(1947)
4
Michael Costello
Although dismissed by auteur critic Andrew Sarris for its social commentary, Jules Dassin's masterful noir, which more than lives up to its title, is a wildly stylized tour of a prison in which the inmates are running the asylum. Still one of the harshest and grimmest of all noirs, it places a young, magnetic Burt Lancaster in a dungeon-like environment apparently just this side of Transylvania. Contrary to expectation, the prisoners are an amazingly soulful lot, with a dubiously high proportion doing time as a result of what they did for love. And they're models of mental health compared to the staff, which includes a shaky warden, an alcoholic doctor, and Hume Cronyn, as the indelibly fascistic guard, Capt. Munsey. The hounding of a stool pigeon into a steam press by blowtorch-bearing cons is typical of the facility's daily recreation. While some of the speechifying can be tedious, and the filmmakers have clearly loaded the dice in favor of the inmates, the character of Munsey remains a compelling portrait of a grotesquely authoritarian personality. Miklos Rosza's brooding score and William H. Daniels' moody photography are vital elements in the film's impact.
cast-crew for Brute Force on AllMovie
Brute Force (1947)
