What's with all the breathless 10 ratings? Ridiculous! What's snowed everybody is the great performances, but they're all in the service of a cliché-ridden melodrama, with a downbeat, portentous ending, to make the audience nod their heads gravely.
Here's the pitch (remember, it's 1947): Penitentiary as Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, complete with warden as weak commandant, chief guard as sadistic Gestapo officer, and brutal guards and, of course, an escape. They even play Wagner! The convicts are all good guys (except for the squealers), with tiresome flashbacks to tell us they were mostly done in by women. There's a single black con to pointlessly sing calypso. The parts are caricatures, but the acting is great -- with fine debuts by Howard Duff and Whit Bissell -- and there are some good lines.
There are also pretty good production values. Mark Hellinger knew how to produce "raw, gritty" stuff (and he died far too soon), and Jules Dassin, who would do Hellinger's last movie, The Naked City, and later the seminal caper flick Rififi, was good at directing it. But the story is really nothing more than the "prisons make criminals" same-old same-old. "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" did it much earlier and far better.
This movie didn't make Burt Lancaster a star. Like Brando would later, this electrifying new star made the movie a success. He and the other fine performers have obviously made the movie seem better than it really is.
Here's the pitch (remember, it's 1947): Penitentiary as Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, complete with warden as weak commandant, chief guard as sadistic Gestapo officer, and brutal guards and, of course, an escape. They even play Wagner! The convicts are all good guys (except for the squealers), with tiresome flashbacks to tell us they were mostly done in by women. There's a single black con to pointlessly sing calypso. The parts are caricatures, but the acting is great -- with fine debuts by Howard Duff and Whit Bissell -- and there are some good lines.
There are also pretty good production values. Mark Hellinger knew how to produce "raw, gritty" stuff (and he died far too soon), and Jules Dassin, who would do Hellinger's last movie, The Naked City, and later the seminal caper flick Rififi, was good at directing it. But the story is really nothing more than the "prisons make criminals" same-old same-old. "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" did it much earlier and far better.
This movie didn't make Burt Lancaster a star. Like Brando would later, this electrifying new star made the movie a success. He and the other fine performers have obviously made the movie seem better than it really is.