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)
—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.”
