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The lifer's intransigence is an aesthetic approach, stated early ("You ain't got much, but you keep subtractin'") to place the story on a Frostian even keel ("A Drumlin Woodchuck," plainly). Five decades behind bars begin in Leavenworth with hulking momma's boy Robert Stroud (Burt Lancaster) and his nemesis, the reformist warden (Karl Malden). The angry mind reveals itself in isolation, in solitary confinement the murderous "dingbat" takes a shine to a fallen sparrow and gradually expands his cell into an aviary. The walls are the eggshell that won't hatch, the move to Alcatraz is a mere shift from one perch to another. "My friends, I give you the illusion of freedom. Take it." In this exhaustive abstraction of the John Frankenheimer social outcast, biopic earnestness cloaks the caustic absurdity of men who turn to canaries just so they don't stab each other and then grow old together anyway. It's about the laborious work of rehabilitation and science, about being taught compassion by a peeved guard (played by Neville Brand, in tender reference to Riot in Cell Block 11), about a show-off star and a show-off director coming up with ways to crack their hemmed-in surroundings. And it's about the Ovidian metamorphoses of supporting players: Telly Savalas' monologue about ugly parrots and ugly girlfriends, the mouth twitch that places Thelma Ritter in Frankenheimer's gallery of maternal gorgons (All Fall Down, The Manchurian Candidate), Betty Fields' look of hurt with one hand pressed against the glass cage. In the smoking battlefield of a failed penitentiary uprising, a moment of clarity. "One thing I learned is not to abuse time." The codger's wry contemplation of the modern world in the epilogue is sent up by Bertolucci in 1900. Cinematography by Burnett Guffey. With Edmond O'Brien, Hugh Marlowe, Whit Bissell, Crahan Denton, and James Westerfield. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |