Film
Brute Force 1947 Criterion Collection
With a title like Brute Force you expect action: nasty, brutish and short. With Jules Dassin at the helm you know you’re in for seasoned noir nihilism. In Brute Force’s terse 90 minutes, the genius behind Naked City, Night and the City, Thieves’ Highway and Rififi delivers the goods. Burt Lancaster stars as Joe Collins, the de facto leader of the guys in cell R17. We first meet Collins fresh from a stint in solitary. When his loyal cellmates discover Collins suffered from a frame-up by a fellow inmate, they deliver payback with blow-torches and a steam-hammer. Dassin maintains a steady, if not always gripping pace, keeping true to the film’s title by peppering it with mean-spirited violence. The truly explosive ending proved Dassin could pull off a complex action sequence with ease. He transforms a formulaic potboiler into a startling meditation on the futility of survival in a world corrupted by power.
Several crude characterizations create a distractingly campy element. There’s the moralizing drunk of a prison doctor or Calypso, the singing Greek Chorus played by real-life Trinidadian calypso artist Sir Lancelot. Burt Lancaster’s the official lead but it’s the supporting cast—A Who’s Who of cool obscure B-movie character actors—who steal the show.
Dassin’s masterful use of high contrast black and white cinematography and powerful framing generate an atmosphere of squalor. Dassin nails down the soul-sucking oppression of incarceration: a guard’s raised arm creates a disruptive border through a sea of inmates; imposing shots of walls, bars, gun turrets and bridges punctuate the narrative and the pounding rain in which the film opens (it rains in prison like it rains in a convicted man’s heart).
So one can’t help wondering what prison in 1947 was really like. Surely it was no cakewalk, yet as grungy and low-life as the inmates might seem, they’re stand-up guys who stick their neck out for a buddy. In classic prison movie fashion, the enemy isn’t incarceration, it’s the man. This prison, with its affably benign, yet ultimately ineffective warden, is a well-oiled microcosm of an orderly society, replete with its own newspaper and auto-repair shop. It’s just a bit too ordered, run by the prison’s Gestapo-like guards and the sadistic Captain Munsey, played not as a savage brute but as a sinister effete by Hume Cronyn.
Despite the threat of torture from Munsey, realized in one particularly homoerotic S & M scene, the cons’ life doesn’t come off as all that hard. Sure there’s solitary confinement and work in the drain pipe if you don’t behave, but for the most part they work away their days like normal citizens.
How about that for a pessimistic metaphor for modern society? Brute Force presents the classic existential dilemma of existing as the captive of another man. Freedom is only a concept and the prisoner’s essence as men is determined by their struggle to escape from the walls of confinement. Abstract this set-up a couple notches and you get Jacques Becker’s Le Trou. A few more notches higher and you arrive at the pinnacle: Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Prison in the Virus Time
By Keith "Malik" WashingtonJUNE 2020 | Field Notes
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, USP Pollock was on regular lockdowns due to pervasive violence. Nothing has changed in this regard; in fact, its getting worse. If I dont get COVID-19, I could easily get caught up in the violence. You can just be minding your own business and get stabbed up here. That is the harsh reality of life in a federal prison.
RIZOMA: Poetry & Performance Workshops at Santiaguito de Almoloya Women’s Prison
By Emma GomisSEPT 2020 | Special Report
In March of 2020 I went with a group of artists, poets, and musicians to the Penal Femenil Santiaguito in Almoloya, Mexico—a prison center for prevention and social reinsertion.
Vincent Van Gogh: A Life in Letters
By Joshua SperlingDEC 20-JAN 21 | Books
Though lacking the inexpensive allure of the old paperback editionsnot to mention the comprehensiveness of the six-volume collectors set released in 2009A Life in Letters succeeds by placing a modest sampling of Van Goghs correspondence into dialogue with both the life and the paintings. Each phase of the artists wandering is bracketed with a brief biographical précis, refreshingly unadorned and free of the usual apocrypha.
The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art
By Charlotte KentSEPT 2020 | ArtSeen
Moving past familiar questions about art, machines, autonomy, and authorship that have been around since the invention of photography, the generative artworks on view through Kate Vasss website offers a chance to think about our respective starting points, the steps we take, and how rules apply in this game of life.