Themes: Prison Life, Fighting the System, Social Injustice
Main Cast: Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford, Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth
Release Year: 1947
Country: US
Run Time: 94 minutes
Plot
Burt Lancaster had one of his first starring roles in this hard-hitting prison drama. Capt. Munsey (Hume Cronyn) is a cruel, corrupt prison guard who has his own less-than-ethical ways of dealing with inmates, enough so that Joe Collins (Lancaster) -- the toughest inmate in the cell block -- has decided to break out. Collins tries to persuade Gallagher (Charles Bickford), the unofficial leader of the inmates and editor of the prison newspaper, to join him, but Gallagher thinks Collins' plan won't work. However, Collins does have the support of his cellmates, most of whom, like himself, wandered into a life of crime thanks to love and good intentions. Tom Lister (Whit Bissell) was an accountant who altered the books so he could buy his wife a mink coat. Soldier (Howard Duff) fell in love with an Italian girl during World War II and took the rap for her when she murdered her father. Collins pulled a bank job to raise money to pay for an operation that could possibly get his girl out of a wheelchair. And Spencer (John Hoyt) made the mistake of getting involved with a female con artist. After Munsey drives Tom to suicide and prevents Gallagher from obtaining parole, Gallagher joins up with Collins and his men in the escape attempt. Director Jules Dassin would next direct the influential noir drama The Naked City; six years later, he would move to Europe after political blacklisting prevented him from continuing to work in the United States. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Although dismissed by auteur critic Andrew Sarris for its social commentary, Jules Dassin's masterful noir, which more than lives up to its title, is a wildly stylized tour of a prison in which the inmates are running the asylum. Still one of the harshest and grimmest of all noirs, it places a young, magnetic Burt Lancaster in a dungeon-like environment apparently just this side of Transylvania. Contrary to expectation, the prisoners are an amazingly soulful lot, with a dubiously high proportion doing time as a result of what they did for love. And they're models of mental health compared to the staff, which includes a shaky warden, an alcoholic doctor, and Hume Cronyn, as the indelibly fascistic guard, Capt. Munsey. The hounding of a stool pigeon into a steam press by blowtorch-bearing cons is typical of the facility's daily recreation. While some of the speechifying can be tedious, and the filmmakers have clearly loaded the dice in favor of the inmates, the character of Munsey remains a compelling portrait of a grotesquely authoritarian personality. Miklos Rosza's brooding score and William H. Daniels' moody photography are vital elements in the film's impact. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
Bernard Herzbrun - Art Director, John De Cuir - Art Director, Jules Buck - Associate Producer, Jacques Gordon - Consultant/advisor, Rosemary Odell - Costume Designer, Fred Frank - First Assistant Director, Jules Dassin - Director, Edward A. Curtiss - Editor, Miklos Rozsa - Composer (Music Score), Bud Westmore - Makeup, William H. Daniels - Cinematographer, Mark Hellinger - Producer, Russell A. Gausman - Set Designer, Charles Wyrick - Set Designer, David S. Horsley - Special Effects, Robert Pritchard - Sound/Sound Designer, Richard Brooks - Screenwriter, Robert Patterson - Short Story Author
The film opens on a dark, rainy morning. Prisoners of Westgate Prison are crammed four into a small cell watch out the window as Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) leaves his term in solitary confinement. Joe comes out angry, and talking about escape. The warden is under pressure to improve discipline. The prison doctor warns that the prison is a powder keg and could explode if they are not careful, not to mention that there is little rehabilitation going on.
Joe's attorney comes to visit and tells Joe his wife Ruth (Ann Blyth) is not willing to go forward with an operation unless Joe is there with her. Her life is at risk if she does not have surgery for her cancer. Joe asks his attorney to get some cash together and have it at his office. In the machine shop the prisoners plan to attack Wilson (James O'Rear) at 10:30. While other prisoners cause a commotion, Wilson is pushed into a compactor and killed. Not coincidentally, Joe is in Dr. Walter's (Art Smith) office when the murder takes place.
Joe presses Gallagher (Charles Bickford) to help him escape but Gallagher has a good job at the prison newspaper and could get a parole. But after instigating a prisoner suicide, the administration revokes prisoner privileges and cancels parole hearings. Gallagher decides breaking out with Joe may be a good idea after all. Joe and Gallagher plan an assault on the tower where they can get access to the lever that lowers a bridge they have to cross to escape.
While the escape plan is taking shape, the cons in cell R17 each tell a story, via flashback, about how being in love somehow got them all in trouble with the law. Standing in the way of the prison break is a sadistic prison Capt. Munsey (Hume Cronyn). When the break goes bad the normally subdued prison yard turns into a violent and bloody riot.
The direct inspiration for the unremitting desperate violence was the recent "Battle of Alcatraz" (May 2-4, 1946) in which three prisoners and two guards were killed during a foiled escape attempt.
The film has a number of brutal scenes including the crushing of a stool pigeon prisoner under a stamping machine and the beating of a prisoner bound to a chair by straps. Film writer Eddie Muller writes that "the climax of Brute Force displayed the most harrowing violence ever seen in movie theaters."[2]
The producers used the following tagline to market the film:
Raw! Rough! Ruthless!
Critical reception
When released, Variety magazine gave the film a positive review, writing, "A closeup on prison life and prison methods, Brute Force is a showmanly mixture of gangster melodramatics, sociological exposition, and sex...The s.a. elements are plausible and realistic, well within the bounds, but always pointing up the femme fatale. Thus Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines and Anita Colby are the women on the 'outside' whose machinations, wiles or charms accounted for their men being on the 'inside'...Bristling, biting dialog by Richard Brooks paints broad cameos as each character takes shape under existing prison life. Bickford is the wise and patient prison paper editor whose trusty (Levene), has greater freedom in getting 'stories' for the sheet. Cronyn is diligently hateful as the arrogant, brutal captain, with his system of stoolpigeons and bludgeoning methods."[3]
Film critic Bosley Crowther wrote, "Not having intimate knowledge of prisons or prisoners, we wouldn't know whether the average American convict is so cruelly victimized as are the principal prison inmates in Brute Force, which came to Loew's Criterion yesterday. But to judge by this 'big house' melodrama, the poor chaps who languish in our jails are miserably and viciously mistreated and their jailers are either weaklings or brutes...Brute Force is faithful to its title—even to taking law and order into its own hands. The moral is: don't go to prison; you meet such vile authorities there. And, as the doctor observes sadly, 'Nobody ever escapes.'"[4]
More recently, critic Dennis Schwartz wrote, "Jules Dassin (Rififi and Naked City) directs this hard-hitting but outdated crime drama concerned about prison conditions. Its social commentary seems more like a mixture of bleeding heart liberal talk and Hollywood's melodramatic interpretation about prison life than a true questioning of the prison system, though its concerns for prisoners' rights might at the time have seemed relevant—modern society is now concerned with the rising crime rate and questioning how to get tougher with the inmates."[5]
Notable quotes
Gallagher: Those gates only open three times. When you come in, when you've served your time, or when you're dead!
Dr. Walters: Force does make leaders. But you forget one thing: it also destroys them.
