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Film Description
The tagline nails it: ‘Raw! Rough! Ruthless!’.
Inspired by, among other things, the recent ‘Battle of Alcatraz’ from 1946, where rebelling prisoners opted to die rather than surrender, this is a brutal and brooding prison-set film noir in which Burt Lancaster’s hardened inmate Joe Collins plans to break out of Westgate Prison to get to his sick wife. Standing in his way is Hume Cronyn’s sadistic prison guard. As the film builds to its explosive climax, Dassin makes evocative use of William Daniels’ noirish imagery, but the power comes from the performances and the grim brutality of Richard Brooks’s screenplay. One of the best prison movies ever made.