and having no real professional objectivity, she immediately pities the children and assumes the role of Reuben’s missing mother, so he follows her wherever she goes.  Then on false pretenses, she summons Reuben’s real mother, Gena Rowlands, as every Wednesday, Reuben gets dressed up and waits for his parents that never show up on visiting day.  This calls into question everyone’s views in an extraordinarily dramatic confrontation.  Lancaster's unbending system is challenged by Garland, whose histrionics are challenged by Rowlands, all are challenged by Reuben, enter the State bureaucrats who really want to wash their hands of the whole problem, threatening to cut finding as it’s not a feel good issue with the public.  Who wants to raise children no one wants to see? 

Largely disowned by Cassavetes for changing the entire tone of the film, the theater of the uncomfortable is really evident here with broken families, love gone awry, disturbingly flawed characters, big emotional moments, Gena Rowlands nervously smoking a cigarette while wearing gloves, as it’s hard to witness mentally impaired children being themselves, but Cassavetes raises important issues, mostly through the peppering questions of Lancaster, who refuses to let the bureaucrats decide their worth through potential employability.  The film does a good job examining society’s response to “damaged” children, where parents immediately alter their expectations, becoming disappointed, embarrassed, eventually hiding their children from public view, supposedly for their own good.   And if they allow them to interact with normal children, they’re bound to be teased and humiliated, as children can be relentlessly judgmental.  Rowlands, of course, is excellent as the disappointed parent who’s too consumed with personal anguish and shame to be able to relate with her son anymore.  Cassavetes wraps up the entire issue in a manner unique to his own particular vision, in a grand, sweeping finale that features the children in a Settlers and Indians Thanksgiving theatrical revue where they are all, at least for a moment, shining stars, continually perplexed with remembering their lines, but singing happily anyway.  In Cassavetes' view, it's the adults that label them retarded, when really, they're just children.