Pre-Code Parade: HELL'S HIGHWAY (1932)

While Warner Bros.' I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang quickly entered the canon of American cinema, RKO's rival chain-gang picture was quickly forgotten until renewed interest in the Pre-Code era revived the reputation of writer-director Rowland Brown. A Pre-Code character in his own right, Brown killed his own career as a director by walking off multiple projects over creative differences with producers, though he continued to write for movies and TV into the 1950s. He was a very hard-boiled director, on the evidence of Hell's Highway, with some pictorial ambition besides. He puts his chain gang to artistic use, shooting them most strikingly from below and between two files, the chain itself passing over the camera as the men march on either side of the frame. For a few minutes, it also looks like Brown meant to do without conventional narrative. After a preface using real newspapers to show that his story is inspired by real events, Brown offers a montage of bits and pieces of prison life. It sinks in eventually that one convict, Duke (Richard Dix), is going to be our point-of-view character. We also meet more eccentric prison types, from Duke's pal Michael (Charles "Ming" Middleton), a bigamist with a spiritual gimmick for whom prison's a vacation from his wives, to an ambiguously gay cook who tends to flaunt his privileged position and gets a slap on the ass from a guard for one sassy crack. Tensions gradually build as head guard Skinner (C. Henry Gordon at perhaps his most loathsome - he's the man with the whip in the ad) inflicts collective punishment on the men for a missing spoon and condemns an individual convict who collapses on the job to a stay in the "hospital," aka the hotbox,where the victim is shackled in an upright position by neck and ankles and left to roast -- or, in this case, strangle to death. Duke, a bank robber, proves himself a troublemaker and leader of the prisoners, angrily protesting both the death of a buddy and the withholding of spoons at suppertime. The cook is finally showered with soup and beans by the cons, but that only temporarily relieves the tension.

One of Duke's buddies has stolen some extra sets of shackles, and Duke gets the idea that the guards might mindlessly run the chain that keeps the cons still at night through the extra shackles while he and his pals keep their legs free to make an escape. Duke depends on Michael, who isn't ready to leave yet, to keep corrupt guard Popeye distracted. Popeye had sought advice from Michael earlier. He has a sort of spiritual, sort of sexual problem that Michael diagnoses in his best visionary fashion as a cheating wife. That distracts him all right. As Popeye races home to murder his wife, Duke and his buddies make their move -- but here a more melodramatic plot imposes itself, as Duke discovers that one of the new prisoners awaiting processing outside overnight is his own kid brother (Tom Brown). Furious that Johnny had ignored his advice to keep straight and take care of their ma, and fearful that the kid is too soft for the joint, Duke abandons his escape attempt. However, he now has leverage with Popeye, knowing exactly what the guard had done that night.

If anything, Johnny's too tough for his own good and gets into a fight with a guard. That gets him sent to the "hospital," but Duke is able to intimidate Popeye into letting him go. When Skinner sees what's going on, he realizes that he has leverage over Duke and promises easy jobs for Johnny if Duke will give up the work stoppage -- a protest over the spoons and the con killed in the hotbox --on the road the cons are building for a corrupt contractor. Working in the mailroom with a sympathetic warden, Johnny learns that Duke is due to be extradited to another state for a crime that may earn him a life sentence. The news provokes Johnny to stage a mass breakout himself that escalates into a reckoning for several characters....

I hadn't been impressed by Richard Dix's work in the Pre-Code era until this film. He always seemed merely oafish rather than powerful -- his lilting voice may have something to do with that -- but Hell's Highway lit a fire under him, inspiring a tough, aggressive performance that finally made me see something of what fans saw in him for years. He's well supported by a surprisingly likable Middleton in a role that exploits his innate creepiness and makes something amiably comical about it, and by the dependably vile Gordon.

Even if the fraternal storyline drags Hell's Highway back to conventional territory -- and you should see the wildly deceptive advertising describing a film that has women in maybe two scenes as "A Heart-Pounding Story of Love" -- Brown continues to do unconventional things with the story. Perhaps needing to pad a film that comes in at around 63 minutes in its present form, he halts the plot for a digression in which Clarence Muse and a group of black convicts comment on the Popeye subplot by drawing cartoons and singing a Popeye-specific variation on "Frankie and Johnny." Another subplot running through the picture is the case of the stolen spoon. Brown occasionally shows us an unknown figure gradually working the spoon into a shiv, until the figure, who remains unknown, stabs Skinner in the back through an open window as the guard starts his violin practice. The violin business is a wonderful extra bit of eccentricity in this odd, tough little movie, while Brown's refusal to reveal Skinner's killer tells us that individual details ultimately matter less than the film's overall picture of prison life. Hell's Highway dares to end on a comic note as Duke adopts Michael's "yea, brother!" catchphrase, which may undermine the outrage the picture may have meant to generate but tips us off to Brown's more-likely real feeling that all this suffering and struggle is just a great joke.  I Am a Fugitive remains outraged throughout, and that may be while it endured, while the hard-boiled attitude of Hell's Highway is more specific to its time. It may be only certain other times, like our own, can appreciate it.

On the Big Screen: COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

That's right: the big screen for Paul Newman's iconic performance in Stuart Rosenberg's film of Donn Pearce's novel. The occasion was the grand re-opening weekend for the Madison Theater in Albany NY. Located near the College of St. Rose campus, the Madison is a neighborhood movie house dating back to 1929. It was a single-screen theater as late as the early 1990s before the original space was split into two screens. Four more smaller theaters were added later. Under new management, the two primary screens now serve as Albany's first full-time repertory movie house, while the remainder are converted into a live performance space. The revamped Madison emphasizes classic Hollywood, broadly defined, programming films according to a different theme each week. Prices for films and concessions alike are reasonable ($5 for the movie) and I intend to be as much of a regular there as the films justify. Anyone who really loves movies in the Albany area should support a theater that shows old films the way they were meant to be seen -- bigger than life.

For whatever reason the new management at the Madison opened with a four-film Paul Newman festival, also showing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Slap Shot this opening week. Perhaps predictably, I chose the oldest film of the four. Cool Hand Luke is celebrated as a celebration of rebellion, but a closer examination reveals greater ambivalence about the hero's rebellion. In his southern prison, Luke is a reluctant Christ figure in a world without God, or at least a Christ figure who doesn't believe in God. Rosenberg acknowledges the absurdity of the concept, posing Newman in his most Christ-like attitude just after Luke has eaten 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour on a bet. Later, the idolization of Luke by his erstwhile enemy Dragline (George Kennedy in his Oscar-winning role) adds a tragicomic note to the allegory. Luke seems capable of miracles, not just in his capacity for eggs but in his inspiration of the work gang to finish a road job in record time, earning them precious extra hours of leisure. Late, he has a Gethsemane moment in an empty church, asking a God whose existence he doubts whether He has any plan or purpose for Luke, finally interpreting an unpromising omen as a cue to give up his life. Luke himself is as uncomfortable with his eventual role as hero of the work camp as he is with any role life tries to force on him. Rebel he may be, and rebel he may against real oppressors, but Luke's rebellion is no more principled or conscientious than Marlon Brando's in The Wild One. Brando's biker, asked what he rebelled against, answered, "Whaddaya got?" Luke might well answer, as in a moment of fatigue, "I dunno, boss." The movie never tries to explain his rebelliousness apart from noting a broken home -- abandoned by his father, raised by an aunt. He has no theory of rebellion beyond, "just because it's the law don't make it right." For this film's purposes, that's enough.

Luke doesn't rebel for a living. He may well have settled into a stint as idol of the cons had the bosses not insulted and provoked him, sending him to "the Box" on no more pretext than a fear (having seen White Heat?) that his mother's death might drive him to attempt escape. Their own actions provoke the response they feared as Luke makes three breaks for freedom. After the second, his acolytes appear to desert him after he seems to break under physical and mental torture from the bulls, but Dragline's faith is restored when a seemingly tamed Luke seizes a truck and drives off. Dragline needs to believe that Luke had faked being broken, that even as he was clinging to a guard's foot he was planning the third escape. He seems undissuaded when Luke assures him that he was broken and had not planned the truckjacking in advance -- "I never planned anything in my life," Luke insists. Kennedy takes Dragline in an odd direction in these last scenes, turning him from the bully of the early scenes into a Lenny to Luke's George -- a Lenny for whom, in a way, George will sacrifice himself. Yet if Dragline has become as a child in Luke's presence, even as Luke tries to blow him off once and for all, there's a hint at the end that Luke has actually enlightened Dragline in some way. Before Luke, Dragline himself had seemed content to be the king of the cons, but Luke taught him to recognize his chains. That Dragline ends the film shackled actually seems like a sign of progress, proof that he's now travelling Luke's path, for whatever good it will do him. Because Luke himself remains an enigma, Dragline's relationship with him becomes the real story of the film -- which is, I suppose, how Kennedy earned that Oscar.

Stuart Rosenberg wasn't really a great director. He too often calls attention to his and cinematographer Conrad Hall's gimmickry, particularly the mirrorshades of "the man without eyes," and makes some odd pictorial choices like a huge closeup of a singer's mouth during a hymn. But he tells the story smoothly, though Lalo Schifrin's score threatens at times to overwhelm the images, and lets his vast ensemble of character actors do their things. Seeing the picture on a big screen made it more atmospheric, more sensual in a grubby, sweaty sense. It reminds you how a star on the big screen commands not just the screen but the whole theater. Seeing it whole for the first time in a long time also reminded me of how much Cool Hand Luke has influenced the Coen brothers, from their recreation of the mirrorshade man in O Brother Where Art Thou to the echo of Clifton James's orientation speech in The Hudsucker Proxy. It's odd because the Coens have never done anything in spirit like Luke, but it gives you an idea of the impression Rosenberg makes visually, despite what I said above. The film may have a mixed message, but there's definitely no failure to communicate here.

THE THICK-WALLED ROOM (1953-56)

In some ways, Masaki Kobayashi's Kabe atsuki heya is a dry-run for his three-part World War II epic The Human Condition. Set in a prison for "Class B" and "Class C" Japanese war criminals, it may be best grasped as a film noir variation on themes from the longer film. Its protagonists, as Kobayashi sees it, are taking the fall for their superiors. Sure, some of the top guys took the fall themselves -- in an early scene some prisoners indulge in literal gallows humor in the chamber where Tojo was hanged -- but but many others are prospering while the men who obeyed the orders rot in prison. The liner notes for the Criterion Eclipse DVD claim that the Shochiku studio shelved Thick-Walled Room for three years from fear of offending the American occupiers, but while our boys aren't exactly flattered by the film -- and some of us have strangely Slavic accents when actors speak English on screen -- Kobayashi is really pointing the finger at his own people.

The film focuses on the six occupants of one cell. The two main characters are Yamashita (Torahiko Hamada) and Yokota (Ko Mishima). Yamashita's unit took shelter in a native hut on a South Pacific island late in the war and accepted dinner from its friendly occupant. Yamashita's commanding officer doesn't trust the "savage" not to rat them out to the Allies, so he orders a reluctant Yamashita to kill him. When he's somehow fingered as the killer after the war, Yamashita hopes that his commander will absolve him by admitting responsibility at the trial, but the officer, who soon becomes a peacetime politician, proves a rat and a liar. Yokota is an intellectual who served as a translator in a camp for American POWs. His commander forces him to flog a prisoner who dies soon afterward. Whether for that reason or simply for being a camp guard, Yokota is stuck in prison, where he reads Oscar Wilde's prison writings and causes a scandal when he smuggles news of an escape attempt by Yamashita to his brother, a Communist agitator.

Yamashita longs to take revenge on his old commander, and he seems to get his chance when, despite his escape, he gets a one-day furlough. He confronts the frightened man but sees the face of the native he killed when he thinks of killing another man. Conscience-stricken, and also conscious of the trust his fellow prisoners placed in him, he spares the old officer and closes the picture by telling his buddies, "I'm back."

If you've ever seen the American film noir Act of Violence, think of Yamashita's storyline in Thick-Walled Room like that film told from the point of view of Robert Ryan's avenger rather than Van Heflin's guilty victim. 

If Yamashita ends up on the road to readjustment, others aren't so lucky. Another prisoner in the cell is tormented by surrealist dreams of atrocities and finally hangs himself, while Yamashita had only joked of growing a beard -- despite a warning that Americans don't like facial hair -- so he could use it to hang himself. Symbolically, he shaves the beard for his furlough. If Kobayashi himself seems to sympathize with the opinion that the war-criminal prison doesn't purge crimes from humanity, but purges humanity from the crimes, Yamashita's story gives cause for hope, demonstrating that not everyone need be crushed by the ordeal. The Thick-Walled Room is an effective appeal for equitable treatment of Japan's veterans, a plea against killing the spirits of the rank-and-file while the higher-ups make different kinds of killings in the new economy. In his third-directed (though not third-released) film, Kobayashi is stretching his pictorial muscles -- maybe even invoking Citizen Kane when a prisoner sees snow inside a crystal to trigger a flashback -- while keeping the film grounded in the personal stories of the principal prisoners. It ended up one of three 1956 releases for the director now included in the "Masaki Kobayashi Against the System" collection, followed by the baseball drama I'll Buy You and the more noirish-sounding Black River. Look for reviews on this blog in the weeks to come.

DVR Diary: CONVICTS 4 (Reprieve, 1962)

Terrified by a teddy bear wielded by an irate shopkeeper, distraught dad John Resko (Ben Gazzarra), who only wanted to steal a toy for his daughter's Depression Christmas, shoots down the entrepreneur and is sentenced to death. Millard Kaufman's film opens with Resko being prepared for execution, though any suspense is spoiled by the opening-credits acknowledgment that the picture is based on Resko's own memoir. Resko has to shower with four guards watching him and one taunting him for not committing suicide. He has to have one more meeting with his family and see his father talk distantly about atoning for his son's crime by saving someone else's life someday. He gets a last meal and ice cream for his last dessert. Warned that he won't have time to eat it all, he has the guards melt it so he can guzzle it down, sharing some with the most sympathetic guard (Stuart Whitman). With seconds to spare, Resko's sentence is commuted in life in prison and he's transferred from Sing Sing to Dannemora, where Whitman's guard is going also.

Imprisonment is a hallucinatory experience for our hero. He seems to encounter mirages. Was that Rod Steiger introducing himself as a tough head guard in a big speech? We never see him again, and we only know that the character has been referred to later because we saw the character's name -- "Tiptoes " -- under the actor's in the credits. And was that Broderick Crawford as the warden? He has one scene with Gazzara and Whitman and then he's gone. Things are happening that we don't see. After Resko's first cellmate (Ray Walston) tries to kill him for taking a bunk reserved for his years-in-the-making model bridge, the new fish is locked up with Wino (Sammy Davis Jr.), a self-described "walking razor blade" who demands "tribute" from Resko but gets a shoe in the face instead. Sometime later, and offscreen, Resko teaches Wino to read (the only reading matter allowed, alas, is the Bible) and the punk is a reformed, clean-shaven man by the time he leaves. Resko himself proves a harder case. Whitman wants him to channel his feelings into art, having noticed some promising sketches at Sing Sing, but Resko simply wants out. He uses the prison art school as a ploy, telling the cons he can create colored paint for them by boiling their old socks. He does that but also recycles the socks into rope so he can scale the prison wall. Unfortunately, the wall gives way on him and he goes to solitary with a busted arm. Later, he and Iggy (his old enemy Walston) scheme to dig their way out from under the prison, but Whitman figures them out when his keys clank hollowly against the tunnel entrance. That earns Resko four months in isolation, and here he finds his muse at last. With nothing else to do, he uses the heels of his shoes to decorate the walls with crazed art illustrating his self-pitiful life story. The revelation of his work is probably the film's most impressive scene, suggesting a man poised between realizing true potential and simply going mad. But Resko has reached the point where art has become an end unto itself; it matters more than freedom, now. But as Whitman, now the warden, hoped all along, art is Resko's one true escape route. By chance, his work catches the attention of an influential art critic who accompanies the prison commissioner on a tour of the joint. The critic (Vincent Prince in a one-scene cameo playing off his real-life rep as an art connoisseur) is impressed and soon Resko is being hung (he resents the pun) in museums all over New York. His new fame inspires petition campaigns for Resko's early release, the signers including the survivors of his victim the shopkeeper. By now, however, Resko seems little interested in freedom. He fulfills himself with art where he is, and he's still worried about what his daughter, now grown and a mother herself, will think of him....

It's a good guess that Allied Artists hoped to steal some of the thunder from the bigger-budgeted, higher-profile Birdman of Alcatraz with this likewise based-on-fact prison picture. The fact that we know the picture by its second title suggests that all didn't go as planned. It opened in the spring of 1962 as Reprieve, the title of Resko's memoir, but by September it was opening in markets missed the first time around as Convicts 4, a title that, so help me, seems inspired by the popularity of Sammy Davis's previous picture, the Rat Pack western Sergeants 3. One look at the advertising, however, tells you that the new title makes no sense whatsoever. Of the four characters portrayed as the leads, two (Whitman and Steiger) are actually prison guards and Davis leaves the picture before it's halfway over. The second most prominent convict is Ray Walston's Iggy, initially portrayed as a near-psycho but ultimately a comedy-relief idiot, who while not pictured in the ad actually has third billing in the credits. Counting Davis as "Convict 3" the likely candidates for "Convict 4" are teeth-clenching Timothy Carey as a friendly prison fixer and Jack "the Man" Albertson as the prison art instructor. At no time in the picture do any more than Gazzara and Walston act as a team. Gazzara, with help from Whitman, barely manages to hold the film together as a tormented man almost too smart for his own good with no way at first to express himself. But while the film is always attractive to watch, for a prison flick, thanks to Joseph Biroc's black-and-white cinematography, Kaufman's sole effort as a director -- he had written everything from the first Mr. Magoo short to Bad Day at Black Rock to The Klansman -- is an almost hopeless hodgepodge of star cameos and setups that go nowhere. The studio clearly had a hard time keeping track of the convicts, but definitely had too many stars in the mix. Resko's story and Gazzara's performance deserved better.

Pre-Code Parade: 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (1932)

Spencer Tracy paid his dues for five years in Hollywood before becoming a real movie star. He served that time under contract to Fox Film, which had little idea of what to do with him. He usually starred, but his starring roles were usually unmemorable, with a few exceptions that people have probably read about more than they've seen. Like many a contract player, he got loaned to other studios. Warner Bros. wanted him for Michael Curtiz's film version of a best-selling memoir by the warden of Sing Sing prison, partly because James Cagney was unavailable, but also most likely because Tracy had made his name on Broadway playing a tough convict in the play The Last Mile. So 20,000 Years in Sing Sing finds Tracy at a midpoint between his Broadway fame and his real movie breakthrough, since some of his performance for Curtiz anticipates his role in his first hit for M-G-M, Fritz Lang's Fury.

It seems unlikely that the screenplay was based on actual episodes from Lewis E. Lawes's memoir, though the story presumably exploits some of Lawes's controversial policies. Lawes himself is fictionalized into a Paul Long (Arthur Byron), who takes special interest in one of his new prisoners, Tommy Connors (Tracy), after Joe Finn (Louis Calhern), a "deputy boss" for the local political machine urges Long to make things easy for Connors, who has unexplained political connections. The incorruptible Long throws Finn out and decides to make an example of Connors instead. Connors takes his pull for granted until he's assigned a ridiculously oversized uniform and punches an unsympathetic guard. Long orders him sent to solitary until he accepts his uniform, then gets a better idea. He has the guards tell Connors that he can go without the uniform if he wants, but he wont get another. That means he has to parade around everywhere in his equally oversized union suit -- one con says it looks like he has a stash of tools in the bottom of his drawers. Connors remains defiant until he's assigned to work in the icehouse. He then reports to Long in the uniform he tore up, but tells the warden he won't work and never has. Long's answer is to keep him in solitary until he begs to work. After three months -- it seems like three years to him -- Connors cracks and is soon breaking rocks with gusto.

Cons at Sing Sing are given intelligence tests to determine their regular work details. Connors proves nearly as bright as Bud Saunders (Lyle Talbot), a genius criminal with Phi Beta Kappa credentials if not a criminal genius, and both get easy details, while Hype (Warren Hymer) proves so stupid that he's only fit for lavatory detail, Connors's smarts come through again when his girlfriend Fay (Bette Davis) explains her harebrained scheme to seduce Joe Finn into working for Tommy's early release. Tommy warns her that she's playing with fire, since any hint she gives Joe will only give Finn reason to make sure Tommy stays in jail, or never comes out. Ironically, however, it's not his brains but his criminal superstition that stops him from joining Saunders's escape scheme, for which the genius has secretly built a lockpicking machine and assembled a working pistol.Connors meant to join him and Hype, but the escape takes place on a Saturday, Tommy's unlucky day. Not so unlucky this time; while Tommy sits in his cell, Hype and another con are caught when the lockpicker malfunctions, and Saunders jumps to his death after killing two guards for whom his accomplices will burn in the electric chair.

Even though Connors retains his bluster and tells the warden the truth about superstition alone preventing his escape, Long becomes convinced that Tommy's intelligence and honesty make him trustworthy. The test comes when a telegram reports that Fay has been gravely injured in a car accident. Heretofore Long has been shown breaking the will of his charges. Now we see the other side of his penology, the honor system that entitles trustworthy inmates to leave prison for short unsupervised trips. Long arranges for Tommy to see Fay, who's being treated at home, and Tommy promises to return, even if it should mean the electric chair. All seems well, but Tommy notices that it's another Saturday. In the city, trailed by a suddenly suspicious NYC cop who'd brought him to Sing Sing initially, Tommy visits Fay and figures out the truth. She'd foolishly kept on trying to butter up Joe Finn, but drew the line too late and ended up either jumping or getting thrown from a moving car. Joe conveniently arrives as Tommy hides and the cop watches, to offer Fay hush money. Tommy confronts him and fights him. Just as Joe raises a chair to brain Tommy, Fay shoots him from her bed. Both realize that Tommy will be blamed, and the cop is breaking the door down, so Fay gives Tommy the hush money and urges him out by the fire escape.

Of course the cops don't believe Fay's story and the headlines scream that a furloughed criminal has committed murder. The news media crucifies Warden Long, who drafts a resignation letter and has just begun to sign it when Tommy, last seen in a safe house waiting to board a tramp steamer, appears to prove his word and vindicate the warden. This is the part that anticipates Fury, where the big question is whether and when the Tracy character will step up, do the right thing and save men from death for a murder they didn't commit -- Tracy's. But Fury's is a happy ending compared to 20,000 Years. Tommy Connors confesses to the shooting of Joe Finn, and Fay is incapable, due to questionable credibility, of convincing jurors of the truth. That means death for Tommy -- and in the unflinching fashion Warner Bros was capable of almost uniquely among Pre-Code studios, there will be no pardon or reprieve. Instead, Tommy convinces Fay that telling the truth won't help them, since they would still be separated for decades if Tommy serves his original term and Fay goes to jail. "We can never be together" he explains, combining an older pathos of renunciation with the Warner hard-boiled manner.

The real Warden Lawes seems like a real self-promoter -- note how he's billed above the stars of the picture. He welcomed Curtiz to Sing Sing to give many scenes documentary authenticity. The director's dynamic framing of action and sharp, shadowy cinematography by Barney McGill ensure a smooth fit between location and studio scenes. Tracy and Davis, in their only screen pairing (before it would have been a major event) have convincing chemistry, and the Warner players are their usual stalwart selves. This could be Arthur Byron's best ever showcase; he holds his own with Tracy every time and his understated authority grounds a sometimes questionable storyline. Lawes/Long is an interesting movie subject at a moment when many Americans seriously considered the necessity of dictatorship. Many of the movie warden's comments are double-edged, especially his assertion that only in prison, under his supervision, are all men truly equal. The warden might and probably would be handled differently in other eras, but the film we have reflects the Pre-Code era's paradoxical longing for authority in a way that may make it uncomfortable viewing today. But without reading politics into it, it remains a brisk, forceful film and an early hint of what Spencer Tracy was capable of and would achieve later.
Here's what looks (or sounds) like a British trailer for the picture, uploaded by omemeister.

R. (2010)

Time for a change of pace -- so how about a Danish prison film? This debut film co-directed by Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm is as dark and merciless an entry in this genre as I've seen in a while, an uncompromising descent into hell. R stands for Rune (Pilou Asbek), who's in trouble as soon as he's left in his prison "house" because he'd stabbed a friend of one of the skinheads inside. He's hardly settled before he has to beat up "the Armenian" and bash the man's teeth in against a set of stairs in a suggestively sickening bit of violence -- the victim's face is wrapped in cloth so we don't see the worst. That still leaves Rune the low man on the totem pole, subject to constant humiliation and menace. A neat freak, he's soon put to work by the convicts cleaning toilets and the like while they mess up his "house" and draw obscene cartoons on photos of his girlfriend. Asbek's face is locked in a glower of perpetual desperation that seems entirely appropriate to his situation.

But R also stands for Rashid (Dulfi al-Jabouri), a Muslim con close to Rune's age who came in on the same transport and is stored with other Muslims on the level below Rune and the skinheads. Co-workers on the kitchen staff, Rune and Rashid figure out their own toilet-delivery system involving the shells of Kinder Surprise eggs to make themselves useful to the intra-penitentiary drug trade and lift some of the pressure off their heads. Theirs seems an unlikely alliance across ethnic and religous lines, but similar alliances are possible for the purpose of preying on the young convicts and betraying whatever group solidarity exists behind bars. The film demonstrates with grim certitude that it would make no difference had we followed Rashid rather than Rune through the entire picture, as their fates prove all too similar.

You could believe that Noer and Lindholm intended their movie as a corrective to Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete, the French film hailed as the best prison film of the past decade. Without disparaging Audiard at all, his tale of a young con's unlikely rise to power in prison looks like a melodramatic adventure tale compared to the miseries of R. While Audiard was working with a larger context of demographic change in the French underworld, Noer and Lindholm make their drab prison a nightmare of perpetual bullying adolescence. The banal decorations -- potted plants in the halls and such -- give the Danish pen a dormitory look that invites comparisons between the sufferings of Rune and the hazings of a private school. The cruel genius of the story is the way the directors present the intense Asbek as a ticking bomb, but thwart our expectation of release through some ultimate explosion. At a crucial moment, the focus shifts from Rune to Rashid to emphasize their commonality rather than either man's exceptional potential.

Even more cruel, perhaps, is the co-writers' determination not to reduce the trouble with prison to racial or religious conflict. Instead, they give us ample evidence that humanity itself, in the stunted form that flourishes in stir, is the essential problem, and that race or religion offer no real security to anyone, except possibly at the top of the parochial food chain. R's spiritual cruelty may turn off many viewers, but it's also the film's chief virtue -- take it or leave it. For the writer-directors it's a formidable debut, and considerable credit is also due to cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck and set decorator Holger Vig for creating a suitably bleak, often evilly banal environment for the story. Noer, Lindholm and Asbek won the big Danish movie awards this year, and without seeing their competition I feel confident that they earned them.

Here's a trailer -- with regrettably censored English subtitles, uploaded by NewTrailersUK.

LE TROU (1960)

A man stops working on his car and addresses the camera. He informs us that his friend the director Jacques Becker based the movie we're about to see on a true story. It's the man's own story, and he's an actor in it, but he won't be playing himself. His plan to escape from prison inspired a novel by Jose Giovanni, an ex-con in his own right and a key figure in French crime literature and film. Le Trou ("The Hole") adapts that novel, and the real con, Jean Keraudy, plays his fictional avatar, Roland Darbant. Becker himself, perhaps best known in America for the noirish Touchez pas au Grisbi, didn't live to see the film released.

Keraudy/Darbant is one of four cons who've volunteered for work making cardboard boxes in their shared cell. They're joined by a fifth prisoner, Claude Gaspard (Mark Michel), who's been transferred while his original cell is under repair. Claude faces an attempted murder charge for taking a shot at his wife. It's a he-said-she-said situation and doesn't look good for him. He may be desperate enough to be trusted with his new cellmates' secret. The pile of cardboard the guards have nicely brought in for them is going to conceal a hole they mean to dig through the cement floor of their cell. That should get them into the service corridors, and from there they hope to get into the sewer system and escape through a convenient manhole cover. Their cell is an enclosed room, and they'll do their digging by day, when the sound should be obscured by the other noises of daily routine. Claude ingratiates himself with his cellmates by sharing his food packages and joins in the step-by-step, day-by-day business of finding a way out of prison. He comes to respect the industrious cons and experiences an ironic kind of rehabilitation through labor, until word comes that his wife is going to drop the charges against him. He may be able to walk out the front door, but what does that mean for his new friends who plan an earlier exit?...

The view through a cell door via "periscope" -- a shard of glass mounted on a toothbrush. A typical instance of convict creativity in Le Trou.

Le Trou is a prison-break movie but not a crime film. Giovanni and Becker don't have a study of the criminal mind in mind. Instead, the movie is very much about the ennobling quality of work, even if that work contradicts the rehabilatory purpose of prison confinement. However bad the prisoners may have been on the other side, they demonstrate all the bourgeois virtues of teamwork and time-management as conspirators, even improvising their own hourglass so they can keep track of time while digging underground. They also demonstrate working-class solidarity, until the moment when Claude gets an exclusive chance at freedom. What happens later leaves you asking who the real criminals are.

The French seem to excel at a certain kind of open-ended thriller. While thriller scenarios often involve races against time, deadlines or ticking clocks, French filmmakers like Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville are good at letting a situation develop in naturalistic fashion while instilling a sense that something bad could happen at any moment. Le Trou has a perfect example of this on the first day of digging in the cell. The cons peel away some slats of parquet flooring and start whacking away at the hard surface beneath with a tool cannibalized from a metal bunk frame. The sound is alarmingly loud; it seems impossible that the guards won't hear it, but we've been insured that they won't really notice. Meanwhile, Becker focuses on that patch of floor as the cons hack away at it. It looks like a real floor and you can hardly choreograph the digging process. You can't know how long it should take, though one con has said, "In an hour we'll be through or we'll be caught." It'll be a make or break scene for any viewer. Some will want to fast-forward until the cons hit paydirt. Others will be riveted by the suspenseful illusion of an arduous real-time task with men's fates at stake.

Becker has prefaced the action with long character-developing scenes as Claude befriends the other cons. By the time they go to work, you should be on their side, especially after they experience the casual (as opposed to the violently cliched) humiliations of prison life, from routine pat-down searches to seeing their food shipments manhandled and torn up by guards in search of contraband. Maybe they deserve it, but Becker's compassionate, humanistic stance seems to be that no one should have to live like that. Arguably, he and Giovanni stack the deck in the cons' favor by focusing on their humanity rather than their criminality, but you'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to root for the cons or for Claude not to screw them over when an opportunity arises.

Most of the commentary I've seen on Le Trou treats the film as some sort of response to a different kind of breakout movie, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped. I haven't seen that film, though the comparisons make me want to do so. All I can say is that, on its own terms, Le Trou is one of the better prison-break movies that I've seen.

On the Big Screen: UN PROPHETE (2009)

Jacques Audiard is a French writer-director who's brought American influences into his country's crime film genre. His previous picture, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, was a do-over of James Toback's Fingers. I haven't seen Fingers, but I liked Audiard's film for the most part, so I was willing to give him another shot, especially when Un Prophete was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. This time the influence is more Scorsesean, but since Martin Scorsese has never made a prison film, Audiard gets points for originality. I also see the influence on the soundtrack; Alexandre Desplat must share time with a variety of pop tunes, often sung or rapped in English (have the French no version of Mackie Messer?). For all I know, this sonic atmosphere reflects the reality of the French underworld, but it also makes the film seem slightly less French somehow, though this isn't a criticism of the film. In fact, the foreign music on the soundtrack is in keeping with the globalization of crime portrayed in the picture as the traditional French criminal element gradually yields to more exotic growths.

The "prophet" of the title is Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a friendless small-timer on his first stretch in prison. He's the ultimate new fish or greenhorn; he can't keep the guards from confiscating his one 50-franc note or two goons from mugging him for his sneakers on his first outing in the yard. In his complete isolation he needs to become protected (literally a protege). He won't pay the price another prisoner, Reyeb, demands -- oral sex. But he soon finds himself with no choice but to pay the price the Corsican mob demands -- accept Reyeb's proposition, but kill him. The Corsicans run the show in stir; they're like Paulie's gang in Goodfellas' prison interlude. After messily doing his duty (he must carry a razor in his mouth), Malik becomes the unlikely protege of Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestup), the old top dog of the Corsicans, gradually earning privileges while availing himself of the prison education system. As a loner, Malik finds himself able to move among different ethnic factions, befriending a Gypsy drug dealer who tells him of a stash of opium that Malik acquires during a furlough arranged by Cesar for the Corsican's own purposes. With help from his former prison tutor, now on the outside, Malik sets up his own drug racket, smuggling stuff into the prison and enhancing his own position, but risking his standing with Cesar, who needs him to keep clean in order to keep getting furloughs. But a shift in political winds reduces the Corsican cohort in this particular prison, threatening Cesar's power despite his continued influence over the hacks (guards). Outside, Corsicans, Italians, Arabs, Egyptians and others vie for power, creating more opportunities for Malik to build alliances and play groups off each other, even as things get more dangerous for him.

What makes Malik a "prophet?" The one time anyone calls him that in the film is when he saves himself from angry gangsters by warning them that deer are about to run into the path of their car. He had, in fact, dreamt about deer on the road earlier in the picture. That's one of the fantastic elements Audiard introduces, as if in acknowledgement of the implausibility of Malik's rise to power. The main recurring fantasy feature is the ghost of Reyeb, who chats with Malik occasionally to no real purpose, except perhaps to establish the protagonist's "miraculous" credentials. But Malik is mainly a prophet in a more mundane sense, on the historical model of a man of obscure origins who rallies disparate people together to become a power in the world. He's no preacher or lawgiver, and he's not particularly charismatic, but he has the power to inspire trust, especially as he learns to be up front about his agenda. When a clique of Muslim cons accuse him of trying to use them, he disarms them, metaphorically speaking, by asking, "Why not?" He takes advantage of the deer incident to confirm his captors' suspicion that he'd killed their friend Reyeb, and they spare him. Even Cesar, who's determined to keep him in a servile role most of the time, ultimately enlists him in a final hare-brained scheme to reassert his power on the outside because he trusts Malik more than others. When Audiard calls Malik a prophet, he doesn't mean the sort of dude who isn't honored in his own country -- not one of those Hebrews who gets killed for denouncing their rulers -- but a prophet on the specific model of Muhammad: a gifted man who overcomes his persecutors and may end up ruling them all, after his hijra in prison.

I don't know if the mystical elements really help the story, but they don't really hurt it, either. Un Prophete is a complex, intense and occasionally brutal crime thriller that kept me engaged for its entire 155 minutes. Audiard does a great job of getting you enraged at the injustice of a prison system that allows cliques to run amok and torment hapless individuals like Malik, whose comeback gets you rooting for him to beat the system and the system within the system. There are moments of major suspense when Malik's outside errands for Cesar put him in peril, or when he has to improvise when a climactic hit doesn't go according to plan. Rahim and Arestup are great in a rivalry that plays out under the surface of their scenes together, when Malik must maintain his servility and Cesar must pretend that he still runs things. And while the American influence is undeniable, Audiard never neglects his native social and demographic context. With Un Prophete he's helped keep the great French crime film tradition alive and well.

Here's an action-packed British trailer uploaded to YouTube by TheMovieJam: