• U.S.

Cinema: The New Pictures, Feb. 15, 1954

4 minute read
TIME

Riot in Cell Block 11 (Allied Artists) is the best prison movie produced in years. It employs what Hollywood chooses to call the “semidocumentary” style—which generally means only that the picture has no love story. In this case, it means something resembling clever crusading journalism, with a weather eye on the circulation figures. There is a moral in Producer Walter Wanger’s tale: the need for reform in U.S. penal institutions is critical. The moral is slickly coated with violence, however, and the pill should go down easy with the mass public.

The plot is patterned on the prison riots of the last year and a half, when thousands of convicts in 35 prisons revolted, sometimes seized guards as hostages, and demanded better food and living conditions. That is what happens in Cell Block 11 of the unidentified prison in question. The convicts, led by a long-termer (Neville Brand), present their demands to a state mediator. He arrogantly rejects them. The riot explodes into other cell blocks. The prisoners run berserk in a thoroughly frightening scene of rage in the mass. In the end, the governor signs the prisoners’ petition. The rioters disband. The pressure off, the state legislature repudiates the governor’s act. Has anything been gained? A little, perhaps; on the other hand, 30 years have been added to the ringleader’s sentence.

The best thing about Riot is its mood of driving concern to get certain facts about prison life before the public. The camera seeks them in the hate-dark faces of prisoners, on the power-cold features of officials. Here and there it stares to find a human face: the warden (impressively played by Emile Meyer) is a figure as granite-hard as his prison walls, but a chisel of harder experience seems to have gouged his face with understanding.

Producer Wanger’s interest in prison reform grew out of personal experience: in 1952 he served 98 days of a four-month sentence in Los Angeles County Honor Farm for shooting an actor’s agent whom Wanger suspected of having an unprofessional interest in Mrs. Wanger (Cinemactress Joan Bennett). His life in prison jolted him into a strong, new social consciousness.

Says he: “The repercussions of the prison problem are enormous. The cost of maintaining these places is tremendous to the taxpayer. The idea is vaguely rehabilitation. But of the 95% of inmates who are released, 65% come back to pris on. So prisons must be a failure . . . I felt the obligation to make this picture exciting enough to wake up taxpayers and the women of the country. If the women are aroused, something will be done about it.”

The Great Diamond Robbery(M-G-M) is Red Skelton’s second attempt in as many pictures to play it straight. If he had succeeded, The Great Diamond Robbery might have been an even more amusing picture than Half a Hero (TIME, Nov. 9). Instead, the stiff upper lip of a surprisingly mature wit goes into a maudlin flap of baby talk before the end of the first reel. Nevertheless, the plot is so neatly stacked, and the rest of the players so well handled by Director Robert Z. Leonard, that the moviegoer gets a pretty good deal.

Comedian Skelton is cast as Ambrose, a second-chisel man in a big Manhattan jewelry store, a diamond cutter whose tragedy is that he just buffs up the big ones for somebody else to blast. The big one in question is a stupendous rock called “The Blue Goddess.” and some chiselers of another sort than Ambrose are interested in her. A foundling who has searched all his life for his parents, Ambrose thinks he has found them at last. Actually, he has run into a couple of shills for an underworld magnate (George Mathews), who is planning to heist the diamond and figures that Ambrose is the perfect patsy. The mobster tries to get his victim to “borrow” the stone and cut it at home, but meanwhile the women in the caper unexpectedly drift into a nest-building mood over the poor motherless boy, and decide to put him wise to the double-cross. How Comedian Skelton cracks the conspiracy and the Goddess with one wild stroke of the old slapstick provides a real Keystone Kop finish.

Skelton’s supporting cast is excellent. Dorothy Stickney, as a ginned-away shop lifter redeemed by delusions of mother hood, is enormously funny. Cara Williams, the love interest, plays it tough and tender with equal sureness as a little Miss Wrong who is waiting for big Mr. Right. And Kurt Kasznar is just about perfect as a pillar of the pool hall trying to act like a paterfamilias.

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