Joe Collins
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Brute Force: Directed by Jules Dassin. With Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford, Yvonne De Carlo. At a tough penitentiary, prisoner Joe Collins plans to rebel against Captain Munsey, the power-mad chief guard.
Edward Curtiss. As hard-hitting as its title, Brute Force was one of Jules Dassin’s first forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama with a scathing critique of the punitive American incarceration system at its heart.
Released from solitary confinement, prisoner Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) learns that his supportive wife, Ruth (Ann Blyth), is refusing surgery to treat her potentially deadly cancer,...
At a tough penitentiary, prisoner Joe Collins plans to rebel against Captain Munsey, the power-mad chief guard. At overcrowded Westgate Penitentiary, where violence and fear are the norm and the warden has less power than guards and leading prisoners, the least contented prisoner is tough, single-minded Joe Collins.
Brute Force, American film noir, released in 1947, that presents a grim portrayal of prison life, highlighted by a memorable war of wills between a convict and a sadistic guard. The setting of Brute Force is Westgate Penitentiary, where the brutal Capt. Munsey (played by Hume Cronyn) uses torture.
Brute Force isn’t just one of the best prison films ever made, it is a must-see film noir, with its ugly portrayal of a doomed society, about to implode in a raging sea of uproar and abandon. The misery is laid on thick, as is the tension, and there is even something brutal about the setting ― an almost modernist prison at times, with its ...
Widely considered the greatest prison film of the noir cycle, Jules Dassin’s Brute Force is unflinching, desperate, and depraved, like a primal scream intended to release pent-up energy but accomplishing nothing in the end. From the opening scene, in which rain pours on a hopelessly gray prison courtyard, the film forecasts its existential ...
