Film Noir: Escaping One Prison for Many By DAVE KEHR

July 26, 2013

Escaping One Prison for Many By DAVE KEHR From The New York Times

“Crashout,” a 1955 film noir directed by Lewis R. Foster, begins under the opening credits with a violent prison revolt, much of it constructed from footage borrowed from Don Siegel’s “Riot in Cell Block 11,” released just one year earlier. As crowds of angry men brave machine-gun fire from the guard towers and surge toward the prison walls, a few get over the top and run for cover. Foster singles out six of the escapees with individual close-ups, labeling each with the name of the actor who plays him.

Here are a half-dozen of the most recognizable performers in the genre: William Bendix, returning to his roots in noir after a few years of playing a cuddly sitcom dad on the television series “The Life of Riley”; Arthur Kennedy, who had moved on from the original cast of “Death of a Salesman” to play a remarkable series of morally ambiguous figures in films like Anthony Mann’s “Bend of the River” and “The Lusty Men”from Nicholas Ray; the gnomish character actor Luther Adler (who provided such memorable villainy in the John Wayne adventure “Wake of the Red Witch”); William Talman, a pioneering screen psychopath (in films like Ida Lupino’s 1953 thriller “The Hitch-Hiker”) who later found fame as the eternally unlucky district attorney on “Perry Mason”; Gene Evans, the growling fireplug who was Sam Fuller’s favorite top sergeant (“The Steel Helmet,” “Fixed Bayonets!”); and the boyish Marshall Thompson, who had played a murderous mental patient in Gerald Mayer’s innovative 1950 thriller “Dial 1119.”

“Crashout” is structured around names and lists: a later sequence reintroduces the characters with a montage of their individual wanted posters, and as each escapee is brought to earth in turn, the wanted posters reappear, with the word “deceased” stamped across them. The film becomes a grim game of Six Little Indians, as each of the characters is systematically eliminated — film noir fatalism at its starkest.For Foster, “Crashout” may have been an escape attempt as well; there is certainly little else like it in his long and varied filmography, which includes Laurel and Hardy shorts, the original story for “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and a long run of low-budget westerns and adventure films made for Pine-Thomas Productions, which supplied B-movies for release through Paramount. “Crashout” was Foster’s first film after his association with Pine-Thomas ended with the frothy 3-D musical “Those Redheads From Seattle,” and the film’s starkness and brutality, even at a time when restrictions on screen violence were loosening, could hardly provide a more vivid contrast with Foster’s past work.for the rest go here:
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