Time has diluted the impact of Brute Force, but this prison drama from 1947 remains a good film, largely because it doesn’t live up to the title.
There is brutishness, but not too much. For much of its length, in fact, it’s a study of character, of how men who are all packed together in an overcrowded prison get along together, or don’t.
Richard Brooks wrote the screenplay and Jules Dassin directs. This was the first of Dassin’s run of great movies – The Naked City, Thieves’ Highway, Night and the City and Rififi would follow. Burt Lancaster is the star, in his first film since his breakout in The Killers, and slots in alongside a good cast, not shining too brightly, playing the ensemble good boy for the most part.
Brooks’s screenplay follows template prison-drama lines. There is a breakout planned, which Lancaster’s Joe Collins is involved in, a sadistic chief guard, played by Hume Cronyn with plenty of sexual ambiguity, a warden who just wants a quiet life and an interfering politician who demands more discipline, more punishment.
Lip service is paid to these staples but Brooks and Dassin have other concerns. Inverting the gendered way men and women interact with the world, this is about men who are “inside” and women who are “outside” and the screenplay regularly switches into flashback mode, when Joe was out and a free actor in the world, as were Tom (Whit Bissell), Spencer (John Hoyt) and Robert (Howard Duff), all caught in tender thumbnail sketches at just the moment when they were about to be apprehended.
Down the hall from where six men share a cell with only four bunks (this is never explained) there’s a character called Calypso, played by calypso singer Sir Lancelot, who keeps up a singing running commentary on activities, and in the medical section there’s the drunken doctor (Art Smith) with a liberal streak a mile wide, whose feelings on keeping men incarcerated like animals is made clear throughout.
As for the brutality that shocked audiences, it is there, but there’s not very much of it, and the film has clearly not set out to brutalise its audience, more to educate them. That said, Cronyn’s scene with a prisoner he’s trying to get information from, using what looks like a piece of lead pipe, is squirm-inducing, and there’s an earlier scene in the prison workshop where the jailbirds take revenge on a stool pigeon by chasing him into a hydraulic press, where he’s turned into an airmail letter.
There’s a lot of depth to this movie, and that extends to its looks, which are the realm of director of photography William Daniels. He was Garbo’s favourite lighting guy, worked with Von Stroheim and would later win an Oscar for The Naked City. Here he apes Brooks’s screenplay – stark and punchy, nothing too fancy but we always know where we are and what we’re dealing with.
It’s often bracketed as a film noir, which led some reviewers of the time to suggest that the women in the men’s lives are femmes fatales. This is nonsense. The men are the agents of their own misfortune and have not been gulled by women or by fate. Whatever else they may be, all the jailbirds in this movie are guilty of one crime or another.
It’s what you do with criminals that is the movie’s concern – if you prick them do they not bleed etc? Which Brooks, Dassin and co make abundantly clear in the film’s final shot, of the doctor breaking the fourth wall to address the camera directly with a plea for compassion. This movie’s clear message: rehabilitation not revenge. You don’t get much more unambiguous than that.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
