Riot in Cell Block 11

A film about a prison riot. There is a block. Crowded, old, airless, and inside it one guard looks after a dozen men. One night the riot begins. The prisoners disable the guards and take the block. Dunn is leading it. What he wants is not escape; he draws up a list of demands. The list asks for ordinary things. Less crowding, separation of mentally ill prisoners, work, and improvement in the food. The warden has been asking for the same things for years. He has sent these reports to the state repeatedly and had no answer. From there the film is a negotiation. A yard, a telephone, arriving journalists, an armed cordon and a signed piece of paper. There is division inside as well. Some of the prisoners want to kill the hostages, and Dunn's real struggle is with his own side. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but administration: the film does not absolve the prisoners but places the source of the problem far above the prison management, with whoever holds the budget. It was shot in a real prison. The production worked at Folsom and real prisoners and guards appear in the crowd scenes. The producer who put it together had served a prison term himself shortly before, and that experience was the project's starting point. The tone is documentary. Little music, real settings, and a narrative that shows no close-up tenderness to anyone. Neville Brand, Emile Meyer, Frank Faylen and Leo Gordon are in the cast. Don Siegel directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes the hard, short, argumentative cinema of the 1950s. Who it is not for: anyone looking for depth of character; the film tells one event in eighty minutes and introduces nobody.