Brute Force (1947 film)
Encyclopedia
Brute Force is a brooding, brutal film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

, starring Burt Lancaster
Burt Lancaster
Burton Stephen "Burt" Lancaster was an American film actor noted for his athletic physique and distinctive smile...

, Hume Cronyn
Hume Cronyn
Hume Blake Cronyn, OC was a Canadian actor of stage and screen, who enjoyed a long career, often appearing professionally alongside his second wife, Jessica Tandy.-Early life:...

 and Charles Bickford
Charles Bickford
Charles Bickford was an American actor best known for his supporting roles. He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for The Song of Bernadette , The Farmer's Daughter , and Johnny Belinda...

. It was directed by Jules Dassin
Jules Dassin
Julius "Jules" Dassin , was an American film director, with Jewish-Russian origins. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career.-Early life:...

, with a screenplay by Richard Brooks
Richard Brooks
Richard Brooks was an American screenwriter, film director, novelist and occasional film producer.-Early life and career:...

 and the cinematography by William H. Daniels
William H. Daniels
William H. Daniels, A.S.C. was a film cinematographer best known as Greta Garbo's personal lensman. Early in his career he worked regularly with director Erich von Stroheim.-Career:...

.

The film was among several film noirs made by Dassin during the postwar period. The others were Thieves' Highway
Thieves' Highway
Thieves' Highway is a 1949 film noir directed by Jules Dassin. The screenplay was written by A. I. Bezzerides, based on his novel Thieves' Market.-Plot:...

, Night and the City
Night and the City
Night and the City is a film noir based on the novel by Gerald Kersh, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney. Shot on location in London, the plot evolves around an ambitious hustler whose plans keep going wrong....

and The Naked City
The Naked City
The Naked City is a 1948 black-and-white film noir directed by Jules Dassin. The movie, shot partially in documentary style, was filmed on location on the streets of New York City, featuring landmarks such as the Williamsburg Bridge the Whitehall Building and an apartment building on West 83rd...

.

Plot

The film opens on a dark, rainy morning at Westgate Prison. Prisoners crammed into a small cell watch through the window as Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster
Burt Lancaster
Burton Stephen "Burt" Lancaster was an American film actor noted for his athletic physique and distinctive smile...

) leaves his term in solitary confinement. Joe is angry and talks about escape. The beleaguered warden is under pressure to improve discipline. His chief of security, Capt. Munsey (Hume Cronyn
Hume Cronyn
Hume Blake Cronyn, OC was a Canadian actor of stage and screen, who enjoyed a long career, often appearing professionally alongside his second wife, Jessica Tandy.-Early life:...

), is a sadist who manipulates prisoners to inform on one another and create trouble so he can inflict punishment. The prison doctor (Art Smith) warns that the prison is a powder keg and will explode if they are not careful. He denounces Munsey's approach and complains that the public and government officials fail to understand the need for rehabilitation.

Joe's attorney visits and tells Joe his wife Ruth (Ann Blyth
Ann Blyth
Ann Marie Blyth is an American actress and singer, often cast in Hollywood musicals, but also successful in dramatic roles. Her performance as Veda Pierce in the 1945 film Mildred Pierce was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.-Life and career:Blyth was born in Mount Kisco,...

) is not willing to have an operation for cancer unless Joe can be there with her. He takes his revenge on fellow inmate Wilson (James O'Rear), who at Munsey's instigation had planted a weapon on Joe that earned him a stay in solitary. Joe has organized the brutal attack on Wilson in the prison machine shop, but provides himself with an alibi by talking with the doctor in his office while the murder occurs.

Joe presses another inmate, Gallagher (Charles Bickford
Charles Bickford
Charles Bickford was an American actor best known for his supporting roles. He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for The Song of Bernadette , The Farmer's Daughter , and Johnny Belinda...

), to help him escape but Gallagher has a good job at the prison newspaper and Munsey has promised him parole soon. Munsey then instigates a prisoner's suicide, giving higher authorities the opportunity to revoke all prisoner privileges and cancel parole hearings. Gallagher feels betrayed and decides to join Joe's escape plan. Joe and Gallagher plan an assault on the guard tower where they can get access to the lever that lowers a bridge that controls access to the prison.

While the escape plan is taking shape, each of the inmates in cell R17 tells a story via flashback. In every case, his love for a woman got him in trouble with the law. Munsey learns the details of the escape plan from an informer, one of the men in cell R17, and the break goes badly. The normally subdued prison yard turns into a violent and bloody riot.

Context

The direct inspiration for the unremitting desperate violence was the recent "Battle of Alcatraz
Battle of Alcatraz
The Battle of Alcatraz, which lasted from May 2–4, 1946, was the result of an unsuccessful escape attempt at Alcatraz Island Federal Penitentiary. Two guards—William A. Miller and Harold Stites—were killed along with three of the inmates. Eleven guards and one convict were also injured...

" (May 2-4, 1946) in which three prisoners and two guards were killed during a foiled escape attempt.

The film has a number of brutal scenes including the crushing of a stool pigeon prisoner under a stamping machine and the beating of a prisoner bound to a chair by straps. Film writer Eddie Muller
Eddie Muller
Eddie Muller is a writer based in San Francisco. He is known for writing books about movies, particularly film noir. Founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, he is considered a noir expert and is called on to write and talk about the film genre, notably on wry commentary tracks for Fox's...

 wrote that "the climax of Brute Force displayed the most harrowing violence ever seen in movie theaters."

Jules Dassin fled the United States because he was to be named a Communist in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Committee on Un-American Activities or House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security"...

 (HUAC). He left for Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 and produced Night and the City
Night and the City
Night and the City is a film noir based on the novel by Gerald Kersh, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney. Shot on location in London, the plot evolves around an ambitious hustler whose plans keep going wrong....

in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. Several actors in the film were later placed on the Hollywood blacklist
Hollywood blacklist
The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the mid-twentieth-century list of screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or...

, including Art Smith.

Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone
William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Stone became well known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, for which he had previously participated as an infantry soldier. His work frequently focuses on...

 cites the film as an influence for his prison break climax in Natural Born Killers
Natural Born Killers
Natural Born Killers is a 1994 crime/black comedy film directed by Oliver Stone about two victims of traumatic childhoods who became lovers and psychopathic serial killers, and are irresponsibly glorified by the mass media...

(1994).

The producers marketed the film with the tagline: Raw! Rough! Ruthless!

Critical reception

When released, Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

magazine gave the film a positive review, writing, "A closeup on prison life and prison methods, Brute Force is a showmanly mixture of gangster melodramatics, sociological exposition, and sex...The s.a. elements are plausible and realistic, well within the bounds, but always pointing up the femme fatale. Thus Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines and Anita Colby are the women on the 'outside' whose machinations, wiles or charms accounted for their men being on the 'inside'...Bristling, biting dialog by Richard Brooks paints broad cameos as each character takes shape under existing prison life. Bickford is the wise and patient prison paper editor whose trusty (Levene), has greater freedom in getting 'stories' for the sheet. Cronyn is diligently hateful as the arrogant, brutal captain, with his system of stoolpigeons and bludgeoning methods."

Film critic Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...

 wrote, "Not having intimate knowledge of prisons or prisoners, we wouldn't know whether the average American convict is so cruelly victimized as are the principal prison inmates in Brute Force, which came to Loew's Criterion yesterday. But to judge by this 'big house' melodrama, the poor chaps who languish in our jails are miserably and viciously mistreated and their jailers are either weaklings or brutes...Brute Force is faithful to its title—even to taking law and order into its own hands. The moral is: don't go to prison; you meet such vile authorities there. And, as the doctor observes sadly, 'Nobody ever escapes.'"

More recently, critic Dennis Schwartz wrote, "Jules Dassin (Rififi
Rififi
Rififi is a 1955 French crime film adaptation of Auguste le Breton's novel of the same name. Directed by American filmmaker Jules Dassin, the film stars Jean Servais as the aging gangster Tony le Stéphanois, Carl Möhner as Jo le Suédois, Robert Manuel as Mario Farrati, and Jules Dassin as César le...

and Naked City
The Naked City
The Naked City is a 1948 black-and-white film noir directed by Jules Dassin. The movie, shot partially in documentary style, was filmed on location on the streets of New York City, featuring landmarks such as the Williamsburg Bridge the Whitehall Building and an apartment building on West 83rd...

) directs this hard-hitting but outdated crime drama concerned about prison conditions... The point hammered home is that the prison system reflects the values of society, as Dassin castigates society for creating and then turning a blind eye toward the brutality and insensitivity of a prison system that offers no chance for rehabilitation."

Notable quotes

  • Gallagher: Those gates only open three times. When you come in, when you've served your time, or when you're dead!
  • Dr. Walters: Force does make leaders. But you forget one thing: it also destroys them.

External links

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