BRUTE FORCE (1947) Seen on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) 6/26/14 If your familiarity with actor Hume Cronyn is limited to his roles in such warm-hearted fare as COCOON, you should get a gander at him in this 1947 prison film, one of the best films of the genre. Cronyn plays the head prison guard, a man with the deceptively flimsy name of Munsey, who is, in fact, a hard case with a chunk of granite where a heart should be. Cronyn is masterful in his evil, both in the depths to which his character will sink and in the levels at which Cronyn plays the character. It’s a remarkable performance in a remarkable film. Burt Lancaster, in only his second film, solidifies the stardom that was rightfully his after his memorable debut the previous year in THE KILLERS. Lancaster’s brooding, angry con is sympathetic more for his strength and fortitude than for anything overtly good or generous about him. We first meet him standing in the rain, his jaws clenched in silent fury, and nothing that happens afterwards softens the edge of this man with a powerful sense of vengeance and his own personal code. As with many prison pictures, BRUTE FORCE is concerned with such things as riots and escapes, and it lives up to the best of such films in its execution of such matters. But the film also deals effectively with the psychological effect of incarceration and the brutality of unfeeling power and punishment. While some of its surface elements may seem tame and dated compared to what we know about modern prison life, at its heart is a timeless examination of man’s capacity for cruelty and for his concomitant capacity for survival. There are superb performances throughout the film: Charles Bickford, always reliable and substantial, as a leader among the convicts; John Hoyt, surprisingly virile as one of Lancaster’s cellmates; Art Smith as the good-hearted but ineffectual prison doctor; Roman Bohnen as the pusillanimous warden; Jeff Corey and Whit Bissell as convicts. A few female characters are strewn about the story in flashback, probably as box-office insurance, but none of the women (Yvonne de Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines) make nearly the impact that the male cast does, mainly because this is a movie about maleness, about the kind of violence, anger, vengeance, and cruelty that bedevil the male gender in every society. Written by Richard Brooks, one of the greatest screenwriters (and directors) when it came to the subject of maleness (CROSSFIRE, THE PROFESSIONALS, IN COLD BLOOD, BITE THE BULLET), the film is directed by Jules Dassin, who himself was associated with a number of tough, masculine films (NIGHT AND THE CITY, THE NAKED CITY) before the blacklist drove him to Europe, where he eventually settled in Greece and made such pictures as TOPKAPI, PHAEDRA, and NEVER ON SUNDAY). William Daniels, the master cinematographer who shot several decades’ worth of movies from GREED to OCEAN’S ELEVEN (the original), shows with his stunning black-and-white photography both the beauty and the harshness of the prison and its denizens. Miklós Rózsa’s score is stirring and deeply effective in promoting the tension of the piece. This is a tough movie, not so much in the sense of masculine bravado as in that it exposes and dramatizes tough situations with an unflinching eye. The thrilling climax is remarkable for any period, but it reflects a postwar refusal of movies to pretty up situations that have nothing pretty about them. BRUTE FORCE is well-titled, an exemplary film on par with some of the best of the prison genre. imdb/title/tt0039224/combined
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 13:57:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015