The film that made the greatest impression on me this week was Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (1947). Brute Force is a prison, film noir drama that definitively still stands up today. It is a classic in every way with supurb acting from Burt Lancaster as the prisoner Joe Collins. The film starts with rain pouring down at the gates of Westgate Penetentiary, introducing us to the dreary, mean and moody atmosphere of noir films. 

The prison is a dark place, six men in one cell, a very repressive, cruel environment where the only chance to stay sane is to cherish memories of loved ones and to keep some kind of unity within the cell. The prisoners only see one alternative and that is to break out. It builds to a tremedous climax, which I will not spoil.

The film is full of great lines describing the claustrophobic, grim setting the men are in. At some point Joe turns back to his cell after solitary confinement and his cellmate tells him that they have looked after his interests and that things are okay. Joe answers: ”Everything’s okay? What’s okay? Nothing’s okay. It never was and it never will be. Not till we’re out. You get that? Out.”

Brute Force led my mind to the genre film noir, defined by the dictionary as ”a motion picture with an often grim urban setting, photographed in somber tones and permeated by a feeling of disillusionment, pessimism and despair”. Classically film noir stands for Hollywood crime drama, extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. This is the period when soldiers came back from the war, often with war trauma’s, mentally exhausted and alienated, amassing and looking for work in the big cities. It is the cinema of the city, filled with fear, corruption and brutality. In many of the top noir films you find reference to the war experience of the protagonist, although that is rarely the central theme. It is generally about seemingly decent, innocent people who are tortured by angst and disorientation and who realise that life has turned its back on them. So, there is a strong sense of dark, disturbing doom, when they try to take what life has not given them.

Even today we are confronted with urban violence, unrest and shootings. Once again there has been an inflow of exhausted, disoriented people who might experience that life has not been kind to them. The thought struck me that revisiting noir films of the 40s and 50s might help us to better understand something of the tensions, grimness and despair that these circumstances bring along and might be the basis of some of those violent expressions. What do you think?

Let me end with adding some other noir films that are on my top list, a list far from complete. I invite others to complement with their favourite film noir titles:

• Out of the Past (1947) by Jacques Tourneur
• The Killers (1946) by Robert Siodmak
• Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955) by Robert Aldrich
• Touch of Evil (1958) by Orson Welles

Rinus Nov 2018

*Image posted for non commercial purposes
under 'fair use' of copyright material in recommendation of the film

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