Brubaker

Many months back, I had the opportunity to DVR Brubaker when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar. Whoever owns the Cinemax channels seems to have the rights to it now, as it's going to be on 5Star Max tomorrow at 6:07 AM and again on Nov. 12 and Nov. 19.

Robert Redford plays Henry Brubaker, who at the beginning of the movie is boarding a bus to take him to his incarceration at Arkansas' Wakefield Prison circa 1969. Apparently there aren't enough cells in this prison, as he's put in a barracks-style cage with a whole bunch of other prisoners. This seems like a recipe for disaster, and unsurprisingly, we see things like sexual assault and one prisoner being tied to the bars of the cage, tortured, and left there all night.

But it turns out that Brubaker didn't commit much of a crime to be put in the barracks. In fact, he didn't commit a crime at all. Brubaker is the new warden, and he got himself put in the general population so that he could see the conditions in the prison as they really are, and not as any handlers would want him to see by turning the prison into some sort of Potemkin village. (How he did this without other officials knowing, I don't know.) I'd suppose you could say he was shocked, except that he had to know things like this were going on as he wouldn't have gone undercover otherwise.

Brubaker, unsurprisingly, wants to reform the prison, although other people who have been making out like bandits under the previous prision management have a fairly obvious vested stake in keeping the old regime running. The one person who might be willing to help Brubaker is Lillian Gray (Jane Alexander), a liaison with the Governor's office. However, she cares more about making herself and the governor look good while providing the appearance of reform, whether or not things get done is secondary.

It's only natural that Brubaker should be opposed by the officials and locals in business who have been profiting under the old scheme, but the scale of the graft shocks Brubaker. He tracks food purchases, only to find that they're being diverted and sold below market value out in the real world with officials pocketing the money. The barracks' roof wasn't properly installed and caves in during a rain storm, and wouldn't you know that's the one thing that's not insured. And when injured prisoners go in to the infirmary, the prison doctor charges them for extra services!

But it's not just officials that dislike Brubaker. Under the old scheme, the prison had "trustees", prisoners who were given better jobs within the prison as a reward for their good behavior. Or at least, that's the way the system was supposed to work; in reality the jobs went to people doing the system's bidding in exchange for the old warden looking the other way at the trustees' torturing prisoners who get out of line. One particularly nasty trustee is Bullen (David Keith), but even a trustee who has some sympathy for Brubaker like Dickie Coombes (Yaphet Kotto) isn't all that supportive and warns Brubaker his plans are never going to work.

Indeed, the trustees on the inside, along with the prison commission on the outside, which is about as corrupt as any government commission out there, both try to stymy Brubaker at every step of the way, either by hiding information from him or actively trying to stop him from doing things. They'll even resort to force if necessary. And when Brubaker finds out that elderly Abraham has been kept in the prison three years beyond the end of his sentence, that's when things really get bad.

Brubaker is based on a true story, although the name of the real-life warden involved, Thomas Murton, who wrote a book on the experience, was changed for whatever reason. The conditions shown are fairly brutal, although I doubt it's anything like what Murton really saw. The story is never interesting, and while it unsurprisingly takes sides, this is sometimes to the movie's detriment Brubaker seems sometimes too perfectly good and people like Bullen too perfectly bad.

Overall, however, Brubaker is more than worth a watch, and one that for whatever reason seems to have fallen through the cracks over the last 40 years. It looks to be out of print on DVD, although it is on Amazon streaming. That's a shame, because it's a pretty darn good movie.