Product: Brute Force [DVD] [1947] (1947)
Rating: 2.0
Man - hate! Woman - love!
"Nothing's okay," Westgate Penitentiary inmate Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) says, "I gotta get out." That's because the sadistic screws are keeping the otherwise tractable inmates down with BRUTE FORCE. You treat a man like an animal and he turns into one, right?At least so sayeth the usually reliable director Jules Dassin in this overripe movie about a prison on the edge of explosion. You see, the bad guys - the inmates - have a backstory, told in a series of flashbacks, that proves they're good guys under the prison grays. They just got hooked up with bad women who made them do bad things. Flashbacks don't lie. They don't necessarily entertain, or keep a movie chugging onward at a comfortable clip, but they don't lie. The prison officials, on the other hand... the otherwise decent warden is weak and vacillating. The avuncular doctor drowns his reprehension in brandy, emerging from his alcoholic stupor periodically to crack wry about the inhumanity of it all.The baddest good guy is Capt. Munsey (`Sir' to you), Hume Cronyn, an effete sociopath with a blood taste for dishing it out (he seems particularly fond of whips) and a penchant for the insinuating seduction.I wanted to like it, but as BRUTE FORCE plodded forward, piling melodramatic excess on melodramatic excess, I found myself fighting it. Fighting the notion that everyone in effective authority was a heartless goon, the ineffective ones were broken (presumably by the ruthless System), and the inmates were misunderstood choirboys. Despite its good looks, good performances and exciting final scene I had too many "Aw, c'mon" moments to honestly say I liked this movie.The transfer print is in good condition, and the disk includes a hands-free Stills Pressbook Gallery with a number of behind-the-scene photographs, publicity stills, lobby cards and posters.