Excepting the shifting loyalties that pockmarked The Big Steal, Count the Hours and Private Hell 36, this prison muckraker was Don Siegel's first real film. After wadding through the newsreel opener (with an American Prison Association mouthpiece pinning a recent wave of penitentiary riots on the "criminal negligence" of the penal system), the film sketches in the set-up with a beautifully delineated terseness -- one-shot character introductions, a rookie guard cold-cocked, the prison corridor erupting as the cons pour out. The setting is overcrowded, understaffed Cell Block 11, with the inmates, led by Neville Brand, trying to steer the chaos toward some recognition of their demands (more room, less beatings) while warden Emile Meyer scrambles to get the hostages out in one piece. Tackling harsh penal conditions, media manipulation (only interested in "mad dogs running wild") and even a bit of homophobia, the movie's social conscience stimulus is lifted above armchair liberalism by a skepticism that sees the exploding tensions of the riot as essentially useless in bringing about change, despite attempts to wring hope out of the bleak finale. Much of the shunning of simplicity can be traced to maverick producer Walter Wanger, who contributed to Richard Collins' script, but the dry, cynical tone (not to mention the dynamic crosscutting of the violence) belongs to the director. In fact, the setting is a literalization of the societal prison entrapping so many of Siegel's outsider protagonists -- the image is continually pierced by bars, grids, intruding verticals and diagonals. (Siegel's use of Clint Eastwood in Escape From Alcatraz twenty-five years later reveals an autumnal abstraction of the same environment.) With Frank Faylen, Leo Gordon, Robert Osterloh, Paul Frees, Alvy Moore, Dabbs Greer, Whit Bissell, and James Amberson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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