Word: jailbreaker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...against 20th Century-Fox for its movie, Roger Touhy, Gangster. Roger charged that the film had maligned him grossly. He planned to use the $15,000 in his "fight for freedom," i.e., to beat the kidnaping rap, plus a concurrent 199-year sentence for his role in a 1942 jailbreak...
...stay in one place. But they have promised to give us a count tonight." A Sternist spokesman thought more than half had returned to the jail; he expected more to come back "if they can get through the police lines." It was only a protest demonstration, not a jailbreak, he explained. "We have just been out doing a little fraternization with...
Canon City (Eagle Lion). Last winter, in the most sensational jailbreak of the year, twelve more or less desperate convicts escaped from the state penitentiary at Canon City, Colo. Within three days they were all either recaptured or killed (TIME, Jan. 12). This was a subject for a first-rate movie. Canon City is not that good, but it is exciting, intelligent and unpretentious. It begins as a straight documentary, presented with gratifying simplicity and quietness, then gently eases in among the professional players, who re-enact the break and the man hunt...
Less ambitious, but even more to the Parisian taste, were the exploits of 23-year-old "Pierrot le Fou" (Crazy Pete), who made his seventh jailbreak in three years. Wavy-haired Pierrot (real name: Pierre Carrot) began his career as an escape artist at the age of 20, when he pretended to hang himself in his cell and knocked out the jailer who rushed to cut him down. Recaptured some months later, Pierrot sawed his way into the cell of a condemned murderer. Then Pierrot used an iron bar to dispose of the guards who came to escort the murderer...
...otherwise to be compared with Hellinger's The Killers. The Killers may have been hammy, but it was grade-A ham, so adroitly served up that the picture got on several of last year's ten-best lists. Brute Force is a prisoner of all the old jailbreak cliches. There is the decent but weak warden (Roman Bohnen) who can't control his mild but maniacal head guard (Hume Cronyn), a sadist who plays Wagner while softening up a prisoner with a rubber hose. There is the boozy prison doctor (Art Smith) with a heart of gold...