Brute Force (1947)

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947) Westgate Penitentiary, in the middle on nowhere identifiable—Its "gates only open three times: when you come in, when you've served your time, and when you're dead!" One of the latter is going out now, a 62 year old prisoner forced to work in the prison's most dangerous area, what they call "the drainpipe." His cellmates in Cell R17 crowd around the the barred window of their too-small enclosure to watch. They are Stack (Jeff Corey), Spencer (John Hoyt)-in for gambling and grifting, Kid Coy (John Overman)-ex-boxer in for assault just moved, in taking the place of the guy who died, Becker "the Soldier" (Howard Duff)-in for murder (he took the rap for his lover), Lister (Whit Bissell)-in for embezzlement. Their main interest is because one of their own is coming back: mobster Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) is coming out of solitary after 10 days after a stool pigeon planted a knife on him. The Chief Guard Munsey (Hume Cronyn) talks briefly to him, telling him he needs to show respect, to not be so hard, and to cooperate. Collins tells him what he wants to hear and he goes back to his cell.

The others crowd around him and give him a dry cigarette and a light and updates on the situation, including their plans for taking care of the stoolie who ratted him out (without going into specifics) and tell him that everything is okay. Collins spits out his response (in just the way you can hear Lancaster doing it): "Everything's okay? What's okay? Nothing's okay. It never was, and it never will be. Not till we're out. You get that? Out."

Brute Force may be the Citizen Kane of prison movies. Or at least a "Grand Gray-Bar Hotel." Produced by Mark Hellinger in the same hard-bitten style of his previous movie The Killers and written by a young up-and-coming script-writer named Richard Brooks.* Brute Force is a prison movie on the surface and a life-metaphor once you get below around drainpipe level. And, except for some motivational flashback sequences demanded by Hellinger so he could throw some female exploitation into the mix, it's directed by Jules Dassin with a noir attitude so bleak it approaches hysteria...then burns right through it. At the time, it was remarked for its violence, but it's not so much the violence—there are patches that are arresting—it's the vehemence, the hot and cold anger behind it, that is truly remarkable.

"Ya know, I was just thinkin'. An insurance company could go flat broke in this prison." Beyond the casual cruelty of the guards, the first outbreak of violence is the one that settles all matters about Collins' framing: in the prison work-room, that stoolie (James O'Rear) begins to suspect that a diversionary fight clearing the area of guards is a trap; it is, as he's cornered by Coy, Spencer, and Stack triangulating him with acetylene torches until he backs into a working industrial press. Nobody knows anything. Nobody saw anything. Just bad luck, "falling" into that press.

This makes a bad situation worse for the warden (Roman Bohnen); he's already been called on the carpet by some lackey of the governor threatening the man with his job if there are any more violent incidents; the guy's just a mouth-piece—he doesn't have any more answers than anybody else in the room does. But, threatening the warden with his job stings. He's been doing the job so long he doesn't know what else he would do without it. He's in a similar situation as the prison doctor (Art Smith), who's doing a job he hates (and self-medicates to get through it), but he's too old to do anything else. Everybody at Westgate has their own flavor of prison, it seems.

Except Munsey. The Chief Guard sits back during that bitch-fest with the governor's man and the warden and the doctor and just listens, biding his time, feigning concern, and solicitously acting as a go-between and interpreter ("I think what the doctor is saying..."), but not revealing his hand. That's because he's a spider, waiting for the prey to be weakened before he takes them out. The prison is his web and he has full control of it, pushing the guards, brutalizing the men, using all the methods at his disposal to have absolute power over the facility and anyone unlucky enough to enter its gates. He's not above any torture, physical or psychological, to maintain his control—at one point, he'll even beat information out of a prisoner (Sam Levene) while listening to Wagner on the phonograph (as if the ties to fascism weren't obvious enough)

That's the situation the prisoners of R17 are in. But there's added urgency: Collins is told by his lawyer that the girl who's waiting for him on the outside (Ann Blyth) needs an operation for cancer, but she won't unless Collins is with her. She doesn't know he's in prison and the lawyer is under strict instructions not to tell her. Collins has to work the angles, but his plan is to escape and never look back, and with ideas from his cell-mates, he hatches an idea—but it will mean being assigned to the very duty that killed the prisoner at the beginning of the movie—working "the drainpipe."

It's mean, it's tough, and it's violent and sometimes a little florid in its prison-yard dialog, but the part the filmmakers weren't crazy about (except the producer) was the insistence on interrupting the story with flash-backs involving the women in their lives. Producer Hellinger wanted female appeal and so the characters played by Hoyt, Bissell, Duff, and Lancaster briefly escape the prison walls (cinematiclly, of course) for scenes with the women in their pasts (played by Anita Colby, Ella Raines, Yvonne De Carlo and Blyth). The scenes don't do much as far as back-story—Hoyt's is even done without dialog and simply his voice-over—and the effect is jarring and removes suspense, pacing, and an ever-increasing feeling of doom that permeates the entire movie. Director Dassin had a substitute in mind—a surreal portrait ripped from a magazine in the cell that reminds all of them of "the girl outside." That was as sentimental as they wanted to get. 

When the escape attempt comes, it is filmed with all the energy, desperation, and hopelessness that can be bled out of the material, both visually and viscerally, like an amped-up war movie—the attempt is based on an attack strategy seen by Duff's "Soldier" during the second world war—and it all seems a bit like a suicide mission that quickly turns from gaining freedom to merely getting revenge and taking out as many guards as possible.

It is dark, but once the smoke clears, the fires are put out, and the dead carried through those implacable doors—ultimately, they make it out, ironically, only when they're dead—the film gets even darker, equating life itself with a prison. Jules Dassin was a master of the film-noir—a genre he wasn't that crazy about—but, he was interested in social justice and in making statements—and his turgid prison/war movie is one of the darkest of the type. It's no wonder tough guys in film-noirs wanted to avoid prison—Brute Force shows a world bleaker than bleak.

"Nobody escapes. Nobody ever really escapes."

* Yeah, if you know anything about movies, the name will be familiar: Brooks would go on to direct, starting with 1950's Cary Grant picture Crisis, work with Bogart on Deadline U.S.A. and Battle Circus, break the rock and roll barrier with Blackboard Jungle, and then veer from programmers (Take the High Ground!, The Last Hunt, The Professionals) to high profile prestige pictures (Lord Jim, the Brothers Karamazov, Elmer Gantry, Sweet Bird of Youth), to exploitation films (In Cold Blood, Looking for Mr. Goodbar). His last film was Fever Pitch in 1985.

The Criminal Code

The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931) The Hawks canon has always been about liberte, egalite, fraternite, and of the power of the group to come together to create something greater than the whole. So...a Howard Hawks prison movie?

Depends on the story, of course. But, The Criminal Code fits right into the Hawks niche, right down to the central authority figure who will give you a fair shake as long as you prove yourself worthy by adhering to their code as a "professional."

 

That figure is newly-installed warden Mark Brady (played by John Huston's dad, Walter) who's been brought up from his previous position as District Attorney. He's overseeing the imprisonment of some of the very men he sent to prison, so the resentment in "the yard" is palpable. So much so that his first day on the job, when he looks out of his office window overlooking the prison yard, he is greeted with cat-calls and "boo's" and the mutterings of threats. He responds, as any member of the court would, by confronting his accusers and going amongst them to talk and let them know what "the rules" are—look them eye to eye to say that as long as they kept their noses clean, there won't be any issues. 

He's not without a heart, and he knows that he's responsible for the cons...and for a lot of them being there. He takes an interest in one young man (Phillip Holmes) that he sent away, now on his sixth year in the stretch, who's about to crack from the strain. He offers the kid, Robert Graham, a job as his valet, hoping that the change in situation and out of the harsh conditions of the prison's jute mill, will improve his psychological condition. It should come as no surprise that it does, especially once Brady's daughter (played by Constance Cummings) takes an interest in young Graham.

But, it's a prison movie, and it wouldn't be one if there wasn't an escape attempt made that would put Graham's improved life in peril. Three hoods—one of them Graham's former cell-mate Ned Galloway (Boris Karloff)—plan an elaborate escape, but during the attempt one of the prisoners is shot and killed. Galloway discovers that the other of the escapee's ratted them out, violating the prison code of silence, and he secretly plans revenge, warning Graham to stay away from that particular prisoner.

Even without seeing his face you can see the menace of Karloff

But, Graham is found, by happenstance, near the body, and even though evidence isn't found that he did it, and despite Brady's ministrations to save himself and tell him who the culprit is, Graham won't betray the ethic of the prison yard, even if it means taking the fall himself. Reluctantly, Brady sends him to solitary confinement.

It is unusual, for a Hawks film, for the communal spirit be the one amongst the prisoners, but the emphasis on the code of silence as the one mark of the professional prisoner that must be kept above all else runs right alongside the usual stoicism, the "keep-it-amongst-ourselves" attitude of the enclave that you'll find in most of the director's work. That it is among the criminal element makes The Criminal Code (with the title's double meaning) stand out from every other posse of professionals, be they cowboys, pilots, race-drivers, newspapermen, even big-game trappers.

The Criminal Code is a "pre-code" film, meaning it was made before the establishment of The Hays Code—Hollywood's attempt to police itself, amid calls that films were starting to depict too many immoral acts and that it might have an effect on the country. Even though there is quite a bit of violence and some of the prison guards are seen as corrupt, the "bad guys" end up punished and the "good guys" are given a second chance. It was still early in the days of Hollywood's own "code" and a few listed improprieties could be seen to still eke their way onto the silver-screen. Over the next few weeks, we'll occasionally be looking at some of those films to see what Hollywood was getting away with, so soon after the advent of "the talkies."

Escape From Alcatraz

Escape From Alcatraz (Don Siegel, 1979) The recent elaborate escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora has been labeled (for want of a concise headline) the "Shawshank" escape—after The Shawshank Redemption, the Frank Darabont film based on Steven King's 1982 novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," which is, ostensibly about a long-in-the-planning prison break. There are elements of that—maybe.  

But truth is stranger than fiction. And the movie that little escapade put me in mind wasn't so much Shawshank as the film and incident it was based on that probably inspired King in the first place, a rather unpretentious vehicle for its star Clint Eastwood that played against his star persona by casting him as an unrepentant hood. The movie is Escape From Alcatraz and one hopes its results are less successful than the ones played out in this film.

It's based on a true story.

In Escape From Alcatraz Clint Eastwood re-teamed with director Don Siegel for their fifth and last collaboration as actor-director (although Siegel appeared as a performer in Eastwood's Play Misty for Me). That film pre-dates the publication of King's novella by three years, and although I'm not sure how long it takes for King to punch one of his novellas out, but it's conceivable Escape from Alcatraz led to "Shawshank." 

"Clintus" (as Siegel liked to call him) plays Frank Morris, a con with a containment problem—the man can't enter a room without scoping out the exits. As this runs counter to the dictates of the penal system, he has been relocated to "the Rock"—Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, which has never seen a successful escape in its history. For Moriss, that isn't a problem, so much as an opportunity.

Morris "settles" in, which means he sets his boundaries and comfort zones, clobbering any bulls who try to become alpha's, and being passive-aggressive with the prison's warden (a supercillious Patrick McGoohan, who, in his television career, also had containment issues), who is particularly proud of the prison's escape-proof reputation. But Moriss thinks he's not a number (AZ1441, by the way), he's a free man, and within a short time he's already plotting his exit.  

But, he can't do it alone. Locked in a one-man cell, it is only during exercise periods in the prison yard and meals that he can find like-minded prisoners, like Charley Butts (Larry Hankin), Litmus, (Frank Ronzio) and Doc (Roberts Blossom)—there's always a prisoner named "Doc." But, it isn't until he meets brothers Clarence (Jack Thibeau) and John Anglin (Fred Ward, only his fourth film) that the plan starts to narrow down the possibilities. 

Morris discovers that the concrete around the vents in the cells have become soft and brittle with moisture—by using a spoon smuggled from the mess-hall, and hardening it with solder from the machine shop, it makes an effective chisel/shovel to chip away at the ventilator, widening the hole, and smuggling in cardboard and paper and paint to make a reasonable facsimile of the ventilator cover to hide the work done overnight. The process is long and laborious, taking months, but eventually the opening is big enough for Morris to shimmy through and he explores the infrastructure of the prison looking for paths to the outside. But, even if he can escape his cell, he still has to get off an island.

That is the most dangerous part of the plan: many men have gotten out of the prison in the past, but getting off "the Rock" is an entirely different matter. There are sheer cliffs, fences, and the matter of crossing San Francisco Bay with its swift currents and unforgiving conditions. However fast the escape would be, the hardest part and the most time-consuming is struggling against the Bay and so to put off a search for as long as possible, distractions have to be made to keep the guards from getting suspicious when they do their bed-checks early in the morning.

Siegel directs this economically, taking advantage of the best possible angles and not wasting any footage on fancy editing (he usually edited in the camera). When things get visceral, he goes hand-held, but mostly he stays true to his B-movie roots, keeping things tough and unsentimental, even if motivations turn very personal. Siegel and Eastwood had been exploring the edges of audiences' sympathy for a movie's lead since they featured Eastwood's amoral Yankee soldier in The Beguiled (and Eastwood's "Man with no Name" persona in the previous Two Mules for Sister Sara. And certainly Dirty Harry taxed audiences' loyalties. But Escape from Alcatraz was the first time Eastwood had played an out-and-out criminal (as opposed to the unjustly accused men of other Eastwood vehicles). The usual uncertain moral terrain of Siegel's movies is even more slippery here, and the film's stance is leavened by its uncertain outcome. Siegel leaves it on a ambiguous note, so those rooting for Eastwood's criminal are given no satisfaction. Those rooting against him—well, they went to the wrong movie.

The last two images of Escape from Alcatraz: a title card as indeterminate aftermath
and one of the papier mâché heads, dreamily expressive.

Morris, and the Anglins: fates unknown (?)