Thoughts on Brute Force

  

 On Criterion, I watched Jules Dassin’s 1947 prison noir film Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster as Joe Collins, the leader of his cell mates in prison organizing an escape, and Hume Cronyn is Captain Munsey, the sadistic, by the book guard who abuses the prisoners and sees them as objects to control and punish. I really liked this movie, and some parts went a lot harder than I expected, like Munsey mentally torturing a prisoner and instigating his suicide, including the movie showing his death in a crude way, even during the Production Code era of Hollywood. And the finale is really explosive and kind of wild to watch, like the way one character basically gets used as a human shield to die.

    This very much felt like a “dad” movie, of a “men in prison” tough guy kind of movie, and not what I’d normally be into, but I really liked it. It was compelling, and Lancaster was great at playing tough guys with soft hearts. The men all ended up in prison due to their loves for the women in their lives, and keep a pinup photo in their cell as a fantasy stand-in to think about their lost loves. Like one man stole money to buy his wife a fur coat, another guy stole food while fighting in Italy in WWII for his girlfriend (played by Yvonne de Carlo, aka Lily Munster), and Collins wants his wife to get surgery to treat her cancer, but she won’t do it unless he’s with her.

    I’ve always liked Hume Cronyn, but never saw him as playing a threatening character, but he was great in this, as this guard with Nazi-like tendencies to want order and abusing prisoners both by mentally torturing them and beating them with a stick, just on a power trip and gunning to be warden of the prison.

    The movie makes it very clear that it’s about the injustices of the prison system, the guards and warden using prisoners as cheap labor, and punishing all of them for any isolated incidents. It is an indictment of the prison industrial complex, one that is unfortunately still relevant today.