Igenlode Wordsmith

"Brute Force" is a rain-lashed, dark and violent — amazingly so for the era — prison movie, whose tight, effective formula is weakened by periodic spasms of manipulation. When it comes to making a moral point, the film isn't always best at judging when to lay off and let the implication work for itself, alas. Still, by and large it's powerful stuff, overseen by the seemingly omniscient menace of Hume Cronyn as Captain Munsey as chief prison guard.

Cronyn draws the eye — and ear — from his first appearance alongside Burt Lancaster; Munsey is probably the most intelligent character on the set (always a hazard for me, alas, especially when coupled to someone physically small enough for me to identify with), and he seems to anticipate and manipulate everything the others do, from his nominal superiors on the staff to the prisoners who hate him. Sympathy for the devil is often a good thing in a story, since it adds greater depth to the interaction of the characters, but in Hollywood productions it tends to be a drawback, since the very traits that attract me tend to be those the studios use as a shorthand for Un-American evil and expect to invoke unambiguous revulsion...

Anyway, I found the film recommendable, but lacking in greatness. The irony of the ending, where lack of communication causes one escape party's dying gesture to foil that of the other, is highly effective, for example; but the lecturing voice-over from the doctor that follows, apparently in order to ensure that the viewers are not tempted to try this at home, undermines its impact. If they'd just left it at "Why do they try?", that would have been fine — but as on other occasions, the script just has to push it that little bit further in order to make sure the moral point is clear, and undercuts itself in the process.

"Criss Cross" has no more ambition to high art than "Brute Force", with the exception of its tricksy flashback structure (the story starts in the middle and then jumps back to a voice-over-backed account of how it got there); but I felt it was more successful in achieving its modest aims without, as it were, over-egging the pudding.

Yvonne de Carlo features again, this time as weak, greedy Anna whose sleepy, almost feline looks hold Lancaster's Steve Thompson fascinated. (The scene in which she appears in slacks, incidentally, only goes to reinforce my prejudice that these garments fail to flatter even a beautiful woman — while the scene where she tries to negotiate San Francisco's hills in high heels make one wonder how the female population ever survived the dictates of fashion!) She has far more to deal with here than in "Brute Force", character-wise, and makes far more of her part: Anna is fatal to the men who love her, but she doesn't mean harm, as such. It's just that her priorities are always, ultimately, swayed by survival when her own welfare is at stake.

Burt Lancaster is again impressive, although there are a few scenes here when his grin comes across as ill-at-ease. His reactions in the hospital scene, however — for example — are a tour de force. The shading of that face is a powerful instrument, and both actor and director know precisely how to use it.

And again, the film boasts an impressive villain, Dan Duryea, although here he does not overbalance the picture. This is film noir. We know it's almost certainly going to end badly — for somebody, and probably the hero. But what we don't anticipate is in just what way. Arguably, it's a happy ending...

She wouldn't come out when I brought them the navel of an orange to eat this evening, although I could see her breathing, or when I offered the rats yoghurt drops later tonight, although she had moved to the back of the bedchamber. Now she has moved to the front again, but is still all curled up with her fur on end, and showing no interest in food or drink — I don't know if she is even alive, or if the others are pushing her body around to get in and out of bed.

Tomorrow morning I'll have to clean out the cage and find out...

Unfortunately, the deep wound in my thumb is still not healing up the way it should; I had to walk a couple of miles in to hospital today (this on top of a thirty-mile bike ride — the reason why I wasn't cycling; I'd had enough!) to get it looked at again, as it had been gradually swelling up to the extent that the half-healed edges had started to split open.

The nurse who saw it said that she didn't think it was infected, but that for whatever reason the layers of skin below had started to separate. Anyway, it's a confounded nuisance, and I now have it done up in an immense dressing all over again, and have to take baths with a plastic bag strapped over my hand again and so on...

The rats, of course, think it's all a tremendous mistake, and either sink their little teeth into it in the hopes that it might be edible, or else kindly try to groom it off for me!

Natalie wasn't anyone special to most people — just a pet rat, and a sick one at that. She was ill in July, and had probably never really recovered from that: when she died, she had been on antibiotics for two and a half weeks and off them for the last four days, after the vet and I agreed that she hadn't shown any improvement during her last course of Baytril, and was probably already as well as she was ever going to get, now. I don't think stopping the antibiotics made any difference, as the damage to her lungs had already taken place. She was bright-eyed and wriggly, but she was often short of breath and sometimes had choking attacks.

She had another attack last night, and when I came in this morning I was intending to see if she needed to go back for another check-up at the vet's surgery. But she was already dead. She must have died some time between 8am and 10.30am on Friday, October 5th 2007.

Natalie was always my favourite among the rats. She was a pretty little 'agouti', which means a rat-coloured rat with boot-button-black eyes and a shaded coat of reddish-brown, beige and black. She had little pink feet, and cold ears that I used to lick for her, because she used to lick mine. When you picked her up she would turn her head and nuzzle your hand, and she liked to climb up trouser-legs — inside and out! — or nibble people's shoelaces. In the last few weeks, while she was ill, she would climb up into my lap and use her long nose to lever up layers of clothing until she could curl up on my stomach and share body warmth: I used to call her my warmrat.

I don't have any pictures of Natalie, and rats aren't particularly easy to draw at the best of times; but here is a picture of her namesake, darkhaired and shy. This is the image from which Natalie was christened.