From the Miguel Pinero play about prison etiquette. As with any Shakespeare play, it takes a while to attune your ear to the language (though this is otherwise not much like any Shakespeare play). You never do get acclimated to the prison routine, but, with careful attention, you can glean at least a few interesting facts about it; and the iron-and-concrete reality of the setting is always authentically oppressive. It's the street language, though, that gives the movie its juice. The narrative events are either prison-movie clichés in a slightly rawer form or else transparent theatrical gambits that don't remotely ring true (for instance, two soulful musical numbers sung by Freddie Fender and Curtis Mayfield, and a ridiculous Ingmar Bergman-esque monologue spoken by Bruce Davison -- "I heard this scream and it was my own" etc.). The white minority in this movie comes off very badly. It's a white man who lands in jail on a charge of child molesting, a crime which all the prison guards and all the incarcerated rapists, muggers, drug peddlers, and murderers (no one's crime, aside from the child molester's, is actually revealed in the screenplay) agree harmoniously is the most heinous crime under the sun; it's a white prison guard who pipes up with the bright idea of cutting this ostracized prisoner's throat; and it's a fellow white prisoner who carries out the idea after a black supremicist declines to do the deed on the high-minded principle that it's not a fair fight. Directed by Robert M. Young. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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