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"In the prison of his days," Don Siegel registers the clash of social forces at its most crystalline. He opens in a newsreel flurry before setting the volatile keynote with a sudden shock, a deep-focus vantage from the guard's tower that yields to a quick close-up of the buzzing lock on the grilled fence. Real walls, real cells (dark iron doors against lumpy white rocks represents the bowels of Folsom Penitentiary like streamlined catacombs), the image is a network of grids to be scorched by roiling human tumult. The spark goes off in the isolation unit, between the pummeling psycho (Leo Gordon) and the reasonable vet (Robert Osterloh) is the cinderblock mug of the uprising's leader (Neville Brand). Reform rather than escape is the objective, the press nevertheless has its preferred narrative ("Yeah, wild dogs running wild"), the warden (Emile Meyer) and the commissioner (Frank Faylen) provide the institutional voices. "Good and bad, just like on the outside." Dassin's Brute Force is visible on its way to Becker's Le Trou, though the extraordinary acceleration of visceral combustion is Siegel's own: The tossed tray in the mess hall balloons into full-scale fire and tear-gas in the yard, a hard panning view of the ensuing rubble evokes the landscape after battle. Dynamite and chisel on one side and tied-up hostages on the other for a crunched Doré composition (cf. Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers), the line between slow change and lost cause, an intimation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers ("We all fight for our identity, and you help destroy that"). From this position (tête contre les murs, as Franju would say), a long winnowing process to the calm of Escape from Alcatraz. With Paul Frees, Don Keefer, Alvy Moore, Dabbs Greer, Whit Bissell, and Carleton Young. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |