Sat 30 May 2009
BRUTE FORCE. Universal International, 1947. Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford. Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines, Anita Colby, John Hoyt, Howard Duff, Whit Bissell, Art Smith. Director: Jules Dassin.
A movie that takes place almost entirely behind the walls of a prison is not likely to have many women in it, and if it weren’t for brief flashbacks, there wouldn’t be any at all. Anyone in 1947 who paid 25 cents to see Yvonne De Carlo in this film should have marched right up to the box office afterward and demanded his money back.
In spite of the posters and lobby cards, a prime example of which you can see below, Miss De Carlo graces the screen for less than five minutes, but I have to admit, she makes the most of them.
In this movie she plays the Italian girl friend of the GI in World War II (Howard Duff) who took the rap for her after she shot her father when he broke down and tried to turn him in to the authorities.
In fact, it seems that the women in their lives are part of the stories of all of the men in Cell R-17, in one way or another.
Some are weak (Whit Bissell) and some are strong (Burt Lancaster), but none are really evil — except perhaps Joe Collins (Lancaster), who seems to be a leader of a small gang but whose soft spot is a crippled woman whom he loves (and who does not know what he did for a living).
No matter. When Burt Lancaster glowers at you, with those dark accusing eyes, you know you’ve been glowered at. This seems to have been only his second movie, the first being The Killers (1946), and if his performance in that earlier picture didn’t make an impression on the movie-going public, this one surely did. Joe Collins means to escape, and he doesn’t care how.
Standing in his way, however, is not the weak-kneed warden, who simply wants everyone to get along — including Gallagher, the grizzled but pacifistic Charles Bickford who’s in charge of the prison newspaper and expecting to get a parole any day now. No, the other person whose role in this movie you will remember for a long time is Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn), the slim but sneering and slickly sadistic head of the prison guards whom everybody locked up inside hates with a passion, to the utmost fiber of their being.
Some prisoners break under his thumb of iron, some don’t. The ending of this movie — I don’t think it will surprise anyone if I say that indeed there is a break-out eventually does take place — is filled with the chaos of lights blazing, sirens wailing, and the sound of gunfire ringing off the walls.
Who gets out, who survives? That I can’t tell you, but I can tell you this. No one walked out of the movie when it was playing, and no one asked for their money back. (That the movie gets a little preachy toward the very end is forgivable. No one paid any attention to that anyway. Prison life was hard in 1947, and while it may have changed, it never got any easier.)
May 30th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
A great brutal film that pulls no punches, makes no excuses, and (pardon the pun) takes no prisoners. It’s one of Dassin’s best American films, and one of the performances that assured Lancaster’s long career would be a success.
I just finished watching Hume Cronyn as another kind of evil man in People Will Talk so it reminds me just how good he always was in these films. His sadistic guard is one of the most chilling portraits of cold blooded cruelty ever presented. To his credit he was equally good in sympathetic roles in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Fred Zinneman’s The Seventh Cross.
Brute Force couldn’t help but get a little preachy, but the significant thing about the film is how tough-minded it is. Lancaster may be shown as human, but I don’t think any of us would want Joe Collins on the outside of that prison. I like to think he kept Collins in mind when he won an Oscar playing The Birdman of Alcatraz, where he never tried to sentimentalize the dark side of Robert Stroud.
Great movie, though I’ll confess, it is so powerful I limit the number of times I watch it.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Hume Cronyn is great in this movie as the sadistic head of the prison guards. BRUTE FORCE was the first in a series of film noir or crime movies by a director that I respect alot, Jules Dassin.
He did five of them in a row, all with strong film noir elements and all hard boiled and outstanding. BRUTE FORCE(1947), THE NAKED CITY(1948), THIEVES HIGHWAY(1949), NIGHT AND THE CITY(1950), and RIFIFI(1955). All are available in Criterion dvds with some nice extras.
Dassin was one of the blacklist victims and had to make NIGHT AND THE CITY in England. This was probably his best film and yet at the height of his powers as a director, he found himself just about unemployable because Hollywood would not have anything to do with him because of the blacklist. He did not make another film until 1955 in France. Though he made some good films in Europe, he never again reached the level of his five great film noir/crime movies of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
In the case of Night and the City, since the setting was London, even though author Gerald Kersh was an American, it worked out just as well, though Richard Widmark’s promoter’s accent is touch and go.
Thieves Highway is an underappreciated little noir with a first class script by A.I. Bezzeredies from his novel.
Still, good as all these films are, I would have to say in terms of sheer power Brute Force stands out. There’s a streak of sentiment in the others, even Rififi, that just isn’t present in Brute Force. Brute Force isn’t the best of Dassin’s film, but it is the most uncompromising.
May 31st, 2009 at 10:13 am
If anything, the word “uncompromising” is an understatement. There are several shocking scenes in this movie, one or two of them so much so, it’s a wonder that they were allowed to stay in as shown.
A streak of sentiment in BRUTAL FORCE? You’re absolutely right. Not at all.