Jules Dassin - Brute Force (1947)

William K Everson writes:
Brute Force was touted as being by far the toughest and most violent prison film Hollywood had ever made. Many European censors felt the same way and scenes were shortened for overseas release. Actually, the violence is essentially surface violence, and earlier prison films had been rougher in a psychological sense. Nevertheless, with all of those noir icons in the cast and behind the camera (especially Miklos Rosza’s music) the film made a welcome break in the increasingly formularized cycle of big-city crime noir films. Silver and Ward in Film Noir sum it up rather neatly: “Functioning as a blatant allegory for an existential vision of the world (Sartre’s No Exit can be seen as a theatrical counterpart) the prison of Brute Force becomes a living hell from which escape is impossible.” While it doesn’t date as a film, it is ironic (and a little sad) that current excesses of explicit violence on the screen are such that, by comparison, this nearly-fifty-year-old film now seems almost a model of decorum and relative restraint.