Brute Force (1947)

[Steve-O]

“Those gates only open three times. When you come in, when you've served your time, or when you're dead!” - Gallager (Charles Bickford) in Brute Force.

Posted by Steve-O

Prison films were most popular in the 1930s when dozens of movies about men serving hard time were churned out. The films were an allegory for the bigger problems in society. Depression era movie goers liked seeing prisoners in Invisible Stripes or Hell's Highway have victories -even small ones- against authority. The men, usually serving time because of mitigating circumstances, were surrounded by violent men and tried to survive despite oppressive living conditions.

In the 1940s director Jules Dassin and writer Richard Brooks succeed in making a different kind of prison film. Brute Force, unlike Dassin's next film The Naked City, is filled with an unrelenting sense of despair. Instead of the prisoners being surrounded by violent criminals a prison guard is the villain. In fact, all the prisoners in cell R17 have back stories (told in overtly romantic flashbacks) that show these guys at least in their own minds are all just victims of circumstance. Dassin later regretted not having any truly violent men populate the prison and I agree. There should be at least one person in the prison that deserves to be there. However, I liked seeing the camaraderie between convicts even when they team up to kill a stoolie or plan a prison break.

The one evil in the film is Hume Cronyn (of all people!) playing the sadistic Captain Munsey. Wearing a tight Nazi-like uniform, prison guard Munsey is power hungry and abuses the men under him either with a rubber hose or just by mental torture. The warden of the prison is weak and Munsey's control is never called into question until he finally takes over the prison.

Although Burt Lancaster is the star of the movie, the film is really about all the prisoners in cell R17 and the men that help them try to escape. The film is filled with familiar faces: Jeff Corey (Fourteen Hours, Sirocco), John Hoyt (The Come On), Charles Bickford (Fallen Angel, Whirlpool), Sam Levene (The Killers), Whit Bissell (Raw Deal, He Walked By Night), and even Charles McGraw (The Narrow Margin) are prisoners. Working with but not necessarily for Captain Munsey are Art Smith (In a Lonely Place) as the drunk prison doctor and Jay C. Flippen (They Live By Night) as a kind guard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMmmVBxKWCM
During long hours in their cell, the R17 prisoners gaze at a pinup girl that reminds them each of a past love. They all take turns telling their tales of woman they've known outside of jail. The stories aren't all that convincing but they are entertaining – especially John Hoyt's wild night with femme fatale Flossy (Anne Colby). The flashbacks seem more like a way for Universal to have some of their leading women in the film. Playing the girlfriends and wives are a number of noir dames: Ann Blyth (Mildred Pierce), Ella Raines (Phantom Lady), and Yvonne De Carlo (Criss Cross) all make appearances.

What really drives the men to try to break from their captors is Captain Munsey. Munsey becomes so powerful he even manages to strong arm the warden. All the men's activities are taken away, parole hearings are suspended and no visitors are allowed. Finally the men have enough and Lancaster comes up with a plan based on a war-time attack explained by fellow prisoner Soldier (Howard Duff) with chess pieces. The plan is to take out the guard tower and open the gate by attacking it from two sides. They know that many will die during the break in the yard because the one machine gun in the tower will be aimed at only one of the two revolting groups. They take the chance knowing that either one of the attacks will get through while the guards are focusing on the other.

Lancaster convinces a small group of inmates that the break (only dreamed of by others) would happen 1215 the next day during their work in a sewer drain. The men object. They have no money and no plans for what to do once they do get outside the walls. Everyone knows the plans will ultimately fail but eventually they all agree to do it.

Just as Lancaster predicts, one of the men leaks information to Munsey who anticipates the break. Even so, the attack of the tower goes ahead. The break turns out to be an incredibly violent and fiery attempt (lensed by famed cinematographer William Daniels). Most of the small group are shot dead including Lancaster. He does, however, manage to kill Munsey. Unfortunately, when Lancaster gets to the switch to open the gates of the prison, he sees that Charles Bickford – in a desperate attempt to crash the gate with a truck – has actually pinned the giant gates shut. Lancaster dies at the switch frustrated that he ultimately failed.

This was Dassin's first film noir (if you don't count the light comic noir Two Smart People). In just a few years, he would go on to make The Naked City, Thieves' Highway, and his best films Night and the City and later, in 1955, Du rififi chez les hommes.

Prison films have always been popular and they still are. Brute Force managed to stand out as an original work which is a hard thing to do considering the limited amount of things you can do in a prison movie. Brute Force shows men behind bars suffering an overwhelming sense of despair which eventually builds to a violent crescendo that's still shocking today.

http://www.backalleynoir.com/Noir soundtrack three-pack/Legendary Film Noir Movies/14 Brute Force.mp3

[MartinTeller]

(review from May 13, 2007)

Pretty good prison genre flick, done with a lot of Dassin's noir style but falters in a few areas. Despite a delightfully evil performance by Hume Cronyn as the sadistic chief guard, the character is rather over-the-top. Also the prisoners are such a nice bunch of guys, one would think that nobody deserves to be incarcerated. The flashbacks to their romantic lives on the outside were really hokey. I haven't listened to the DVD commentary, but I do wonder if Dassin threw them in there primarily to bring in more women. Overall, however, not a bad movie at all, and easily watchable. Rating: 7

[Adam Lounsbery]

I'm writing a review of Jules Dassin's Brute Force, and I have a question that I hope someone on this forum can help me with.

What is it that Hume Cronyn beats Sam Levene with in his office? It looks like a hardened piece of rubber tubing, but it could also be a metal pipe. Can anyone help me out?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_bEvren9O8V0/Rv62lHsuelI/AAAAAAAAA0o/419fQgpyP_s/s400/bruteforce2.jpg

http://content8.flixster.com/photo/11/63/65/11636518_gal.png

[tterrace]

I always thought it was a length of garden hose. Back then they were usually real rubber, thick-walled and reinforced with fabric mesh, so a piece like this would have some rigidity. A similar section of today's vinyl hose would be limp and floppy. He wouldn't use a pipe because it would be more likely to break bones, requiring medical attention and thus the possibility his torture would be exposed. This way, the guy would just have some nice, painful bruises.

[Nauga]

I'd second that... a length of rubber hose 'specially brought in for the beating.

Those are great stills, Adam. Definitely not the Hume Cronyn people would think of today; he was definitely up there on the noir villain list with this film.

[Adam Lounsbery]

Thanks, tterrace and Nauga.

I think you're both right. I rewatched this scene today and it does look like a length of hose. It's rigid and inflexible, but that backs up what you said, tterrace. Also, the sound effects seem as if that's the case, too. I'm pretty sure I've heard/read references to working over a suspect with a length of rubber hose.

[Adam Lounsbery]

And you're right, Nauga, about what a briliant villain Hume Cronyn is as Capt. Munsey. Despite the fact that most of us don't think "bad guy" when we think of Hume Cronyn, it's not just all the nice guys he's played in the intervening years. Even at the time of the film's release he made an unlikely villain -- he's small of stature, looks like an average Joe, and has a high voice.

But what a brilliant point it makes about how little, unassuming men can commit great evil when they have the force of the law and the approbation of society behind them!

And of course it makes it all the more satisfying when Burt Lancaster finally gets his hands on him...

[Steve-O]

merging with Brute Force thread...

[Davidmk]

I still have to pick up a copy of this , it was on TCM a few weeks back & i only caught part of it .... what i saw looked great !

[Adam Lounsbery]

http://ocdviewer.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/brute-force1.jpg

Snitches get stitches.

Or, in the case of Jules Dassin's Brute Force, they get forced into a giant machine press by a group of cons wielding acetylene torches or they get tied screaming to the front of a mining cart and used as a human shield during a massive prison break.

Westgate Penitentiary is hell on earth. All the cells are filled to double capacity. The warden is a weak-willed jellyfish who cedes all authority to the sadistic Capt. Munsey (Hume Cronyn). There are punishing make-work assignments in the dreaded "drainpipe." Capt. Munsey plants contraband on prisoners just to send them to solitary confinement. And worst of all, on movie night the cons are forced to watch The Egg and I (http://ocdviewer.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/the-egg-and-i-march-21-1947/).

Brute Force is director Dassin's first film noir (and still one of his best). It's also producer Mark Hellinger's second great film to star Burt Lancaster (the first was The Killers (http://ocdviewer.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/the-killers-aug-28-1946/), in 1946).

In 1947, Lancaster wasn't the versatile superstar he would eventually become. He was mostly known for playing "The Swede" in The Killers. The Swede was a lovesick former prizefighter; a big, dumb brute who feels pain, but little else. Brute Force allows Lancaster to stretch a little as an actor. The character he plays, Joe Collins, is the biggest, toughest man in Westgate — on the surface, not that different from The Swede — but he's also a canny tactician who is ruthlessly efficient at getting what he wants. Collins doesn't have a lot of dialogue, but Lancaster's physical performance is phenomenal, and would have been at home in a silent film.

http://ocdviewer.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/burt-lancaster.jpg

It's a cliche to say that an actor's body is his "instrument," but it's true of Lancaster, a former circus performer who expresses more with his body and his eyes in Brute Force than words ever could.

Collins is the de facto leader of the men in cell R17. He wants out of Westgate Penitentiary, but unlike all the daydreaming, hard-luck sad sacks who are behind bars with him, Collins has a plan, and it's a good one. But for his plan to work, he has to have the support of the other five men in cell R17, as well as the cooperation and support of a hardened old convict named Gallagher (played with grumpy gravitas by the great Charles Bickford). Gallagher is up for parole, and he's not sure if he wants to endanger his chances of release by throwing his lot in with Collins.

Brute Force is a film as lean and mean as Joe Collins himself, which makes the sentimental back stories of the convicts feel especially unnecessary. I've seen Brute Force at least three times now, and every time I see it I hate the flashback portions of the film more and more. I don't think Dassin was fully committed to them either, and the abrupt tonal shifts they force on the movie are irritating and unnecessary.

They're unnecessary because in a prison film about a sadistic captain of the guards and his unfair treatment of the prisoners, the audience will naturally identify with the prisoners without really caring about how they ended up in prison. (Imagine a flashback sequence in Cool Hand Luke that shows Paul Newman saving children from a burning orphanage — what would be the point?)

http://ocdviewer.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/cell-r17.jpg

The fact that the audience knows from the outset of the film that Capt. Munsey arranged to have a shiv planted on Joe Collins in order to throw him into solitary is upsetting enough to most people's sense of decency and fair play. We don't also need a ridiculous subplot about Joe's girl on the outside, Ruth (Ann Blyth), who has cancer and refuses to get the operation she needs unless Joe is with her.

Ditto for the backstory of "Soldier" (Howard Duff, in his first film role — he's listed in the opening credits as "Radio's Sam Spade," the role he was best known for at the time). Duff's boyish face and incongruously deep, soothing voice do more to elicit the audience's sympathy than the smarmy flashback in which he's captured by MPs in Italy and falsely accused of murder while distributed food to the hungry.

Not every backstory in the film is sentimental, nor does every backstory paint its criminal protagonist in a great light. But they are all, in their own way, unnecessary. For instance, the audience doesn't need to see the flashback in which Tom Lister (Whit Bissell) gives his wife a fur coat with money he's embezzled to know that he's a white collar criminal. (Although it's always nice to see the beautiful Ella Raines, who plays his wife.) Lister's eyeglasses, his effete appearance, and Munsey's line — "You're no hoodlum, like the others in this cell. Why protect them?" — tell us all we need to know about Tom Lister.

The only flashback I enjoyed and would be sad to see excised from the film is the whimsical story Spencer (John Hoyt) tells about the beautiful girl named Flossie who helped him out of a tough jam only to turn around and take off with his money. Not only is the flashback funny and mercifully brief, it ends with the wonderful line, "I wonder who Flossie's fleecing now."

In fairness to producer Hellinger, who was largely responsible for the flashbacks, he knew what it took to get a picture made, and how to make a picture that would lead to another picture. The top brass at Universal probably wouldn't have been crazy about a grim prison movie with no female characters, so the backstories of the prisoners allowed for several beautiful actresses under contract with Universal to draw people into the theater. (And even though I don't like the flashbacks, I never mind seeing the aforementioned Raines or the beautiful Yvonne De Carlo, who plays Soldier's Italian femme fatale.)

Also, Hellinger's skill at wheeling and dealing helped him negotiate the film's violence around the production code, and for Dassin to get away with things other directors might not have been able to. Brute Force is an extraordinarily violent film for 1947. Of course, it doesn't show what really happens to human bodies blasted by Thompson submachine guns or .30 caliber machine guns, but it implies enough.

http://ocdviewer.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/hume-cronyn.jpg

I haven't said a lot about Hume Cronyn's performance as Capt. Munsey, and I'd be remiss if I didn't praise him. The diminutive, soft-voiced Cronyn is one of the most memorable villains in the film noir pantheon. Cronyn gives "Napoleon complex" a whole new meaning, and he gives lines like "I get quite a kick out of censoring the mail" a creepy, sociopathic edge.

It's pretty clear that Dassin is using Munsey to make a statement about creeping fascism in America. Munsey is a homegrown little Hitler, and just in case you don't immediately get the connection when Munsey professes his simplistic, Social Darwinist philosophy, Dassin drives the point home with the set design of Munsey's office, which includes a giant framed photograph of himself, enormous shotguns which he relishes stroking and polishing, and sculptures and paintings that scream homosexual body worship, not to mention a phonograph on which he plays the overture to Wagner's "Tannhäuser" while brutally beating a hapless inmate (Sam Levene) with a length of rubber hose for information.

Despite a few missteps here and there, Brute Force is a great film, and should be seen by anyone who appreciates prison movies, film noir, violence in the cinema, finely crafted black and white cinematography, or the brilliant film scores of Miklós Rózsa.

A note about Jules Dassin: because of his French-sounding surname, and the fact that one of his best and most well-known pictures, Rififi (1955), is a French-language film, a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that Jules Dassin was French. He wasn't. He was an American who was born in Connecticut in 1911 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He immigrated to Europe after he was blacklisted following testimony about him that was given to HUAC in 1951.

[Harry Fabian]

Excellent review, Adam.

Regarding the subplots, I agree that a lot of that was about marketing, and perhaps beyond Dassin's control. However, I do have a soft spot for Ella and her scene does add depth to Tom Lister's character. Knowing the kind of character Ella played, tells you a lot about how truly weak and obssessed Lister was when Captain Munsey gives him some bad news later in the film. I suppose the refusing cancer treatment until Collins get out of prison is not credible (I didn't believe it), but the studio probably decided that Collins to be a little more sympathetic and needed a better justification for escape than just Munsey's sadism. I'd be very curious as to how many women saw this film during its theatrical run and what their reaction was.

Regardless of any shortcomings, it is a great film and I would go a little further and say that unless you completely abhor violence in film, you should see Brute Force.

[Adam Lounsbery]

Thanks, Harry. Like I said, I never mind seeing Ella Raines (those eyes!) in a movie, but I find her scene in Brute Force more funny than tragic. She encourages her husband to return the fur coat. She can't wear something bought with stolen money! Then she puts it on and strokes it and suddenly looks crazy and says she'll never give it up. I'd find it sexist if it weren't so goofy.

[Harry Fabian]

Yeah, Adam, it seems like a fur drives women crazy in noir-even some of the good girls. I don't think the Raines scene is necessary, but it does give you the noir convention of an essentially good guy (Lister) doing something stupid for a dame who wasn't worth it. When Lister reacts later to Munsey's "news", you sit there and go "Dude, she was a loser, why react that way?" It's mostly Lancaster's film, but Lister's story also establishes even further what a sadist Munsey is. Could they have done it without the flashback? Sure.

I have experienced the same thing you speak of though-disliking certain scenes of a film more and more upon repeated viewings (even though you like the film overall). I think that's pretty natural when you start to really scrutinize films-especially if you plan on writing about them. Of course, it can work both ways, and you can like certain scenes more as well. I'd be very curious if Dassin ever mentioned this film and the flashbacks in any interviews.