Jules Dassin passed away yesterday in Athens at age 96. The various obituaries tend to mention up top of his status as a blacklisted filmmaker and the husband of Melina Mercouri. Also mentioned first among his impressive achievements are the international thrillers he made during his Hollywood exile: Topkapi (1964), Never On Sunday (1960) and Rififi (1954)

For me, he was one of the founders of American Film Noir. Each venture into this genre was another breakthrough: The Naked City (1948) with it’s unvarnished location photography; and Night and the City (1950) shot in London, rendered as dark and dangerous as any Noir American city of the period.

But my favorite film of his– and definitely one of my all-time favorite films– is Brute Force (1947). This is one of the earliest film noir– and definitely one of the darkest.

Produced by Mark Hellinger as a follow-up in spirit to his 1946 hit The Killers, It told the story of Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) a defiant, charismatic inmate in a grim penitentiary. It eventually becomes imperative that Joe must escape, which sets in motion a chain of events that leads somewhere beyond tragic, violent and senseless.

Now I’m making a fine distinction here. The are plenty of tragic, violent and senseless movies out there today. New ones come out all the time. The Saw and Hostel series come immediately to mind: a newer example would be last month’s Funny Games. But Noir films play to a higher standard. Sure, they were probably had the same visceral impact during those Hays Office times as the torture porn disguised as horror flicks has these days, but these restrictions on on-screen carnage forced film Noir to tell compelling stories.

It is possible Dassin was trying to make this a “message” film about prison reform, and his progressive credentials (which got him blacklisted) certainly align with this tale of hardened cons in a brutal prison run by a feckless warden, a sadistic guard captain (played by Hume Cronyn: those who remember him from his gentle old man roles need to see him here as a crypto-Nazi torturer), overseen by a government that wants criminals out of sight, period.

But the message transcends mere prison reform. Brute Force is an essay on the hopelessness of human existence. The prison is our world: escape is impossible, kindness and charity are ephemeral, if not illusory. The last lines of the film are spoken by the prison doctor, who looks out from his office through a barred window and mournfully proclaims: “Nobody escapes. Nobody ever really escapes.”

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 7:25 am and is filed under General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.