A thoughtful film, it is also sprinkled with all sorts of features designed to increase its box-office appeal. Redford is Brubaker, the new reform warden who enters the prison in the guise of a prisoner in order to get a worm's eye view of the goings on. (They're pretty crummy, what with patients having to pay for their own medical care from a corrupt doctor, insurance premiums paid to cover non-existent tractors but not collapsing roofs.) After ten or fifteen minutes he reveals his true identity and begins snapping out orders and cleaning things up. At this point it's rather like Superman emerging from the phone booth that Clark Kent entered, or Destry finally picking up a gun.
But Redford learns that prisons, like wars, must operate within political constraints. He is told of a field full of buried bodies and begins to dig them up, despite the entreaties of his political friends and advisers, who try to talk him out of it or buy him off with the prison improvements he's been fighting for. It's not even clear that the bodies have been illegally buried, much less murdered as he suspects. The place used to be a pauper's graveyard, he's told.
But nothing will wreck a reform agenda faster than zealotry. Before you can say Reign of Terror, Redford is relieved of his job and is driven away -- to the sad but appreciative applause of the prisoners he's leaving behind. That should leave the viewer uplifted alright.
What a complicated and dynamic place a prison must be to be properly run. Some of the inmates have been railroaded but most of them have been (or have become) the cold-blooded psychopaths they're so often labeled. A warden must walk a tightrope between seeing that the men are treated decently but not given Jacuzzis. Redford, as it turns out, has pretty good balance in this regard, but if he were really concerned about getting his job done he would have compromised and stopped digging quite so hard.
Nice cast of supporting players. Jane Alexander is always good. Matt Clark is effectively devious as Redford's clerk (he's about the only inmate who can read and write) who participates in the murder of a helpless and naive old prisoner. Redford is about as authoritative as he can be in his minimalist way. He's not George C. Scott playing Patton.
The movie rolls along smoothly and takes us with it. We WANT Redford to succeed. But the box-office stuff just doesn't ring true. The sudden emergence of Redford's latent identity as the warden, a shootout with shotguns resulting in two deaths, the inmates applauding and whistling for the disgraced warden as he leaves. It detracts from the more important story and leaves us happy but with an armful of unanswered questions. (Just who ARE those guys buried on prison property?) The inmates may now "respect themselves as human beings", as Redford claims, but how long will it take the new replacement warden to reduce them to their original rags and despondency? I wish it had been better, though it's involving enough. It was directed by Stuart Rosenberg who injected a lot more life into Don Pearce's "Cool Hand Luke." Pearce, by the way, like Warden Brubaker, was a true original.
But Redford learns that prisons, like wars, must operate within political constraints. He is told of a field full of buried bodies and begins to dig them up, despite the entreaties of his political friends and advisers, who try to talk him out of it or buy him off with the prison improvements he's been fighting for. It's not even clear that the bodies have been illegally buried, much less murdered as he suspects. The place used to be a pauper's graveyard, he's told.
But nothing will wreck a reform agenda faster than zealotry. Before you can say Reign of Terror, Redford is relieved of his job and is driven away -- to the sad but appreciative applause of the prisoners he's leaving behind. That should leave the viewer uplifted alright.
What a complicated and dynamic place a prison must be to be properly run. Some of the inmates have been railroaded but most of them have been (or have become) the cold-blooded psychopaths they're so often labeled. A warden must walk a tightrope between seeing that the men are treated decently but not given Jacuzzis. Redford, as it turns out, has pretty good balance in this regard, but if he were really concerned about getting his job done he would have compromised and stopped digging quite so hard.
Nice cast of supporting players. Jane Alexander is always good. Matt Clark is effectively devious as Redford's clerk (he's about the only inmate who can read and write) who participates in the murder of a helpless and naive old prisoner. Redford is about as authoritative as he can be in his minimalist way. He's not George C. Scott playing Patton.
The movie rolls along smoothly and takes us with it. We WANT Redford to succeed. But the box-office stuff just doesn't ring true. The sudden emergence of Redford's latent identity as the warden, a shootout with shotguns resulting in two deaths, the inmates applauding and whistling for the disgraced warden as he leaves. It detracts from the more important story and leaves us happy but with an armful of unanswered questions. (Just who ARE those guys buried on prison property?) The inmates may now "respect themselves as human beings", as Redford claims, but how long will it take the new replacement warden to reduce them to their original rags and despondency? I wish it had been better, though it's involving enough. It was directed by Stuart Rosenberg who injected a lot more life into Don Pearce's "Cool Hand Luke." Pearce, by the way, like Warden Brubaker, was a true original.