-Devdutt Trivedi
Jules Dassin’s Brute Force begins where a previous noir would have ended, with the anti-heroes trapped by the ‘federales’, or cops, and put behind bars. The film follows in the direction first established by Anatole Litvak, an important noir director who excelled in making the claustrophobia sub-genre of noirs, which examined a set up of characters within a single space over the course of the entire film. Litvak’s outstanding works include The Long Night (1947) and The Snake Pit (1948) and serve the function of building up the claustrophobia noir aesthetic with their exploration of the depths of single space through its characters.
These films usually employ camera movements and specific cutting to different parts of the interior space explored, which could either be a prison, as in the case of Brute Force, a mental institution as in the case of Budd Boetticher’s Behind Locked Doors(1948), or simply an apartment in urban America, as in Anatole Litvak’s masterful The Long Night. These set of noirs reached their crescent in the masterful mental sanitarium set claustrophobia which has become the epitome of the noir’s ability to create pathological affect: Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963). The film is the first important prison noir and is perhaps the only satisfactory noir produced around the prison cell, complemented later by the likes of Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) and John Cromwell’s Caged (1950).
The film was produced Broadway columnist Mark Hellinger who having worked with Warner Bros and Fox, worked as Hollywood’s only Independent Producer at Universal. He was a pre-cursor to the studio back indie film production system that would be fully fledged only by the late ‘60s and then become an established career move for film makers in the late ‘80s. His first film was a production of Ernest Hemmingway’s The Killers (1946), directed by Robert Siodmak which was Burt Lancaster’s debut; which Lancaster followed up by playing the lead role in Brute Force, as the rebel leader Joe Collins.
Lancaster came in as a replacement for Wayne Morris, a Warner backed star who could not work with Hellinger when his studio refused to loan him out to Universal. The film is an important work in both Hellinger’s and Jules Dassin’s career and is a stepping stone on their way to their next collaboration, the docu-noir Naked City completed in 1948. According to James Ursini, Hellinger wanted to work with the same actors from The Killers and included minor actors from the former such as Charles McGraw. The film was scripted by Richard Brooks who spent two weeks in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta to complete research on the film in order to try and replicate the feeling of what it was like to be in a real penitentiary.
The film is chock-a-block with actors who played landmark roles in other noirs. Included in the cast are Jeff Corey from Fourteen Hours, Sam Leven (another Hellinger backed actor) from Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, Charles McGraw who played Detective Sergeant Colonel Brown in Richard Fleishcher’s The Narrow Margin and Whit Bissell of Raw Deal and He Walked by Night. The lead roles, other than Lancaster’s part, went to actors from important noirs, mainly to Art Smith, playing Captain Munsey, who would later play an important part in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and Charles Bickford, a frequent collaborator in the works of Otto Preminger including Fallen Angel(1945) and Whirlpool(1949). Playing the spouses and girlfriends of the prisoners, presented across
the flashbacks, are several important female leads: Ann Blyth from Mildred Pierce, Ella Rains from Phantom Lady and Yvenne De Carlo from Criss Cross.
According to Alain Silver Lancaster’s performance is influenced by the actors that defined late Expressionist cinema. Expressionism was a silent film movement in Germany which used visual forms that emphasized darkness and shadows along with jagged set designs to capture the state of Germany following the First World War. Lancaster’s acting is reminiscent of the parts played by F.W. Murnau’s actor Emil Jannings and the great American horror film actor Lon Chaney Sr. Silver describes Lancaster’s performance as that of a ‘suffering male with a hero’s façade.’ Dassin later commented on being disappointed at not being able to have really violent men populate the prison. Perhaps Dassin is suggesting that he would like to reduce their performativity and instead simply document their behavior. This move would make the film enter the realm of a psychoanalytical documentary instead of an ‘action’ oriented noir.
In the case of Brute Force, the ‘villains’ are not the ‘criminals’ but the law enforcers, a common theme in film noirs. Brute Force is different from an underworld noir like Hawks’ Scarface(1932) and similar to Walsh’s White Heat (1949), in its depiction of a nomadic space which is also a negative space belonging to the state but without any permanent residents i.e. residents who ‘belong there.’ Dassin has been described by critics, when describing his exposure to literature, as being ‘over-read’ (along with Joseph L. Mankiewicz who is also labeled in the same way). Dassin creates a form of coding so as to make the state law enforcement organization become a symbol for fascism. Dassin along with his left-wing contemporaries wished to comment on changing socio-political trends in America after the War and their eerie resemblance to Hitler’s Germany. Dassin underlines this in the sequences around the prison warden, Munsey (Herme Cronin) who resembles Hitler in his behavior and speech as well as in his love for the music of Richard Wagner.
The references to Hitler’s Germany are a comment on post-War American society which, for Dassin and his friends at the Actors Laboratory in Los Angeles, was becoming increasingly fascist. The film consists of actors such as Roman Bohnen and Art Smith from the Group Theater which emphasized the theories of the Russian master actor, Constantin Stanislavksi. These actors usually had along with their director Jules Dassin’s associations with leftist organizations in America and were blacklisted during the HUAC period between 1949-’50 following which they were out of work or forced to migrate abroad.
The film consists of several of the noir cycle’s trademark characteristics. The most striking of these is the use of the flashback. Dassin uses this tool to highlight different aspects of the characters in a territorialized setting i.e. to contrast society with the null identity of the prison. He also has his characters engage in non-psychological banter, the kind of material one finds in the pulp novels of Raymond Chandler or in Albert Camus’ masterful The Outsider. Another common noir tool used by Dassin is the use of the femme fatale. The ‘femme fatale’ has been often been read as a comment on the emancipation of women following the war and symbol for male jealousy. This reading is best symbolized by the image of Yvenne De Carlo in Siodmak’s Criss Cross (also produced by Hellinger) and the cigarette smoking Virginia May of Raoul Walsh’s White
Heat ; two of the noir cycles most important works both completed in 1949. Also used are the trademark flashbacks, which are indication points referring to ‘previous noirs’ leading the character (usually the protagonist) to his present situation in prison. These flashbacks build towards a climax different from that of the film with the last flashback being the most significant of the lot.
The film owes its form and aesthetic to Expressionism, if not in its baroque forms, to its approach to film as being primarily a visual medium with the frame being the most significant aspect of the film. The frame denotes the aura of the film within its layering and often consists of frame within frames. It also borrows from the Existentialists, particularly Jean Genet, an obsession with the male body form through Lancaster’s physique, which the famous actor was aware of and proud of .This masculinity which also denotes weight and therefore materiality transforms the realist nature of the single location film into an affected nightmare recalling the best early works of Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1919).
The ending chapters of the film are particularly subversive as Munsey becomes a parody of Hitler. The captive members of the prison rebel against the state and the existentialist discourse becomes explicit in the sequence where Charles Bickford crashes into the wall in an attempt to free the prisoners. According to Silver the unmediated violence was acceptable to audiences only because of the Second World War newsreels which were much more explicit in their documentation of brutality than the studio backed Hollywood cinema could ever be.
The film which stands out in the careers of Lancaster and Jules Dassin, is a cornerstone of the noir cycle, and is perhaps the most important prison noir made in the cycle’s history.
References:
Alain Silver and James Ursini
The Dark Side of The Screen: Film Noir, Foster Hirsch, Da Capo Press, 2008