This story of the half-dozen inmates in Cell R17 of a prison that looks something like Sing Sing is pretty earthy stuff. What a cast. Burt Lancaster is the leader of the attempt to break out. The other cell mates include Jeff Corey, Howard Duff, and Whit Bissell, and John Hoyt -- who was the Martian with three arms in a "Twilight Zone" segment, as well as Decius Brutus in MGM's "Julius Caesar". Charles Bickford is the prison's newspaper editor and Sam Levene is the prison reporter.
On the staff side of the cast list, Roman Bohnen is the weak-willed prison warden, Jay C. Flippen and Roy Teal are corrections officers, and Hume Cronyn is superb as the Captain of the Guards.
I kept thinking how easily this could have been a film about Stalags or concentration camps in World War II Germany. Escape is hopeless. (The code in 1947 would never have permitted a successful escape from prison.) And Cronyn is a kind of Nazi figure. He's smooth and ingratiating when necessary but his real character is revealed during a hair-raising scene in which he tries to get Sam Levene to spill the beans about the escape plans. Cronyn interrogates Levene and taunts him, while Wagner is playing on the phonograph. When Levene isn't forthcoming, Cronyn pulls down the shades, dismisses the witnesses, and begins beat the handcuffed Levene with a rubber hose.
The inmates are all essentially good guys. Flashbacks fill in their back stories. They were either dumb and impulsive or committed a crime to help their marriages or to get money for a girl friend's operation. Either the writer didn't know much about inmate culture or that culture has changed a great deal in the years intervening since its release.
At one point, the weakling warden has an interesting, if brief, exchange with the placid Cronyn. Cronyn remarks, "You set the rules, but I have to enforce them." He's right about his awkward position. He belongs to a class that the sociologist Robert Park called "marginal people," along with top sergeants, head nurses, and factory foremen -- not management and not quite labor. Of course, not every person occupying a marginal status needs to caress his rubber hose with such relish.
There are a couple of murders, a suicide, and a riot. There's plenty of action. At the same time, prison movies are by their nature depressing. The clothing and surroundings are so bleak and grating that, no matter what happens, one's spirits sink.
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