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Bernie
Matthews, University of Southern Queensland, for ‘The
Crime and Prison Movie Genre Showcase only Rare True
Successes’ - posted at
www.onlineopinion.com.au Tuesday, January 27, 2004.
Judges’ Comments:
Some
fine work from Bernie Matthews who uses his inside
knowledge of the prison system to its advantage. A
talented and colorful addition to the journalism
fraternity.
The Crime
and Prison Movie Genre Showcase only Rare True Successes
by Bernie
Matthews
The release
of Pauline Hanson from Wolston Correctional Centre
rekindled a vicarious interest in prisons and the
criminal justice system. When Ms Hanson attended a
special screening of Getting’ Square, a movie
written by Gold Coast lawyer Chris Nyst, her rave
reviews were accorded credibility from an insider’s
perspective although she had only spent eleven weeks in
prison.
Gettin’
Square is a humorous approach to the criminal milieu
that closely resembles another Australian movie, Two
Hands. Both movies portray criminals as whacky
characters that conduct business with dialogues
liberally dosed in slang and expletives and plots that
undermine the realism of established career criminals.
Chopper,
based on the self-promoted life story of Mark Brandon
Read, gave a rare glimpse of criminal realism and the
bloody-minded violence that accompanies most career
moves within the Australian criminal culture. Blue
Murder dragged its audience through the Sydney
gutters of crime and corruption to where demarcation
lines between police and criminals blurred with
organised crime. The story of Neddy Smith’s rise to
power in the Sydney underworld, inextricably linked to
the sale of heroin and a green light (permission to
commit crime free of police interference) given to him
by notorious Sydney rogue cop Roger Rogerson, was
graphically delivered from the screen in a
no-holds-barred expose.
Gettin’
Square fails to deliver any social messages. It is
light-hearted escapism whose characters are molded in a
similar winning formula set by US lawyer/author John
Grisham whose books; The Pelican Brief, A Time
to Kill and Runaway Jury, have all been
successfully adapted to the screen. Like Grisham, Chris
Nyst draws on his legal expertise to deliver fictional
characters based on past clients and events drawn from
the archives of his criminal briefs.(Some Gettin’
Square characters have a striking resemblance to
real-life Gold Coast career criminals Edward “Chicka”
Reeves and Ronny “The Fat Man” Feeney who have both
departed this world – Feeney from cancer and Reeves from
a bullet probably delivered by a Sydney contract killer.
His underworld murder remains unsolved.)
Gettin’
Square has strong audience appeal but the title
remains a misnomer. “Getting square” or “squaring up”
has distinct implications in Australian criminal jargon
of which Chris Nyst should be aware. It has no bearing
on the movie’s implication of trying to go straight or
giving up a life of crime. “Getting square” is the
primeval act of revenge - on an informer or somebody who
has transgressed the protocols and proprieties of
criminal boundaries.
The
inevitable consequence of crime depicted by Gettin’
Square, Two Hands, Chopper and Blue
Murder is prison. Not the celluloid prison of Ronnie
Barker’s Porridge but real prison laid bare by
Pauline Hanson’s emotional 60 Minutes interview,
a tearful insight into what it is all about. The reality
of squat-and-cough strip searches, cell doors slamming
shut, body-bags containing the corpse of young prisoners
and the coldness of an incarceration process that
doesn’t give a damn. It is an emotive reality that few
Australian movies have been able to effectively capture.
British and
US film companies have continually explored the
prison-movie genre from different angles in an attempt
to deliver realism to an impenetrable world contained
behind the walls, guard towers and razor wire of the
prison system. Different aspects of the system have been
graphically and realistically captured by movies such
as; Dead Man Walking, The Green Mile,
Papillion, The Hurricane, McVicar,
A Sense of Freedom, and The Shawshank Redemption.
Some movies
are more incisive in their examination of prison
sub-cultures than others. The Defiant Ones (1958)
revealed an inherent racist culture that pervades most
US prison populations when Joker Jackson (Tony Curtis)
and Noah Cullen (Sidney Pottier) escape from a southern
chain gang manacled together. The movie explores the
black and white relationship of two men forced to work
as a team if they want to survive.
Survival on
a southern chain gang is the main theme of Cool Hand
Luke (1967) in which Lucas Jackson (Paul Newman) is
the prolific escaper who pits himself against authority
in a constant test of wills. Adapted from the book
written by Don Pearce, who served time on a Louisiana
chain gang for safe cracking, the movie explores the
oppositional forces of individuality and authority. The
portrayal of Boss Godfrey (Morgan Woodward) as the
prison guard who never speaks but constantly surveys the
chain gang through reflector sunglasses epitomises the
sinister pervasiveness that is prison.
The
complexities of the southern chain gangs where prisoners
were elevated to the role of trustee and earned freedom
by stopping others from escaping was a concept imported
into Australia and employed at the NSW Mt Penang
Training School for Boys at Gosford. It allowed
privileged trustees to chase “runners” or “dingoes” and
forcibly drag them back to the institution where they
were punished for escaping. The concept instilled a
ruthless manipulation of authority but was abandoned by
US prison authorities following the discovery of
murdered prisoners buried in unmarked graves at Tucker
Prison Farm in Arkansas during the 1970s. The scandal
became the theme for Brubaker and explored how
politicians allow cover-ups to perpetuate a corrupt and
evil system.
The
warehousing system of segregating the worst of the
worst, the intractables or the “Dirty Thirties” of the
US prison system, resulted with a Federal prison on
Alcatraz in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz
set the scene for many prison movies designed to exhibit
a deterrent value with underlying messages of good
triumphs over evil where Alcatraz was the end of the
line. The underlying message, like the prison itself,
dismally failed society in that regard.
Burt
Lancaster’s portrayal of the convicted killer Robert
Stroud in The Birdman of Alcatraz illustrated the
futility and counter-productivity of isolation by
solitary confinement. The movie also reveals the
frustration of trying to rehabilitate behind prison
walls. Escape from Alcatraz and Alcatraz The
Whole Shocking Story reveal the failure of a system
designed to brutalise men by isolation and solitary
confinement. The end product of that brutalising system
is graphically captured by the true story of Henry Young
in Murder in the First (1995).
Young (Kevin
Bacon) was sent to Alcatraz after he stole $5 from a
convenience store/post-office resulting in his arrest
for a federal offence. An attempt to escape from
Alcatraz earned Young three years in solitary
confinement (a stark reminder of the days when The Hole
at Boggo Road Jail was used for the same purpose).
Within hours of his release from solitary, Young
murdered the prisoner informer responsible and was
charged with murder in the First Degree. The State
requested the death penalty. In a riveting journey
through the incarceration process that creates men like
Henry Young his subsequent murder trial became a social
indictment against the entire US prison system and
resulted with the subsequent closure of Alcatraz in
1962.
The story of
Henry Young and Murder in the First has a
chilling parallel to the current Maximum Security Units
inside the Arthur Gorrie and Sir David Longland
Correctional Centres at Wacol where survival in the
new-age gladiator schools of the incarceration process
also change young prisoners forever. Ghosts of the
Civil Dead and Scum reinforce those
observations of a prison system rarely revealed to the
public.
In
Queensland, the prison-movie genre has suffered from
legislative restrictions designed to stop media access
to prisons and prisoners while continuing to envelop the
system in a cloak of bureaucratic secrecy. The
determination of prison bosses not to allow any repeat
exposés of their incarceration processes is evidenced by
the embarrassment caused with the 1988 award winning ABC
tele-documentary Out of sight – Out of Mind when
it revealed how Australian prisons are also failing
their obligation to society.
Despite
Queensland’s legislative restrictions, the Victorian and
NSW prison systems have been successfully and critically
dissected in Every Night Every Night and Stir.
The
iconoclastic Stir, written by ex-prisoner Bob
Jewson, explores the lead-up to the February 1974
Bathurst Riot that resulted in total destruction of
NSW’s most brutal maximum-security jail. Jewson’s
first-hand experience of life inside Bathurst Jail
during that period has been successfully transposed onto
the screen with devastating realism.
Every
Night, Every Night adapted from a stage play written
by Ray Mooney, unveils the story of H Division inside
Pentridge (the Alcatraz of the Victorian prison system),
where systematic and institutionalised violence was an
everyday occurrence used to rehabilitate prisoners.
Mooney
served eight years inside Pentridge and was transferred
into H Division for being a spokesman during a riot.
When he refused to break rocks in the labor yards he was
subjected to intolerable brutality at the hands of
prison guards led by a Chief Prison Officer dubbed
“Hitler”.
Mooney’s
experience of H Division has been captured for posterity
in the movie but the title reveals an underlying anger
and hatred that illustrates the pressure-cooker syndrome
slowly bubbling away until the gates of freedom are
opened and it explodes on an unsuspecting society.
Mooney’s
explanation of the connection between H Division and the
movie title reinforce the counter-productivity of
Australia’s incarceration processes:
“I coped
(inside H Division) by resigning from the human race and
dreamed every night of what I would do to the bastards
when I got a chance.”
Mooney never
returned to prison. He failed in his H Division ambition
to get square with society and the prison system. Today
Ray Mooney is a successful Victorian theatre director
with more than 50 plays to his credit. His most recent
film script The Truth Game explores the 1988
murder of two Victorian police officers in Melbourne’s
Walsh Street.
Bernie
Matthews is a convicted bank robber and prison escapee
who has served time for armed robbery and prison escapes
in NSW (1969-1980) and Queensland (1996-2000). He is now
a journalist.
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