|
The capitalist grid, couched in jailhouse fatalism out of Ionesco (Le Solitaire) and Warners (Each Dawn I Die). Prison life, or the prisons of life. Joseph Losey's camera is set high to dwarf the convicts in the penitentiary yard, and low to accentuate the lattice of bars hemming them in. Stanley Baker is the volatile human mass amid the metallic hierarchies and power clashes, his going-away present before parole is a baby-faced squealer (Kenneth Cope) clobbered by a burly bullethead. (The warden bids him an ineffectual adieu: "Don't come back here again. You're worth better things.") London outside the walls is a windowless flat cluttered with alienation fetishes, a racetrack waiting to be robbed, and the desolate landscape where the loot is buried. Only uniforms separate the chief guard (Patrick Magee) and the gangland boss (Sam Wanamaker), spurned virago (Jill Bennett) and soothing kitten (Margit Saad) are equally informed by Cleo Laine's ballad: "All my sadness, all my joy, came from loving a thieving boy." Losey is a peerless engineer of cramped spaces exploding into frenzy—a beating muffled by chanting and clanking, a jazzy party punctuated by a jilted lover's thrashing, an incendiary riot that turns top dog into stool pigeon. The most piercing moment is one of trembling quiet as the director dims the lights and lends the foreground to the "crazy" inmate (Brian Phelan), whose aria of breakdown is a stunning chink in the film's macho armor. "Your sort doesn't fit in an organization" (cp. Polonsky's Force of Evil), "one passport and one airplane ticket to nowhere" are rejected for the snowy, furrowed field at the end of the line, just another cell. Cinematography by Robert Krasker. With Grégoire Aslan, Rupert Davies, Laurence Naismith, John Van Eyssen, Nigel Green, Noel Willman, Tom Gerrard, Kenneth J. Warren, Tom Bell, Neil McCarthy, and Murray Melvin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |