May 26-June 1, 2005

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Brute Force (Fri., May 27, 8:30 p.m., $7, Eastern State Penitentiary, 22nd and Fairmount sts. ) Prison-break movies are off-limits in real houses of correction, but the decommissioned Eastern State is fair game for Secret Cinema's screening of Jules Dassin's high-drama yarn. Drawn from Richard Brooks' script, Brute Force stars Burt Lancaster as a rock-jawed inmate with a yen for the outside air and an effetely effective Hume Cronyn as a sadistic head guard. Dassin liked to marry pulp forms to socially conscious themes, which sometimes produces a kind of leftist camp. (I suspect the reference in Barton Fink to a wrestling movie in which the main character "wrestles with his soul" is a dig at Dassin's Night and the City.)

Fond of Wellesian high angles and showy deep focus, Dassin is a relentlessly self-conscious stylist, amping up the climactic prison riot to gladiatorial proportions, an instinct that jars with Brooks' desire to make each of his inmates an average Joe, complete with heart-tugging flashbacks in which their crimes are laid down to economic need. Dassin would do better with the just-the-facts approach of Rififi, but William Daniels' cinematography is often stunning, and Cronyn's slyly menacing performance will come as a shock to those who only remember his kindly roles.

Piccadilly ($29.95 DVD) A hit at the 2004 Philadelphia Film Festival, this British-made, continent-minded 1929 silent comes to DVD appropriately embellished with a host of historical materials on the movie's unofficial star: Anna May Wong, the laundryman's daughter who became a Chinese-American star. This story of life in London's swank, debauched nightclubs doesn't give Wong top billing, but it's clear whom E.A. Dupont's camera really loves: When Wong's Shosho takes the floor of the titular nightclub, the movie's old-world ornateness suddenly turns futuristic. Milestone's characteristically rich disc includes segments of a panel discussion from the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (although oddly, especially given the venue, the issue of Wong's bisexuality never comes up), as well as the movie's invaluable press kit and excerpts from five Wong biographies, most published during the recent bout of fascination with Wong's career.