The crime and prison movie genre showcase only rare true successes

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 Gettin’ 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.