Brute Force is a robust, testosterone-soaked action picture.
It’s about as manly as movies get, and yet it paints such a different picture of masculinity than the one seen in the robust, testosterone-soaked action pictures of my youth. Those were movies like Commando or Bloodsport, where men were measured primarily by how they filled out a birthday suit while kicking people in the neck. Heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme were such bad actors, it almost seemed like that was the point; that to even attempt realistic human emotion was not appropriate male behavior. Though I have a soft spot for those sorts of movies, I found the men of Brute Force refreshing. These guys are tough, no doubt about it, but they’re not afraid to actually present a few emotions other than deadly assertiveness and assertive deadliness. And when we do need a little I-will-kill-you-with-my-gaze-style smouldering, we’ve got Burt Lancster giving the stink eye and he does it about as good as anyone in history.
Lancaster is Joe Collins, a prisoner desperate to escape from Westgate Penitentiary Island, which is ruled over by brutal head guard Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn). Brute Force is obstensibly about Collins’ escape plan, but those form relatively late in the film; much of the rest is given over to the horrific milieu of 1940s prison life, where the only voice of sanity is an disgraced, alcoholic doctor and snitches get a lot worse than stitches (specifically they get flattened to death inside an enormous press in the prison metal shop).
If Cronyn sounds like an unusual choice for a despotic prison guard, he is. But it’s also emblematic of movie itself; he doesn’t necessarily look the part, but man can he act it. And if it might be tough to initially buy Cronyn as the kind of guy who might be able to intimidate men around him into toeing the line, Capt. Munsey’s Gitmo-ready control techniques (and the disturbingly casual nature with which Cronyn enacts them) quickly change our impression. This is one of the great “a good actor can convince you of anything” type roles. I thought of Hume Cronyn before this as a grandfatherly onscreen presence. But as Munsey he is a truly despicable villain.
When I say this movie is packed with guys (a male-female ratio we might term dude density or, simply, “dudensity”) I mean it. The movie is set entirely within the walls of Westgate; the opening credits slowly bring us inside, and end with the doors shutting and its bridge rising, symbolically indicating that the audience is now stuck inside with the inmates. As such, there aren’t too many women on the grounds, so a feminine touch comes via an interesting device. Collins’ cell R17 has an absurdly tame calendar girl pinup on the wall, and each cellmate in turn gives it a flashback-trigger look that returns them to a time before their imprisonment. Each shows how the significant woman in each of their lives was responsible for their incarceration.
Now that could play as misogynistic, but it doesn’t. In all but one case these women are not the femme fatales we’d expect. They’re not sending their men out to steal or kill for them. Most of their stories are a good deal more tragic; one inmate is a soldier who got busted for stealing food from the U.S. Army to feed his Italian lover and her cruel father. These scenes add a melancholic dimension to the film, and while it doesn’t always excuse the criminal’s behavior, it sometimes add a humanizing dimension (and permits some of the best examples of the more complex acting that I was so impressed by). I read on Wikipedia that director Jules Dassin, who later dismissed this film as “stupid,” fought against the use of the flashbacks because they “watered down the film.”
With respect to the very talented man who made this superb film, I disagree. They don’t water down the film so much as they leaven it. Brute Force is, true to its title, absolutely brutal (the ending is particularly intense for a studio film of the era). The flashbacks provide the audience their only respites from its harrowing realities and show that a real man doesn’t use brute force because he enjoys it but because feels that has no other choice.
2 responses
Really nice write-up. I’d forgotten how strong the ending was, and am going to have to check out the film again.
Another great little film piece. I’m an obsessive Dassin fan — Night and the City and Rififi are about as good as movies get — and Brute Force is one of my faves.
@ Neil: I don’t want to get into an argument about whether Citizen Kane is “boring,” for a couple of reasons. First, I get the feeling that you spend a lot of time explaining why it’s a boring movie; no doubt you’ve got some well-honed talking points at the ready, to which I’ll only be able to respond, lamely, “But … it’s … so … good!” Second, whether a movie is “boring” is mostly subjective, making it a silly thing to argue about. (I say “mostly” because The Hours has actually been scientifically proven to be boring.) I’m sure that most of us find the Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean movies deadly dull, and yet: there wouldn’t be any point trying to convince a fan of either of them that while he thought he was being delighted, he was actually being bored.
But I really hate that “us” at the end of your comment.
Setting aside Citizen Kane’s historical significance and reputation — speaking purely subjectively — I LOVE that fuckin’ movie. Many of my friends claim (though maybe they’re lying?) to love it too. I wouldn’t argue that it’s a perfect movie — and discussions of whether any movie is “the best of all time” are inherently ridiculous — but the idea that Kane is universally regarded as boring sounds a little bit insane to me.
Of the few people I’ve met who’ve found Citizen Kane “boring,” most of them have been pretty dumb. They find the movie boring mostly because it’s in black-and-white … and, also, because it “has too much talking.” You’re obviously not dumb — I gather that you’re some kind of teacher or professor? — and you seem to know film … which makes you, I guess, the first exception. I’m sure your students are bright, and if you say they find “Citizen Kane” boring, I’ll concede that your students are additional exceptions. But, still: rare exceptions.
I was a film studies major and took a number of grad-level film classes while I was working towards a degree in a different discipline, and even the hardcore contrarians — the ones who were into making obnoxious claims like “Garry Marshall’s films are superior to Billy Wilder’s!” — didn’t talk about how boring Citizen Kane was. It seems like the kind of thing they’d WANT to do . . . but maybe insisting that Kane was dull was just a bit too far-fetched?
This might seem like a long comment in response to a few throwaway words, but that’s just the point. Tearing down great (and exciting) works of art with casually snobby remarks — and adding words like “we” to create the illusion of consensus, and an aura of uncoolness around the thing you’re tearing down — isn’t discussion; it’s anti-discussion.
So you think Citizen Kane is teh ghey. Why?
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