Rent Brute Force (1947)

Painful Prison - Brute Force review by NO

Violent but excellent prison drama.Hume Cronyn as the sadistic warden is at his best and Lancaster is his usual brilliant self as is Bickford.Good idea to show the women who put them there and the photography works well in B&W.

Bleak - Brute Force review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Julie’s Dassin’s bleak prison break drama has Lancaster as Collins the leader of seven men all cooped up in a single cell in an overcrowded powderkeg prison. It’s never revealed why he is there although we do see a brief backstory of why he wants to escape. The prison is run by an ineffectual warden with the real power wielded by Capt Muncie (Cronyn) who seems polite and softly spoken but is revealed to be a power mad sadist who will use any means necessary to achieve his aims. A plan is laid but it soon becomes apparent that Muncie knows and has laid a trap but the prisoners are so desperate that they go ahead anyway fully aware of the consequences. The final break is superbly staged with multiple action scenes as utter chaos descends and Muncie becomes totally unhinged. It’s a really bleak take on the human condition and for it’s time really quite violent - a stool pigeon is forced under a huge metal press and others characters are sacrificed in a increasingly pointless manner. Lancaster is as always solid in the role but it’s Cronyn with his skin crawling performance that you take away from it - 4/5

Brute Burt - Brute Force review by CH

Is prison an extreme form of boarding house? The thought comes to mind during Brute Force, although any landlord would find it hard to rent out a room which houses seven men who can only leave its confines for hard labour and a queue to receive unappetising gruel.

Others here have summarised a plot which turns around ribbed fit Burt Lancaster's plan to escape all this and visit a wife beset by cancer (four women appear briefly in the film, each given a brief section which sets out their part in the reason for a man ending up beind bars). Pitted against the prisoners is sadistic guard Hume Cronym. He has supplanted power from the bumbling Warden who lives only for retirement. Cronym's very expressions embody an Evil redolent of the recent German death camps (Wagner plays on a gramophone while he slugs a prisoner with a lead pipe to squeal information). Director Jules Dassin brings a noir pace to all this; it is matched by the light and dark, and vile weather, of William Daniels's cinematograph to make something palpably real of what, in other hands, would seem preposterous. It is also a masterclass in the use of sound.

It is not too fanciful to see here, as with much noir, an emblem of society at large - no less so, an astonishing eighty years on.