Even today, the scale and scope of the violence in Brute Force plays strong.
In this savage prison drama, there’s a particularly nasty episode where one victim is blow torched to death. In black and white, without close ups or graphic make-up, it’s a piece of mayhem strong enough to rival any recent screen bloodbath.
Directed by Jules Dassin, the plot strikes as a variation that had huge popularity in pulp novels and pictures in post-war pop cinema, where the characters put to use their experience as battle veterans in ways that are no longer socially responsible, honest or decent (and if that sounds like heavy-handed irony, it was and is!). Here, prisoners devise a break out based on strategy learned on the frontline.
In between the high drama of the impending clash between the prisoners and their keepers, the film cuts back into the past, thereby explaining how each of the main characters ended up in the slammer. These sub-plots shuffle the existential pack used by suckers everywhere. For some it was hard luck, for others it was nature and, in one case, it was taking the fall for love.
Dassin, a dedicated left-winger, saves his moral outrage for the sadistic warden, Capt. Munsey played with lip-smacking glee by a brilliant Hume Cronyn. Burt Lancaster is splendid as the only prisoner who really understands the significance of Munsey’s ideological position – the prison is a fascist state and the captain is its dictator.
Images of medieval torture abound (even the prison looks like a castle and the prison escape a catacomb like array of shafts and tunnels). Far from 'realism’, this is great American post-war hard-boiled poetry. And Dassin is as relentless as an all night grilling in his attack. Don’t miss it.
