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.” 

City Streets (1931)

CITY STREETS              B+       
USA  (83 mi)  1931  d:  Rouben Mamoulian

This second Rouben Mamoulian film, after the box office failure but critical praise for APPLAUSE (1929), is significant in several respects, as Paramount studios forced the young director to wait a year before offering him another picture, an adaptation of a Dashiell Hammett screenplay with Gary Cooper and Clara Bow as the leads, a romantic couple that gets mixed up with bootlegger racketeers.  Clara Bow suffered a much publicized nervous breakdown and had to withdraw from the movie, much of it based on a lawsuit that Bow initiated against a former secretary named Daisy DeVoe, claiming she stole thousands of dollars worth of clothing and personal items.  While Bow won the lawsuit, the scandalous publicity cost her much more, as the secretary’s trial testimony exposed Bow’s reputation as a woman with a wild and uncontrollable love life, not to mention supposed drug use, unwanted publicity that sent her on an emotional tailspin that all but ended her career.  Since the success of It (1927), Bow was the mistress of Paramount associate producer B.P. Schulberg, where she was his vested financial interest as well, but by 1931 due to major personal problems she left Paramount, her career finished, and within another year Schulberg was squeezed out of the studio as well.  For this film, however, in an era when sex and romance determined stardom, Bow was replaced by Sylvia Sidney in only her second feature, though she was a well known star on Broadway at the time and had been directed by Mamoulian on the New York stage, where she was not only given the lead role but also became the new mistress of Schulberg as well—That’s Hollywood, folks.  During the Depression era of the 30’s, Sidney worked with many of the major lead actors, but her terrific work on this film may have cemented her reputation with gangster movies.  The commercial and critical success of von Sternberg’s Silent film Underworld (1927) is often thought of as the inspiration behind a trend of Prohibition-era Hollywood gangster films that followed, like LITTLE CAESAR (1930), PUBLIC ENEMY (1931), and SCARFACE (1932), while often overlooked is this gangster melodrama that features less onscreen violence, with supposedly ten murders, but not one of them takes place onscreen, released a month before Fritz Lang’s M (1931), containing many of the characteristics that would anticipate film noir. 

Working with cinematographer Lee Garmes, who became associated with shooting the films of von Sternberg, nominated for an Academy Award for MOROCCO (1931), winning the award for SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1933), his expressionistic influence on this film is a major factor on why it’s still important today, as it deals with noirish themes of gangland turf and criminal amorality, where the fate of the individual is challenged by a corrupt world around them, where in the laws of the jungle only the strongest survive.  Mamoulian’s direction shows a greater appreciation for the visual stylization, including elegant tracking shots, where it is arguably the most artistically advanced of the 30’s gangster films, showing momentary brilliance and occasional poetic flourish.  It’s also interesting for Gary Cooper’s portrayal of an underworld criminal, the only known example on film, while it’s also one of the earliest talking efforts, where the sound editing is often clumsy, as the camera rolls before anyone speaks, creating a time gap between characters having a dialogue that slows the pace of the film.  This is the first use of voiceover in an American film, used earlier by Hitchcock in the sound version of Blackmail (1929), as Sidney is alone onscreen with recurring thoughts in her head spoken out loud, where the audience hears the echoing voice of Gary Cooper as she recalls what he said to her earlier, where Paramount executives believed this would confuse audiences and tried to cut the scene, but the director fought for it, also the additional use of off-camera sound, which was also considered innovative at the time.  While Cooper went on to greater fame, it’s Sidney’s performance as Nan that dominates the film, literally stealing every scene she’s in, often pushed to the breaking point, becoming the face of the 30’s aptly called “Depression’s Child.” The audience is immediately intrigued by her love affair with The Kid (Cooper), a rugged guy off the ranch with a talent for shooting, appropriately enough working at a carnival shooting gallery, where their conversation is often drowned out by the massive crowd.  But when they have a romantic moment where they’re quietly alone at the beach, she tells him sees nothing wrong with working with racketeers, as at least they’re guys that make money, including her own stepfather Pop (Guy Kibbee) who works for the biggest bootlegger in town, The Big Guy (Paul Lukas).  The Kid has other ideas and wants no part of a life in crime, including his girl.  But she was born into the business, where in one of the cleverly written early scenes with Pop, he scolds her for coming in late and asks who she was with?  When she refuses to answer, despite being goaded, he bursts out laughing and rewards her with money for learning to keep her mouth shut.    

While Al Capone supposedly loved this film as an accurate portrayal of the underworld of gangsters, where they are continually undermining one another to get ahead, where hits are ordered with subtlety, where the boss’s henchmen have to read between the lines to figure out what he means, and when they knock somebody off, this makes life easier within the organization.  The Big Guy makes this clear right away, asking if Pop is interested in taking over somebody else’s territory, inferring he would like for this to happen, and then walks away while Pop gets involved in a gangland slaying, quickly giving the gun to Nan to dispose of, but she gets caught with the murder weapon and takes the prison rap.  Meanwhile Pop manipulates The Kid into joining the organization by telling him the cops planted the gun on Nan, and they’ll need his help to try to get her out of jail.  Despite promises that the mob will get her out, Nan languishes in jail for two long years, becoming embittered by her experience, where her tough girl persona is convincing, becoming cynical about the whole racketeering operation from behind bars.  This prison sequence shows Sidney at her best, given a hard edge, as she’s wise to the ways of the world and can stand up to anybody.  When she gets out, she’s literally dumfounded to find The Kid working with these same bootleggers, blinded to their real intentions, where The Big Guy throws her a party in her honor, where he uses the occasion to make Nan his girl.  When The Kid stands up to him, “Nobody steals my girl, not even you,” which seems to click a switch in his head where all bets are off and anything can happen, leading to a spectacular fight to the finish, culminating with an exhilarating chase scene up a narrow mountain road that is as thrilling today as when it was made.  Paul Lukas is an interesting contrast to the humble Western manner of Gary Cooper, as he plays the suave and sophisticated Charles Boyer-style villain, well dressed and heavily Hungarian-accented, where it’s easy for the audience to root against such a villainous guy.  Many of these little quirks make this an offbeat gangster film, where Mamoulian uses a staggering array of innovative camera shots and narrative techniques for this film, including an infamous sequence shot from the top of the stairs where The Kid is steadfast in going after The Big Guy and refuses to listen to Nan, despite being draped all over him, where she’s left alone in tears muttering “You fool” over and over again, yet the camera holds the scene in utter silence as she composes herself and paces the floor until an idea comes to her, and she slowly walks across the floor to make a telephone call, where Sidney offers her own praise for the director, “Look, he carried me through that picture.  He was a great teacher and a great director, and I will always be indebted to him for his genius and for his confidence in me.”  In one of her earliest screen appearances, Paulette Goddard can be seen as a nightclub patron, but in perhaps the most bewildering twist of all, once the outcome has been determined, the rising trumpets and blaring horns from Prelude to Act I of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger Herbert v. Karajan "Prelude to Act I " Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg YouTube (9:49) resound triumphantly over the end credits in one of the more astonishing audience send-offs on record—an enduring classic that will likely leave the audience smiling.   

One Minute of Darkness (Dreileben 3 – Eine Minute Dunkel)

DREILEBEN TRILOGY III                       B+                  

ONE MINUTE OF DARKNESS (Dreileben 3 – Eine Minute Dunkel) – made for TV

Germany (90 mi)  2012  d:  Christoph Hochhäusler

While Christoph Hochhäusler is an established German filmmaker, it may be his writing about contemporary German cinema as co-editor and publisher of his film magazine Revolver that has brought him to international acclaim, as it was here that The Dreileben Trilogy took form, where Hochhäusler publicly challenged fellow Berlin School filmmakers Christian Petzold and Dominik Graf to express their thoughts about a lack of genre films as well as the changing German aesthetic emerging from the mid 90’s that has taken a distinct interest in German locations while also examining political and/or cultural ramifications.  It’s only fitting then that Hochhäusler provide the concluding episode (shot in digital) and the segment that is most genre driven.  Dreileben is a small town in the German countryside engulfed by nature, where the enormous surrounding woods have a way of culturally isolating the inhabitants, creating an almost fairy tale and mythic illusion, which are frequently referenced through the Grimm Brother’s Hansel and Gretel, explored in the initial episode, but also Wagner’s Ring cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, loosely based on characters from Norse mythology where giants and dwarves thrive in the darkness of the Thuringia woods, often finding themselves at odds with one another.  It is here the focus has finally shifted from a peripheral role to the featured attraction, as the concluding episode is largely seen through the eyes of a mentally disturbed escaped killer, Frank Molesch, played by Stefan Kurt in a simply extraordinary mix of innocence and deranged confusion.  Molesch seeks refuge in the forest and spends most of the film roaming aimlessly through the woods, but Hochhäusler also retraces how easily he initially escaped from the hospital, as the police allowed him to visit his dead mother in the Dead Room at the hospital, but only guarded one of the two exit doors. The concluding episode, like Kieslowski’s RED (1994) in his Three Color Trilogy, has the most connecting links to previous episodes, and although each claims to be an independent, stand alone film, it helps if one is familiar with the earlier references, as the finale sheds new light on everything that has come before. 

The finale also introduces us to a new character, the chain-smoking Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Mirchberg), a Columbo-like seasoned police inspector who is on medical leave, but can’t stay away from tinkering with the case, as the town is under siege from strange attacks and unresolved murders, where the audience is treated to gruesome forensic photos of the deceased.  While we get a taste of his family life, where his overbearing wife berates him for not staying in bed and his dim, constantly demanding son wants his approval for another hair-brained business proposition, hoping his dad can interest the police department into using his exercise equipment that is otherwise sitting dormant in an empty gym collecting dust.  Marcus is often seen alone scrutinizing the video security tapes of the hospital, including the evidence used to convict the killer, the last man to see the girl alive, where the title is based on the tape going blank just prior to a young girl’s murder, leaving lingering, unanswered questions, where he is hoping to discover new clues, but he’s also interested in changing the focus of the investigation, trying to fathom why Molesch would go on a murder spree, trying to understand how he thinks, where he often visits Molesch’s mother’s vacant home in the middle of the night hoping to pick up new information, where the constantly wandering Molesch is also seen hovering nearby.  In fact, the latest police strategy is to form tightly connected search lines combing through the woods, where Molesch can frequently be seen just out of reach desperately trying to escape, reminiscent of Peter Lorre’s frantic attempts to escape the police manhunt in Fritz Lang’s M (1931).  When he’s flushed out of the forest, he often meanders into various pieces of the preceding episode, where despite a sighting, his detection was appropriately misidentified, a clue to the filmmaker’s goal of challenging the audience’s expectations.

This finale has a rhapsodic approach when the convict is free to roam through the countryside, feasting on wild berries, talking to himself, his mind often wandering to thoughts of his dead mother, where instead of a vicious monster of the loose, Molesch seems more like a simpleton, a manchild who has been tossed out into the world, frightened and alone, where his mood shifts and nervous body language are often inexplicable.  Perhaps the highlight of the film is a sequence in the woods where Molesch has amusingly stolen sandwiches from a picnic table of visiting tourists enjoying the hillside view of the town nestled in the valley below, where he retreats into the woods to first identify and label the contents of each sandwich before gobbling them down, when he is unexpectedly interrupted by a young girl (Paraschiva Dragus) hanging from a tree limb above who is also hungry.  She immediately trusts and protects him, warning him where the police are, quickly escorting him to safety, developing a tender bond between the two where they sit by an evening fire as he sings a silly song in a beautifully realized tribute to FRANKENSTEIN (1931).  The dual narrative tracks of the finale center upon exposing the heart of each character, the cautiously circumspective police inspector and the gentle giant, often maligned monster in the woods, where at one point the police dragnet forces his retreat into the hidden confines of a cave, which turns out to be a historical witch’s cauldron, where he has to hide from another tourist group as they listen to legendary tales of witch burnings and witches capturing unsuspecting hikers.  Still in the cave when the evening fog rolls in, Molesch can be seen trying to squirm under the enveloping layer quickly filling the empty spaces, obviously threatened by a fear of the unknown.  This all too human quality, ironically from a monster regarded as a deranged serial killer, described by Hochhäusler as “a man who became a murderer only because he was hounded,” becomes a major theme of the film, how easily we jump to the wrong conclusions, as if anything, this Trilogy suggests humans are continually prone to making mistakes.