(POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)
"Brute Force" is a prison drama, directed by Jules Dassin, who was soon thereafter blacklisted in Hollywood, went abroad, made "Rififi," married Melina Mercouri, made "Never on Sunday" etc. etc. "Brute Force" dates from 1947, a moment when the Stalinist line on the arts was taking a particularly sharp turn toward the crudest formulas--in that year there was a sharp debate in the CPUSA's cultural magazine, Masses and Mainstream, between the screenwriters Albert Maltz and John Howard Lawson (both of whom later served time in Federal prison as members of the Hollywood Ten) over whether art must always be viewed as a weapon in class struggle. (Maltz suggested maybe not, Lawson insisted yes; the dispute was eventually closed by a declaration from V.J. Jerome that Lawson was right, and Maltz was obliged to engage in "self-criticism" for his Browderite errors.)
So here's Burt Lancaster as prisoner "Joe Collins" (and if the assonance of that name is an accident then I am the Grand Duchess Anastasia.) In a back story we learn that he's serving time for organizing bank robberies (students of Stalin's biography, or legend, please note); now he's masterminding a mass escape. The prison warden (Hume Cronyn), made up to look uncannily like Goebbels, struts around his office in jodhpurs and a black Sam Browne belt; when he gets ready to torture a prisoner for information, though, he strips to the waist--no, I'm not making this up--and puts on a recording of Wagner.
Then we have Charles Bickford, editor of the prison newspaper and clearly cast as the voice of misguided reformism; he opposes the prison break, arguing that publicizing the warden's brutality will eventually win better conditions, but is cruelly betrayed, and comes to see the wisdom of Collinsism. Jeff Corey plays one of Lancaster's subordinates but shows his true colors in a key scene: when Lancaster asks the others what position they want to take up in the actual breakout, Corey answers "I'll go last, to cover our back," which sounds plausible until you realize that the others all give the only right answer, which is "Wherever you want me, Joe." Of course Lancaster immediately grasps that Corey is the traitor, presumably because he displays the capacity for independent thought, and so indeed it proves.
Wait, there's more. There is only one Black prisoner, whose job in the joint is to sweep the floors; known as Calypso (I *swear* I'm not making it up) he sings all his dialog in rhymed couplets. And there's the prison doctor, the spineless petit-bourgeois intellectual, who sympathizes with the prisoners but is bullied into inaction by the warden; he drinks and utters despairing commentary.
Pervading this tale is a misogyny so deep and unquestioned that the filmmakers would probably have been astonished to have it pointed out to them. Yet all the prisoners whose stories we learn are there essentially because of the perfidy, greed, lust, or other vices of women in their lives--all except for Joe, who in a scene calculated to induce whiplash smoothly exits a long black getaway car to a house with a white picket fence, where dwells his sweetheart--a crippled girl, in a wheelchair, her nether parts covered by a thick plaid blanket. He swoops her up in his strong arms and carries her about, doll-like, while she squeals with delight--she is, in other words, completely desexualized and infantile, the only kind of woman (the script seems to be saying) that a man can trust.
The square-up is the ancient device whereby dubious themes or images are cleansed in the last few minutes by some clumsy explanation: it was all a dream, or the lurid images had a sober educational purpose, or some such. But what's the square-up in a Stalinist parable? It's a noir dead end! The prison break goes off the rails, the warden gets his fiery come-uppance but the prisoners don't get out, the state cops retake control with great bloodshed, and the prison doctor gets the last word: "They didn't escape. No one ever escapes." In short Hollywood endorses this bleak Sartrean view by way of trumping the rest of the movie's pitch for the wisdom of Comrade Collins.
"Brute Force" is a prison drama, directed by Jules Dassin, who was soon thereafter blacklisted in Hollywood, went abroad, made "Rififi," married Melina Mercouri, made "Never on Sunday" etc. etc. "Brute Force" dates from 1947, a moment when the Stalinist line on the arts was taking a particularly sharp turn toward the crudest formulas--in that year there was a sharp debate in the CPUSA's cultural magazine, Masses and Mainstream, between the screenwriters Albert Maltz and John Howard Lawson (both of whom later served time in Federal prison as members of the Hollywood Ten) over whether art must always be viewed as a weapon in class struggle. (Maltz suggested maybe not, Lawson insisted yes; the dispute was eventually closed by a declaration from V.J. Jerome that Lawson was right, and Maltz was obliged to engage in "self-criticism" for his Browderite errors.)
So here's Burt Lancaster as prisoner "Joe Collins" (and if the assonance of that name is an accident then I am the Grand Duchess Anastasia.) In a back story we learn that he's serving time for organizing bank robberies (students of Stalin's biography, or legend, please note); now he's masterminding a mass escape. The prison warden (Hume Cronyn), made up to look uncannily like Goebbels, struts around his office in jodhpurs and a black Sam Browne belt; when he gets ready to torture a prisoner for information, though, he strips to the waist--no, I'm not making this up--and puts on a recording of Wagner.
Then we have Charles Bickford, editor of the prison newspaper and clearly cast as the voice of misguided reformism; he opposes the prison break, arguing that publicizing the warden's brutality will eventually win better conditions, but is cruelly betrayed, and comes to see the wisdom of Collinsism. Jeff Corey plays one of Lancaster's subordinates but shows his true colors in a key scene: when Lancaster asks the others what position they want to take up in the actual breakout, Corey answers "I'll go last, to cover our back," which sounds plausible until you realize that the others all give the only right answer, which is "Wherever you want me, Joe." Of course Lancaster immediately grasps that Corey is the traitor, presumably because he displays the capacity for independent thought, and so indeed it proves.
Wait, there's more. There is only one Black prisoner, whose job in the joint is to sweep the floors; known as Calypso (I *swear* I'm not making it up) he sings all his dialog in rhymed couplets. And there's the prison doctor, the spineless petit-bourgeois intellectual, who sympathizes with the prisoners but is bullied into inaction by the warden; he drinks and utters despairing commentary.
Pervading this tale is a misogyny so deep and unquestioned that the filmmakers would probably have been astonished to have it pointed out to them. Yet all the prisoners whose stories we learn are there essentially because of the perfidy, greed, lust, or other vices of women in their lives--all except for Joe, who in a scene calculated to induce whiplash smoothly exits a long black getaway car to a house with a white picket fence, where dwells his sweetheart--a crippled girl, in a wheelchair, her nether parts covered by a thick plaid blanket. He swoops her up in his strong arms and carries her about, doll-like, while she squeals with delight--she is, in other words, completely desexualized and infantile, the only kind of woman (the script seems to be saying) that a man can trust.
The square-up is the ancient device whereby dubious themes or images are cleansed in the last few minutes by some clumsy explanation: it was all a dream, or the lurid images had a sober educational purpose, or some such. But what's the square-up in a Stalinist parable? It's a noir dead end! The prison break goes off the rails, the warden gets his fiery come-uppance but the prisoners don't get out, the state cops retake control with great bloodshed, and the prison doctor gets the last word: "They didn't escape. No one ever escapes." In short Hollywood endorses this bleak Sartrean view by way of trumping the rest of the movie's pitch for the wisdom of Comrade Collins.