Rent Brute Force (1947)

Brute Burt - Brute Force review by CH

Is prison an extreme form of boarding house? The thought comes to mind during Brute Force, although any landlord would find it hard to rent out a room which houses seven men who can only leave its confines for hard labour and a queue to receive unappetising gruel.

Others here have summarised a plot which turns around ribbed fit Burt Lancaster's plan to escape all this and visit a wife beset by cancer (four women appear briefly in the film, each given a brief section which sets out their part in the reason for a man ending up beind bars). Pitted against the prisoners is sadistic guard Hume Cronym. He has supplanted power from the bumbling Warden who lives only for retirement. Cronym's very expressions embody an Evil redolent of the recent German death camps (Wagner plays on a gramophone while he slugs a prisoner with a lead pipe to squeal information). Director Jules Dassin brings a noir pace to all this; it is matched by the light and dark, and vile weather, of William Daniels's cinematograph to make something palpably real of what, in other hands, would seem preposterous. It is also a masterclass in the use of sound.

It is not too fanciful to see here, as with much noir, an emblem of society at large - no less so, an astonishing eighty years on.

Includes spoilers. - Brute Force review by Steve

Brilliant prison noir which retains the liberal sentiments of the great Warner Brothers penitentiary films of the thirties. But America had since been through WWII and the dynamic between guard and prisoner has changed. The convicts are humanised by flashbacks to domestic life. When the inevitable knock on the door comes, it now evokes images of the gestapo.  

Many of the men fought in the war, and draw on combat experience to plan an escape. Hume Cronyn is the sadistic guard, his torso oiled, polishing his rifle while listening to Wagner, intent on beating a confession out of a prisoner with a lead pipe. No debate about whose side we are on here, though true to the laws of noir, Burt Lancaster and his cellmates are cursed.  

Jules Dassin was associated with the Hollywood ten and this is the work of a dissident. Cronyn plays a political figure. His power is justified by the uniform (which anticipates the Stanford Prison experiment). He is a fascist, who turns his fire on the inmates, or manoeuvres them to self destruction. His sadism is sensual ('I get quite a kick from censoring the mail').

Lancaster is the nominal star, but it's Cronyn that dominates. There is a chilling moment at the end when he is announced as the new Governor, surely a warning from Dassin about how close America is to fascism: 'Kindness is a weakness' he says as he lies to a prisoner that his wife has divorced him, 'the weak must die so the strong can live'.