BRUTE FORCE: Blu-ray (Universal-International, 1947) Criterion Collection

The keystones of Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (1947) are firmly rooted in prison reform, based on the renown 1946 revolt at Alcatraz prison where prisoners staged a daring 2-day siege at the Frisco-based ‘big house’ in the wake of a failed prison break. If the veneer is thin, Dassin nevertheless spares nothing here – his illustrations of a prisoner crushed in a stamping machine, and the hellish pummeling of another prisoner, leather-strapped to a chair, still of the ‘wince’ factor. Indeed, at the time of its release, Brute Force was both hailed and chastised for representing the most repugnant forms of violence as yet witnessed anywhere on movie screens. Perhaps, Dassin was more interested in reform than violence, though in viewing the picture today, he seems to suffer a streak of relish in shocking his audience from their complacency with a lurid showman-like mélange of 30’s styled gangland ferocity meets post-war sociological clarification, and yes – with a little sex thrown in, just to thoroughly test the boundaries of the ‘then’ all-pervading screen censorship. As big and burly as the boys on the inside are, we get the slink and sexpot alure of their women on the outside, with Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines and Anita Colby doing their own ‘heavy lifting’ in flashbacks. Not surprising to learn this one was scripted by the irascible, Richard Brooks (later to become a director of merit), whose certain dispensation with the niceties, and tart-mouthed/razor-sharp dialogue permeates every frame with a sort of boastful sin and salaciousness eager to take a sledgehammer to the iron-clad Code, dictating permissible behavior.

Brooks is working with archetypes here. But the impressions stick – in the craw, actually – with odd and ugly nods to exercise contempt, vengeance and menace.  The victimization of these prisoners does tend, rather disturbingly so, to make martyrs of the criminal element. Lest we forget, prisoners have presumably done ‘something’ to place them within the system. However, once on the inside, reformation takes on an almost Salem-esque witch hunt/trial by fire quality, surely to sour us on the institution itself, presumably – altruistically – devoted to ‘teaching’ a lesson. Making the criminals the heroes of the piece works, primarily because our star is Burt Lancaster (a.k.a Joe Collins) – ye of the stoic and steely-eyed, wayward he-man ilk – young, muscular, ready to pick and finish any fight. You can get away with an awful lot if your star is of Lancaster’s presence and magnitude. And producer, Mark Hellinger, in this – his second to last movie – has done his due diligence to ensure Lancaster remains the embodiment of the all-around Joe Friday, even going so far as to infer he has been unlawfully accused and incarcerated. Hellinger here stacks the deck with ‘good’ men gone only ‘slightly’ bad; an ex-military, taking the rap for his gal/pal, who actually murdered her own father, an ex-bookkeeper who only stole to provide his wife with a luxury his salary could not afford, a slick con artist with the proverbial ‘heart of gold’ and Lancaster’s Joe – who took to a life of crime merely to care for an invalid sweetheart fatally stricken with cancer. It’s the idealism here that wears a bit thin. I mean, are there no legitimate inmates in Westgate Penitentiary? Where for art thou, axe murders, sadists, rapists, and cold-blooded hoodlums of the ‘beat you till you bleed’ ilk? No, they are not represented in this story.

On the flip-side, Hellinger presents the administrators of law and order as the most corruptible fiends on the lot; the incompetent warden, chronically inebriated in-house doctor, and the despicable captain of the guard who enjoys inflicting maximum cruelty on the men under his watch. Brute Force is therefore a tome to ‘social justice’ – perhaps, one of the earliest to infer the wrong people are actually being incarcerated by a system that is callous, corrupt, outdated and politically motivated. The picture’s climax is therefore presented as the cause célèbre exalting prisoner’s rights, while drawing an unflattering parallel between the American justice system and Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. Again, you can get away with an awful lot when your star is as big, brawny and butch as Burt Lancaster. And Brute Force, despite its single-slanted indictment of the system, nevertheless remains one of Dassin’s greatest movies. Almost immediately, it captured the popular zeitgeist as boffo box office, with critical plaudits to immediately follow. Insubordinate of Hollywood’s self-governing production code, Dassin dares to live up to the picture’s title by representing some truly violent murders - guards killed by prisoners. Arguably, for Dassin and Brooks, the point is not made in the murders themselves, but rather in their seemingly ‘Old Testament’ justification for them, as well as the violence perpetrated against the imprisoned populace; malevolent retribution when its more divinely inspired counterpoint is not available. If ever the fictional Westgate Penitentiary existed, its purgatory would surely be brought to heel under the devastatingly observant and cruel Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn).

Having made a pledge to his woman on the outside, prisoner, Joe Collins (Lancaster) is determined to escape. Westgate is run by the compassionate, but weak-kneed Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen). As time is running out on his promise, Collins devises a plot to break free, enlisting his cohorts in the cause. The allegorical nature of the story, whereupon both the measure and merits by which humanity treats its most vulnerable is weighed against abject revenge – the time-honored counterbalance in punishments achieved to fit the crimes, is instead subverted by sadism in place of discipline – was shocking in 1947, and remains compellingly disturbing today.  Early on, Barnes, Munsey, and, the prison’s physician, Dr. Walters (Art Smith) discuss rehabilitation; a conversation to fall on deaf ears of the prison’s owner, McCollum (Richard Gaines), who merely desires his investment to turn a tidy profit. McCollum even threatens Barnes and Walters with expulsion if the situation does not improve, siding with Munsey on matters of discipline. Brooks’ screenplay presents the audience with a quandary in that it flies in the face of traditional impressions about the inmate population. Here, it remains the opacity of that argument for their salvation that intrigues most, as the inmates of cell R17 are not innocent, even if none are truly of the ‘criminal class’ - amateur thieves and liars, at best. Hence, any punishment incurred ought to be corrective, not corporal. All evidence to the contrary, as we first meet Collins, a filthy mess, having done hard labor working on a drainpipe in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. Collins’ forced march – in the pouring rain, no less – is punctuated by Munsey, pleasurably relaying the death of a fellow inmate inside the pipe. Within these prison walls, inmates regard one another with reverential respect, reciprocated by some of the guards who do not favor Munsey’s sadistic approach to governance.

Disgusted, Joe has already decided it is time to make a change. Meanwhile, the beleaguered Barnes is under pressure to improve discipline. As Chief of Security, Munsey preys upon the prisoners to inform on one another, merely as an excuse to inflict maximum punishment. Walters warns against tightening the screws, suggesting the prisoners will rebel. Walters also denounces Munsey’s methods while lamenting the perceived general lack of rehabilitation. In the meantime, Joe's attorney (Howland Chamberlain) informs him that his wife, Ruth (Ann Blyth) is not willing to have her cancer operation unless he can be there for her. Already frustrated, Joe retaliates against fellow inmate, Wilson (James O'Rear) who, at Munsey's instigation, previously planted a weapon on Joe to land him in solitary confinement. Wilson’s vial demise in the machine shop is orchestrated by Joe, who forms his own alibi by being with Dr. Walters at the time of the murder. Joe presses another inmate, Gallagher (Charles Bickford), to help him escape. However, Gallagher, who has a good job at the prison newspaper, and has been promised early parole by Munsey, is unwilling to help. To renege on this promise, Munsey instigates another prisoner's suicide, thus affording him the authority to revoke all privileges, including parole hearings. Recognizing the betrayal, Gallagher aligns with Joe, plotting an assault on the guard tower. While the plan evolves, we are afforded back story on the various cell mates of R17. Ironically, in virtually every case, the love of a woman has resulted in their troubles with the law.  Unearthing the details of Joe and Gallagher’s escape plan, Munsey attempts damage control, resulting in all-out chaos. The yard erupts in bloody revolt, and, in a very Shakespearean turn of events, virtually all of the principles meet with an untimely end, including Munsey, Gallagher and Joe.

Brute Force remains a somber indictment of America’s prison system, the relative ‘chivalrous’ nature of the inmates, subverted by their penultimate acts of violence for which no excuse – not even perceived liberation from the tyranny of an oppressive regime – can be wholly justified. Dassin’s bear-knuckled assault on the senses was shocking in its day, and continues to pack a wallop now, although one sincerely wishes he had stayed the course with the immediate story at hand (Joe’s breakout) instead of using the movie’s middle act as a sort of regression therapy for the audience to ‘get to know’ the other inmates who populate the backdrop. Presumably, this was done to establish intimacy – a connection between the audience and these secondary characters, offering insight into their motivations for the crimes they committed. But here, Brooks and Dassin basically tell the same tale of inherently ‘good’ men, whose virtue is pressed, corrupted or otherwise negatively influenced by the women in their lives to commit bad acts against their own moral fiber, almost sacrificially accepting incarceration as their fate. At barely 98 min. there is not enough time to offer anything better than diverting thumbnail sketches of these strangely similar – if disparate histories – all of them filtered through the rubric of a singular end result; life, in prison with little to no chance for parole. Burt Lancaster is excellent here, as are Charles Bickford and Art Smith. Cast against type, Hume Cronyn manages to evoke a bizarre and oily venom that allows us to openly despise Munsey. In the final analysis, Brute Force is a startling picture – particularly one made at the zenith of Hollywood’s self-governing code of censorship.

Criterion Home Video brings Brute Force to Blu-ray via a meticulous 2-yr.-long 4K restoration effort by Germany’s TLEFilms Film Restoration & Preservation Services. As with The Naked City (1948), Brute Force has undergone an extensive research and remastering effort, culling together print elements from various archives to achieve optimal quality under the most arduous and time-consuming conditions known in the field. The results are very impressive; solid gray scale, excellent detail, perfect image stabilization, and barely an age-related artifact to suggest the travesty of time-ravaged elements from whence the work was first begun. An oddity occurs in the film’s organic grain structure, the grain, a tad clunky, and, somehow appearing as though to separate from any object or person in motion on the screen. This anomaly is only evident when sitting close to the screen. At an acceptable distance, it is virtually undetectable. The uncompressed PCM mono audio sounds marvelous; clear, with virtually no hiss or pop. We get an audio commentary from noir experts, Alain Silver and James Ursini, recorded in 2007, along with an interview from Paul Mason. There is also a featured video essay from 2017 by film scholar, David Bordwell and a written essay by film critic, Michael Atkinson, which also includes a reproduction of the 1947 profile on producer, Mark Hellinger, and rare correspondence between Hellinger and Code president, Joseph Breen, plus trailers and a stills gallery. Of the aforementioned, Mason’s video piece is the best – or rather, most comprehensive, with Silver and Ursini’s accompanying commentary a very close second. One would have liked a bit more documentation on TLEFilms’ in-depth efforts to resurrect the movie from oblivion.  Bottom line: a solid effort of a truly powerful movie whose reputation has been allowed to molder with the past for far too long. Very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

3