(The Filmakers, 1955)
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| The inmates demand an early check-out time. |
Tagline
Killers on a Furlough from Hell!
Just the Facts
As
terse as its title and meaner than a junkyard dog, Crashout is a tough and unrelenting crime film that has a lot more
on its mind than its formulaic narrative might suggest. On a literal level the
story of six convicts who bust out of a maximum-security prison and embark on a
perilous journey to recover stolen loot, Crashout
also explores how several of those cons—as well as law-abiding citizens unfortunate
enough to cross their path—grapple with social and psychological shackles that
prove just as confining as a stretch in stir. In keeping with the film’s
unapologetically bleak tone, there are no happy endings for anyone.
The film begins in one of those imposing penitentiaries that dotted the era’s crime-film terrain: a house of psychic and physical pain, a mausoleum for the spirit. The soul-deadening atmosphere is deftly established in the pre-titles tracking shot of an armed guard prowling the catwalk as a line of prisoners march single-file in the yard below, seemingly resigned to the impossibility of escape. But it turns out the inmates are just playing possum, for suddenly all hell breaks loose: Sirens blare, desperate men storm the walls and prison guards begin to gun them down like fish in a barrel.
As the opening credits appear, a Godard-like jump cut (years before Breathless) takes us outside the prison, where a succession of dynamic panning shots introduce the lead characters fleeing through the nearby woods to the accompaniment of deadly machine gun fire. They’re a rich assortment of scuzzballs: Van Duff: bank robber, murderer and the escapees’ unchallenged leader. Joe Quinn, embittered embezzler. Pete Mendoza, convicted murderer and sex fiend. Luther “Swanee” Remsen, murderer and religious psycho. Maynard “Monk” Collins, another murderer. Billy Lang, the youngest, serving time for accidentally killing a man, but heading down the same irremediable road as the others. (They’re played respectively by William Bendix, Arthur Kennedy, Luther Adler, William Talman, Gene Evans and Marshall Thompson.) They mostly hate each other’s guts, banding together for strength in numbers rather than out of friendship or loyalty.
All six eventually reach an abandoned mine shaft that will serve as their hideout, but not before Duff takes a bullet and has to play dead for several hours for the benefit of the trigger-happy search party. The convicts are forced to remain there until the manhunt moves elsewhere, which affords plenty of time for mutual antipathies to devolve into internecine squabbles that don’t bode well for their chances. All that binds them is the prospect of sharing in the $180,000 that Duff stashed after his last bank robbery, and which he can recover only with their help.
When not sniping at one another, they take out their frustrations and resentments on regular folks, like the country doctor they kidnap to dress Duff’s wound—an act of Hippocratic honor for which Duff pays him back most dishonorably. Or the patrons at a roadside tavern, whom the fugitives terrorize while stealing their clothes, valuables and dignity, with Duff slapping down anyone who questions his authority. Not to mention an unlucky cop who shows up just as the cons are about to leave, and pays for his bad timing by being on the wrong end of vehicular manslaughter.
Their collective mayhem serves inevitably to infuriate the police, and the ranks of the dirty half-dozen are gradually (and graphically) depleted as the manhunt intensifies. Death arrives in various guises—a dying cop’s bullet, a treacherous convict’s knife, a kerosene lamp that turns of their number into a human torch. After commandeering a farm inhabited by an unmarried mother and lying low for a couple of days—while their situation becomes even more complicated and fraught with danger—the survivors eventually make their way to the mountaintop where Duff cached the money. In the midst of a blinding snowstorm, greed, paranoia and betrayal flare up with a vengeance, ensuring that only one of the criminals will walk away unscathed, physically if not psychologically.
Summary Judgment
Crashout is a remarkable film on many levels, not least for its pitch-black tone and its utter refusal to either justify or condemn the actions of its lead characters, even as it acknowledges the moral gradations among them. Their depredations are all the more shocking and credible for their offhand depiction—each act of violence is staged with startling abruptness, but never lingered upon longer than necessary to make its impact. Indeed, the most gruesome murder takes place offscreen, to the sounds of a hapless victim’s squeals for mercy followed by the thwack of blunt-force trauma. The convicts’ feral natures lend a disturbing edge even to the threat of violence, as when they hold knives and broken bottles to the throats of terrified roadhouse patrons to ensure their silence. The harsh mood is mitigated only occasionally by a touch of sardonic humor—viz. the wanted posters superimposed on the screen each time one of the escapees is killed, with the word “deceased” stamped mockingly across it.
Also notable is the recurrent sense of entrapment, both literal and figurative, that dogs every step of the convicts’ journey. This is evoked most explicitly in the protracted sequence in the mine shaft; forced to endure the claustrophobic and miserable conditions, with little to do but bicker and quarrel among themselves, the escaped men might just as well be back in their cells. The feeling of being hemmed in is sustained in the diner where they hold the patrons hostage, but must themselves hide when a pair of motorcycle cops drop in; in the cramped confines of the train they board to avoid police roadblocks; in a remote farmhouse they commandeer where every outsider represents a threat. Each setting and circumstance helps to undermine the convicts’ fragile unanimity and contributes to their attrition.
Two of the men, Billy Lang and Joe Quinn, have chance meetings with women who have the potential to help them to redirect their destinies. Lang’s occurs during the train journey, when he finds himself seated next to a girl his age who senses in him a kindred spirit. She relates her shame at having to return to her hometown after failing to achieve her dream of becoming a singer. Like Lang, she faces a future with few options, but any unspoken hopes the budding couple might have to make a fresh start are brutally snuffed out by Duff and the others when Lang tries to sneak away from them in the dark.
Quinn’s shot at redemption manifests in the person of Alice Mosher (Beverly Michaels), who has been ostracized by her community for having a child out of wedlock. While the fugitives keep her captive while hiding out at her farm, she and Quinn unburden their life stories—and their attraction—to each other. “You’re on the run yourself, same as me,” Quinn tells her. But while Alice feels equally as alienated from society as Quinn, she can never accept him unless he renounces his unlawful way of life. Among the elder cons, Quinn is the least degenerate and un-salvageable. But his stubborn insistence on grabbing a slice of Duff’s dirty money doesn’t accord with Alice’s straight-and-narrow conception of happily ever after. These brief encounters offer the only respite from the moral darkness that otherwise dominates the film.
Although the screenplay is credited to director Lewis R. Foster and Hal E. Chester, its uncompromising tone is likely due in part to the uncredited contribution of blacklisted writer/director Cy Endfield, whose films—including The Sound of Fury (1950) and Hell Drivers (1957)—typically feature morally dubious, unsympathetic protagonists who don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of them. The bleak atmosphere is well sustained by Foster, an otherwise journeyman director, albeit one with an Academy Award on his resume (best original story for 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). Foster handles the action scenes with authority and some inventiveness and keeps the film moving at a cracking pace. He also knows when to throttle back during quieter scenes to explore the characters’ motivations, fears and desires. He elicits uniformly powerful yet restrained performances from the first-rate cast. Bendix’s cold-blooded Duff is the polar opposite of the lovable lunkhead he played in television’s The Life of Riley, then in the midst of its five-year run. His thoroughgoing malevolence contributes mightily to the film’s dark, nihilistic tone. Kennedy demonstrates his considerable range as the conflicted Quinn, and is matched beat for beat by the underrated Michaels as the lonely, unwed mother. Adler provides creepy comic relief as the oversexed Mendoza, while Talman incarnates the kind of gloriously unhinged character he did so well in The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and Big House, U.S.A. (1955).
Foster conjures more than a few visual frissons, ably abetted by cinematographer Russell Metty, who lends Crashout greyish, grungy visuals to match its hard-edged narrative. There’s an indelible scene early in the film in which Duff plays dead after being shot during the escape. Forced to lie motionless in the dirt as a furious search party swarms the area, he gazes with unblinking zombie eyes at dozens of ants swarming across his bloody hand. Foster holds the shot for a beat or two, evoking a surreal resonance that recalls the ant-infested hand in Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and prefigures the moment in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966) when a gang member lying in wait to knock over a payroll truck stares with existential fatalism at a mass of ants scurrying at his feet.
Another
oddly intense scene occurs in the mine shaft when the mentally unbalanced
Swanee, fearing that Duff (“a sinner”) is about to expire, “baptizes” him in a
dank pool of water, holding Duff's head under for an uncomfortably long minute as he silently
intones a prayer, until finally raising the nearly dead man Lazarus-like out
of the water. The other men temporarily suspend their cynicism in the face of
Swanee’s Biblical conviction. Foster films this with all the gravitas of an
actual religious ceremony. The irony, intended or not, is palpable.
The entire roadhouse sequence plays like a mini home-invasion movie—a la The Desperate Hours, also released in 1955—but with a much rougher tone, as the characters in Crashout embody a truly inimical and intimidating presence. Particularly startling is the moment when the sexually predacious Mendoza forcibly fondles and kisses a pretty young girl as her milquetoast boyfriend helplessly watches. Although it’s just a kiss, it’s delivered with such naked lust and brutality that it evokes a sense of violation more unsettling than any physical violence his cohorts mete out. Mendoza then compounds the offense by passing the girl to the equally loathsome Swanee, who conveniently foregoes his religious zeal for a stolen sexual thrill.
And it’s Swanee who invests the film’s climax with a suitably lunatic touch. Having consistently carried out Duff’s commands like an obedient cur, he finally rebels when he discerns his master’s true nature, delivering a messianic screed worthy of the thirties’ Father Coughlin as if seeking his own perverse martyrdom. One can ascribe a quasi-religious interpretation to the resulting denouement as the last two convicts recover Duff’s stolen stash and inevitably, fatally fall out over its ownership. Yet the last man standing, isolated in a remarkable long shot amidst the vast frozen terrain, ultimately rejects the money that precipitated the escapees' collective odyssey of violence and terror.
The use of snow as cleansing metaphor recalls the ending of On Dangerous Ground (1951), in which Robert Ryan's brutal cop reclaims a measure of his misplaced humanity in another snow-covered landscape. But whereas Ryan’s character could look forward to a new lease on life, no such surcease is granted to Crashout’s sole survivor. Descending the mountaintop, he can hear the sounds of approaching policemen, and must surely realize the unavoidable judgment awaiting him, whether its execution will be immediate or only slightly deferred.
Fingering the Fifties
Quotable
PRISON GUARD: “More than one of our guys went out the hard way today, so if you pick up Van Duff or any of the other escaped convicts, remember the warden said, ‘dead or alive,’ and he didn’t say which.”
PETE MENDOZA: “Oh, boy, you don’t look so good.”
VAN DUFF: “How do you expect me to look after layin’ in the sun for hours with ants and lizards crawling all over me?”
VAN DUFF: “You gotta kill to go free and you gotta kill to stay free.”
ALICE MOSHER: “I said, what kind of money, Joe?”
JOE QUINN: “Okay, so it’s hot. Who cares? Who asks where you get the money as long as you have it? Having it is what counts.”
ALICE MOSHER: “No, Joe. Money’s a lot like love. There’s a dirty kind and a clean kind. No good comes out of the dirty kind.”
VAN DUFF: “Money’s no good for you, Joe, boy. You like it too well. You wouldn’t have anything left to live for. So long, sucker!”
SWANEE: “Now I know who the devil really is. It’s you, Van, you!"
VAN DUFF: “You’re crazy!”
SWANEE: “You killed Pete! You killed him with lust. And Billy! You killed Billy! And he was good! And Monk! Monk you destroyed in a pit of fire! You’re the devil! The devil!”
Cast
The film begins in one of those imposing penitentiaries that dotted the era’s crime-film terrain: a house of psychic and physical pain, a mausoleum for the spirit. The soul-deadening atmosphere is deftly established in the pre-titles tracking shot of an armed guard prowling the catwalk as a line of prisoners march single-file in the yard below, seemingly resigned to the impossibility of escape. But it turns out the inmates are just playing possum, for suddenly all hell breaks loose: Sirens blare, desperate men storm the walls and prison guards begin to gun them down like fish in a barrel.
 |
| Killers on the run. |
As the opening credits appear, a Godard-like jump cut (years before Breathless) takes us outside the prison, where a succession of dynamic panning shots introduce the lead characters fleeing through the nearby woods to the accompaniment of deadly machine gun fire. They’re a rich assortment of scuzzballs: Van Duff: bank robber, murderer and the escapees’ unchallenged leader. Joe Quinn, embittered embezzler. Pete Mendoza, convicted murderer and sex fiend. Luther “Swanee” Remsen, murderer and religious psycho. Maynard “Monk” Collins, another murderer. Billy Lang, the youngest, serving time for accidentally killing a man, but heading down the same irremediable road as the others. (They’re played respectively by William Bendix, Arthur Kennedy, Luther Adler, William Talman, Gene Evans and Marshall Thompson.) They mostly hate each other’s guts, banding together for strength in numbers rather than out of friendship or loyalty.
All six eventually reach an abandoned mine shaft that will serve as their hideout, but not before Duff takes a bullet and has to play dead for several hours for the benefit of the trigger-happy search party. The convicts are forced to remain there until the manhunt moves elsewhere, which affords plenty of time for mutual antipathies to devolve into internecine squabbles that don’t bode well for their chances. All that binds them is the prospect of sharing in the $180,000 that Duff stashed after his last bank robbery, and which he can recover only with their help.
 |
| Merciful ministrations for the merciless. |
When not sniping at one another, they take out their frustrations and resentments on regular folks, like the country doctor they kidnap to dress Duff’s wound—an act of Hippocratic honor for which Duff pays him back most dishonorably. Or the patrons at a roadside tavern, whom the fugitives terrorize while stealing their clothes, valuables and dignity, with Duff slapping down anyone who questions his authority. Not to mention an unlucky cop who shows up just as the cons are about to leave, and pays for his bad timing by being on the wrong end of vehicular manslaughter.
Their collective mayhem serves inevitably to infuriate the police, and the ranks of the dirty half-dozen are gradually (and graphically) depleted as the manhunt intensifies. Death arrives in various guises—a dying cop’s bullet, a treacherous convict’s knife, a kerosene lamp that turns of their number into a human torch. After commandeering a farm inhabited by an unmarried mother and lying low for a couple of days—while their situation becomes even more complicated and fraught with danger—the survivors eventually make their way to the mountaintop where Duff cached the money. In the midst of a blinding snowstorm, greed, paranoia and betrayal flare up with a vengeance, ensuring that only one of the criminals will walk away unscathed, physically if not psychologically.
 |
| Fugitive pastimes: sexual predation, voyeurism and humiliation. |
Summary Judgment
Crashout is a remarkable film on many levels, not least for its pitch-black tone and its utter refusal to either justify or condemn the actions of its lead characters, even as it acknowledges the moral gradations among them. Their depredations are all the more shocking and credible for their offhand depiction—each act of violence is staged with startling abruptness, but never lingered upon longer than necessary to make its impact. Indeed, the most gruesome murder takes place offscreen, to the sounds of a hapless victim’s squeals for mercy followed by the thwack of blunt-force trauma. The convicts’ feral natures lend a disturbing edge even to the threat of violence, as when they hold knives and broken bottles to the throats of terrified roadhouse patrons to ensure their silence. The harsh mood is mitigated only occasionally by a touch of sardonic humor—viz. the wanted posters superimposed on the screen each time one of the escapees is killed, with the word “deceased” stamped mockingly across it.
Also notable is the recurrent sense of entrapment, both literal and figurative, that dogs every step of the convicts’ journey. This is evoked most explicitly in the protracted sequence in the mine shaft; forced to endure the claustrophobic and miserable conditions, with little to do but bicker and quarrel among themselves, the escaped men might just as well be back in their cells. The feeling of being hemmed in is sustained in the diner where they hold the patrons hostage, but must themselves hide when a pair of motorcycle cops drop in; in the cramped confines of the train they board to avoid police roadblocks; in a remote farmhouse they commandeer where every outsider represents a threat. Each setting and circumstance helps to undermine the convicts’ fragile unanimity and contributes to their attrition.
 |
| A dying cop’s last shot. |
Two of the men, Billy Lang and Joe Quinn, have chance meetings with women who have the potential to help them to redirect their destinies. Lang’s occurs during the train journey, when he finds himself seated next to a girl his age who senses in him a kindred spirit. She relates her shame at having to return to her hometown after failing to achieve her dream of becoming a singer. Like Lang, she faces a future with few options, but any unspoken hopes the budding couple might have to make a fresh start are brutally snuffed out by Duff and the others when Lang tries to sneak away from them in the dark.
Quinn’s shot at redemption manifests in the person of Alice Mosher (Beverly Michaels), who has been ostracized by her community for having a child out of wedlock. While the fugitives keep her captive while hiding out at her farm, she and Quinn unburden their life stories—and their attraction—to each other. “You’re on the run yourself, same as me,” Quinn tells her. But while Alice feels equally as alienated from society as Quinn, she can never accept him unless he renounces his unlawful way of life. Among the elder cons, Quinn is the least degenerate and un-salvageable. But his stubborn insistence on grabbing a slice of Duff’s dirty money doesn’t accord with Alice’s straight-and-narrow conception of happily ever after. These brief encounters offer the only respite from the moral darkness that otherwise dominates the film.
 |
| Van Duff lays down his law. |
Although the screenplay is credited to director Lewis R. Foster and Hal E. Chester, its uncompromising tone is likely due in part to the uncredited contribution of blacklisted writer/director Cy Endfield, whose films—including The Sound of Fury (1950) and Hell Drivers (1957)—typically feature morally dubious, unsympathetic protagonists who don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of them. The bleak atmosphere is well sustained by Foster, an otherwise journeyman director, albeit one with an Academy Award on his resume (best original story for 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). Foster handles the action scenes with authority and some inventiveness and keeps the film moving at a cracking pace. He also knows when to throttle back during quieter scenes to explore the characters’ motivations, fears and desires. He elicits uniformly powerful yet restrained performances from the first-rate cast. Bendix’s cold-blooded Duff is the polar opposite of the lovable lunkhead he played in television’s The Life of Riley, then in the midst of its five-year run. His thoroughgoing malevolence contributes mightily to the film’s dark, nihilistic tone. Kennedy demonstrates his considerable range as the conflicted Quinn, and is matched beat for beat by the underrated Michaels as the lonely, unwed mother. Adler provides creepy comic relief as the oversexed Mendoza, while Talman incarnates the kind of gloriously unhinged character he did so well in The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and Big House, U.S.A. (1955).
Foster conjures more than a few visual frissons, ably abetted by cinematographer Russell Metty, who lends Crashout greyish, grungy visuals to match its hard-edged narrative. There’s an indelible scene early in the film in which Duff plays dead after being shot during the escape. Forced to lie motionless in the dirt as a furious search party swarms the area, he gazes with unblinking zombie eyes at dozens of ants swarming across his bloody hand. Foster holds the shot for a beat or two, evoking a surreal resonance that recalls the ant-infested hand in Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and prefigures the moment in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966) when a gang member lying in wait to knock over a payroll truck stares with existential fatalism at a mass of ants scurrying at his feet.
 |
| Darkness falls on Mayberry. |
The entire roadhouse sequence plays like a mini home-invasion movie—a la The Desperate Hours, also released in 1955—but with a much rougher tone, as the characters in Crashout embody a truly inimical and intimidating presence. Particularly startling is the moment when the sexually predacious Mendoza forcibly fondles and kisses a pretty young girl as her milquetoast boyfriend helplessly watches. Although it’s just a kiss, it’s delivered with such naked lust and brutality that it evokes a sense of violation more unsettling than any physical violence his cohorts mete out. Mendoza then compounds the offense by passing the girl to the equally loathsome Swanee, who conveniently foregoes his religious zeal for a stolen sexual thrill.
And it’s Swanee who invests the film’s climax with a suitably lunatic touch. Having consistently carried out Duff’s commands like an obedient cur, he finally rebels when he discerns his master’s true nature, delivering a messianic screed worthy of the thirties’ Father Coughlin as if seeking his own perverse martyrdom. One can ascribe a quasi-religious interpretation to the resulting denouement as the last two convicts recover Duff’s stolen stash and inevitably, fatally fall out over its ownership. Yet the last man standing, isolated in a remarkable long shot amidst the vast frozen terrain, ultimately rejects the money that precipitated the escapees' collective odyssey of violence and terror.
The use of snow as cleansing metaphor recalls the ending of On Dangerous Ground (1951), in which Robert Ryan's brutal cop reclaims a measure of his misplaced humanity in another snow-covered landscape. But whereas Ryan’s character could look forward to a new lease on life, no such surcease is granted to Crashout’s sole survivor. Descending the mountaintop, he can hear the sounds of approaching policemen, and must surely realize the unavoidable judgment awaiting him, whether its execution will be immediate or only slightly deferred.
 |
| As you sow, so shall you reap. |
Fingering the Fifties
• Prison guards communicating via mobile radio phones.
• Platinum blondes wearing expensive furs in roadside taverns.
• Motorcycle cops riding sans helmets.
• Footage from 1954’s Riot in Cell Block 11 used for the opening prison break.
Quotable
PRISON GUARD: “More than one of our guys went out the hard way today, so if you pick up Van Duff or any of the other escaped convicts, remember the warden said, ‘dead or alive,’ and he didn’t say which.”
PETE MENDOZA: “Oh, boy, you don’t look so good.”
VAN DUFF: “How do you expect me to look after layin’ in the sun for hours with ants and lizards crawling all over me?”
VAN DUFF: “You gotta kill to go free and you gotta kill to stay free.”
ALICE MOSHER: “I said, what kind of money, Joe?”
JOE QUINN: “Okay, so it’s hot. Who cares? Who asks where you get the money as long as you have it? Having it is what counts.”
ALICE MOSHER: “No, Joe. Money’s a lot like love. There’s a dirty kind and a clean kind. No good comes out of the dirty kind.”
VAN DUFF: “Money’s no good for you, Joe, boy. You like it too well. You wouldn’t have anything left to live for. So long, sucker!”
SWANEE: “Now I know who the devil really is. It’s you, Van, you!"
VAN DUFF: “You’re crazy!”
SWANEE: “You killed Pete! You killed him with lust. And Billy! You killed Billy! And he was good! And Monk! Monk you destroyed in a pit of fire! You’re the devil! The devil!”
 |
| The gang’s all here. |
Cast
William Bendix (Van Duff; Arthur Kennedy (Joe Quinn); Luther Adler (Pete Mendoza); William Talman (Luther “Swanee” Remsen); Gene Evans (Maynard “Monk” Collins); Marshall Thompson (Billy Lang); Beverly Michaels (Alice Mosher); Gloria Talbot (girl on train); Adam Williams (Fred Summerfield); Percy Helton (Doctor Barnes); Morris Ankrum (head guard)
Credits:
Credits:
Director: Lewis R. Foster; screenplay: Hal E. Chester, Lewis R. Foster, Cy Endfield (undredited); producer: Hal E. Chester; music: Leith Stevens; cinematography: Russell Metty; editing: Robert Swink
