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Storm the tower, torch the cage: "Well, gentlemen, that's one way of getting sprung." War is the lynchpin of the furioso allegory, ingrown fascism in the vertical structure of a uniformed sadist looking down on a captive lumpen-proletariat. "One big bomb" describes Jules Dassin's penitentiary, inmates go from crowded cells to a Dantean pit, the purgatory within the purgatory. At the top are the craven warden (Roman Bohnen) and the vicious security chief (Hume Cronyn) angling for a promotion, the humanistic physician (Art Smith) has become a mordant voice in a haze. Capo (Charles Bickford), soldier (Howard Duff), gambler (John Hoyt) and embezzler (Whit Bissell) populate the behind-bars microcosm, the convict leader (Burt Lancaster) steps out of solitary and builds toward the uprising. (The breakout is planned with chess pieces as a battleground remembrance.) "I was just thinking, an insurance company could go flat broke in this prison." Sinew against concrete, not the government of rehabilitation but the tyranny of punishment. Snitching inside is the major offense, complete with its own ceremonial retribution: One stoolie is pushed by blowtorches down the jaws of a metal press, another is tied to a mining cart and propelled toward the guards' bullets. The pin-up poster on the wall is everybody's feminine altar, she's the gamine in the wheelchair (Ann Blyth), the wife in the fur coat (Ella Raines), the casino double-crosser (Anita Colby) and the Italian villager (Yvonne De Carlo), glimpses of the outside world. Kubrick's gladiators and Peckinpah's desperadoes are anticipated in a riot culminating in an image from Overthrow of the Titans, though not even Molotov cocktails can fracture the institutional grid. (The bewildered closing words belong to the fallen doctor, just another prisoner of the system.) With Sam Levene, Jeff Corey, Jack Overman, Sir Lancelot, Vince Barnett, Richard Gaines, and Jay C. Flippen. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |