Word: murton
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...subject in Cool Hand Luke (1967). But never has the food looked so disgusting, or the living conditions so vile, as they are shown here. Nor have the reprisals and punishments been more brutally demonstrated. Also, the fact that the Brubaker character is modeled after Thomas Murton, an academic penologist who took over an Arkansas prison in the 1960s, gives the film a documentary urgency that its predecessors have lacked...
Brubaker, like Murton, discovers that the horrors of prison life are not waste products of idle sadism; they are manifestations of a wider corruption. The penalty for exposing these evils is death - a sentence carried out by the venal trusties and implicitly condoned by their civilian counterparts, the local politicians and businessmen. It is the discovery of the victims' graves that brings Brubaker to its ambiguous climax...
This I'd-rather-be-right-than-warden attitude is noble but frustrating. Murton ahs made no effort to break with the Democratic system he extolls while trying to improve it; yet he refused to compromise when it came to working within the Arkansas prison system. It's hard to break with a system. It's harder to be right all the time. But it's even harder to change the system, instead of simply revealing its failures...
Brubaker is a difficult film to dislike, and for that reason it may accomplish part of its goal, which is to educate audiences to the bloody reality of prison existence. But as entertainment, it remains somewhat bland and predictable. Redford--Murton--drives off into the sunset, leaving behind a plantation of untamed men whose personal well-being he has sacrificed to protect his moral principles...
...Murton's reforms worked for a short while. "You could argue that I made things worse for the inmates," he says, "lighting a candle to have it blown out. As people said, start a band, then they want dances. Let 'em out of their cells, they want out of prison." But ultimately the reforms upset the politicians and exposed the system." As Murton says, smiling, "It worked. That's why it failed...