Released in August 1947, the aptly-named Brute Force offers a unique cocktail of film noir, prison drama, social comment, and action thriller that still packs a powerful punch 75 years later. It boasts a remarkable array of talent, with an outstanding cast in front of the lens and a brilliant crew behind the camera. It was the first of American director Jules Dassin’s run of tough crime pictures, followed by The Naked City (1948) and Thieves’ Highway (1949), before the rabid communist-hunting of the House Committee on Un-American Activities curtailed his Hollywood career and forced him into exile in France. It marked the second collaboration between columnist-turned-producer Mark Hellinger and breakout star Burt Lancaster, following Robert Siodmak’s seminal noir The Killers (1946). Its screenplay came from another emerging star of the genre, Richard Brooks, who had collaborated with John Huston on uncredited rewrites for Siodmak’s classic, and whose 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole had been adapted for Edward Dmytryk’s socially-conscious Crossfire (1947).
The plot follows the inmates of Westgate Penitentiary, an overcrowded island prison with a marked resemblance to Alcatraz (whose real-life riots the previous year provided significant inspiration for the film). As tensions rise, Joe Collins (Lancaster) leads a desperate escape attempt. This brief synopsis may sound entirely predictable to a modern audience, and indeed most of the expected prison-movie cliches are present and correct: corrupt guards, stool pigeons, inmate rivalries, and hard-luck tales for the more sympathetic convicts. This is hardly surprising, given that Brute Force helped cement the tropes of the genre, vastly predating the likes of Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz (1979) or Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994). What is surprising is just how well it has endured despite its many imitators, crackling with energy, bite, and style to remain as unsentimentally engaging and pertinently vicious as it was on its first release.
An overwhelming sense of oppression and enclosure is established within the film’s very first frames: a low-angled shot of the impassive prison watchtower, looming over the viewer in the pouring rain to the accompaniment of Miklos Rozsa’s fraught score, creates a feeling of inescapable doom. William H. Daniels’ superb cinematography constantly emphasises the cramped conditions through tight close-ups and dense, crowded compositions full of tough, worn faces jostling for air. While many classic noir films merely imply the prison bars awaiting their protagonists through the use of slanting shadows, their constant physical presence here drives home the fact that these men have already crossed that threshold of despair. They are relentlessly divided from the outside world and from each other, even as they are crammed in six-to-a-cell. Aside from brief glimpses at the beginning and end of the lonely expanse of sea dividing the inhabitants from the land, the only uncluttered views we see are of lone guards patrolling the castle-like walls, and the symmetrical cathedral of the main prison house once the men have been locked away at its sides.
While Westgate is theoretically governed by the aging, uncertain Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen), its true ruler, and the only person truly at home there, is his scheming underling Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn). Where Barnes is essentially decent but weak, Munsey is authoritarian and duplicitous, ruthlessly pushing his political advantage with government bureaucrat McCallum (Richard Gaines), who has tired of hearing about the failing institution and wants a new regime of “absolute discipline, not charity.” Embodying the age-old debate between retribution and rehabilitation, Munsey and McCallum believe in punishing the prisoners, while the outspoken, alcoholic Doctor Walters (Art Smith) believes the men deserve humane treatment. Their furious philosophical exchanges may be unfashionably direct, but they largely avoid the pitfalls of preaching, thanks to the fiercely pithy lines of Brooks’ script and the terrific performances.
Although both sides get to air their views, it is clear where the film’s post-World War II liberal sympathies lie. We first meet Munsey strolling through the courtyard in the rain, having dispatched a coffin containing yet another dead prisoner, his rain-slick coat and dark uniform making him resemble a member of the Gestapo. He treats the inmates with a kind of solicitous contempt, affecting an unctuous concern for them in public that thinly masks his private loathing and belief in his own strength and superiority. He touches the men with an insinuating familiarity as he moves through the cafeteria, but barely conceals his disgust when hapless informer Wilson (James O’Rear) presumes to touch him while begging for protection, despite Munsey’s own responsibility for the man’s plight. Safely hidden behind his uniform, he believes that “kindness is actually weakness, and weakness is an infection that makes a man a follower instead of a leader.” His philosophical connection to Nazism is made even more explicit when he plays the music of Wagner to cover the sounds from his office as he tortures Louie (Sam Levene); the composer was much admired by Hitler, and remains highly controversial for his dubious racial views. Symbolically stripped to his vest and beating a helpless captive, Munsey is confirmed as a vain, brutal fascist beneath his civilised veneer.
Cast against type, Cronyn proves an inspired choice for the vicious captain. His slight stature and gentle voice are perfect for the part of a bullying coward, only strong behind his uniform. They also make a striking physical contrast with Lancaster’s athletic brawn as his nemesis Joe, creating a sense of polar opposites clashing, inexorably drawn into conflict but unable to ever truly best one another. At times, their visual chemistry recalls that of Boris Karloff’s monolithic monster and Colin Clive’s Henry in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. As in Whale’s horror classic, the ‘monster’ (in this case the criminal) is sympathetic if dangerous, while the supposedly urbane authority figure is the true architect of their misery. Like Karloff’s tragic creature, Joe finally hurls his tormentor over his head at the end, only to succumb to his injuries in the flames (sadly lacking his predecessor’s knack for resurrection). The comparison with Whale’s film also suggests a strangely symbiotic relationship between Brute Force’s primary characters: with no prisoners to dominate, Munsey would be nothing, while without Munsey’s provocations, Joe’s violence and desperation might at least have been directed more productively. They create and destroy each other, completing a circle of bloodshed between them.
While Munsey is an unequivocal villain, the prisoners are never portrayed as angels — there are no Shawshank-style wronged innocents here. Joe is physically intimidating, and has few qualms about resorting to brutality if he considers it necessary. He arranges the murder of Wilson in retaliation for his framing and is almost sociopathically committed to his escape plan, utterly dismissing warnings from other sympathetic inmates about the suffering it will cause. Paradoxically, his one soft spot is the very thing driving his merciless quest for freedom; Ruth (Ann Blyth), the woman he loves, is sick and requires urgent treatment. Ashamed of his gangster past, he cannot bring himself to tell her that he is imprisoned, while she in turn refuses to undergo a life-saving operation until he returns from his unexplained absence. In a cruel echo of his physical contrast with Munsey, Joe’s size and strength is the exact opposite of Ruth’s frailty, his hulking presence unbalancing the cosy composition of her house and making clear that his attempts at domesticity are doomed.
The pasts of several other prisoners are also revealed in similarly effective if briskly sketched flashback sequences. In keeping with noir tradition, women lie at the heart of their dilemmas, a fact that also underlines their pronounced absence in the brutal world of the male penitentiary. The film generally avoids the expected femmes fatales, however; Spencer (John Hoyt) reflects on the woman who robbed him with the rueful affection of one con-artist for another, while the divorce proceedings that destroy besotted husband Lister (Whit Bissell) are eventually revealed to be a hoax perpetrated by Munsey for his own vindictive ends. While the female roles are disappointingly brief, existing only to provide motivations for the male characters (with Ruth in particular proving too saintly to entirely convince), they do at least avoid the heartless stereotype common to much classic film noir.
While it works brilliantly as a straight-forward prison-break thriller, Brute Force actively invites deeper political, even existential, readings. Two years after the conclusion of the Second World War, its portrayal of Munsey not only suggests that not all fascists were defeated with the fall of Hitler, but that they are grasping for power again right under our noses (a grimly prescient argument given the prominence of various far-right demagogues in the 21st century). The film implies that while WWII may be over, the fight continues — it is no coincidence that Becker (Howard Duff) is nicknamed ‘Soldier,’ nor that the escape plan is inspired by a past military operation to capture a Nazi fortification. It could be argued that the prisoners represent the divided general populace: failed by the weakening Warden, whose belief in democracy is symbolised by the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on his wall, they are forced to either fight or collaborate with the insidious authoritarianism of Munsey, whose choice of office décor is inevitably a picture of himself in uniform. The inmates are the downtrodden, trying to hang on to their menial jobs and dignity to the complete indifference of self-serving bureaucrats like McCallum and the guards who turn a blind eye to their captain’s manoeuvres. Fittingly, their escape attempt centres on “the drainpipe,” a vainglorious engineering project overseen by Munsey. Hated by the workers, it regularly claims lives and literally smothers the men underground, reflecting their crushed social status. It also comes to represent the arrogance that is Munsey’s Achilles’ heel: obsessed with punishing the men, he fails to understand the full scope of the escape plan, never comprehending that his actions have actually succeeded in uniting the men’s resistance rather than breaking it.
In the end, however, the status quo emerges as the only victor. No higher power intervenes to help the prisoners, despite the Christian references scattered throughout the film. Although Joe and Gallagher (Charles Bickford) finalise their plans in the chapel, their subversive prayer (“When the gates open, the whole population’ll break out”) remains unfulfilled. The escape is a bloody failure despite Munsey’s downfall. While the film refuses to offer any neat solutions, its pessimism remains tempered with fiery defiance. Brute Force concludes with the kindly Doctor Walters tending the injured James (Sir Lancelot), whose small role has served almost as a chorus commenting on events. Hurt but calm, the inmate implacably observes: “Whenever you got men in prison, they’re gonna want to get out.” As Walters replies, “Nobody ever really escapes,” the camera moves through an external window to place both behind bars, trapped in the eternal conflict between the necessity of fighting for freedom and the terrible human cost of doing so.
