Another batch of titles has been added to the shop’s online store, and this time it consists of Jack Arnold’s “Revenge of the Creature,” Jules Dassin’s “Brute Force,” and Michael Crichton’s “Runaway.”
“Brute Force” was the first of two films that Dassin directed for producer Mark Hellinger, who essentially drank himself to death by the age of 44, just before the release of their second picture, “The Naked City.” For Lancaster, it was the follow-up to his starmaking role as “the Swede” in Robert Siodmak’s “The Killers” (he actually shot “Desert Fury” before “Brute Force,” but the former hit theaters after the latter). The film, loosely based on a real life prison riot at Alcatraz, was mostly marketed on the notion that it contained a level of violence that far surpassed anything previously seen onscreen. It features a harrowing performance by Hume Cronyn as a sadistic warden, whose penchant for playing Wagner while torturing his victims was a clear message to audiences that he was a stand-in for Nazism.