Solitary Rebel

Bird Man of Alcatraz. During a span of 43 years, Robert F. Stroud became a renowned authority on the diseases of birds, and produced an exhaustive book on the subject. He also wrote a mammoth study of the federal penal system. He did both while serving the longest term in solitary confinement in U.S. prison history at Leavenworth and Alcatraz, as the convicted murderer of two men.

The strange case of Robert Stroud has been fashioned into an absorbing film that is deceptively calm and emotionally powerful. Burt Lancaster plays the bird man with a firm restraint that never conceals a deep-felt conviction that Stroud should not be in stir at all. Inevitably, this is Stroud's side of the case, as originally unearthed by Social Worker Thomas E. Gaddis in his 1955 book, Bird Man of Alcatraz. Fact is, Stroud, offscreen. was a stiff-necked, arrogant, impenitent man and at least initially a homicidal threat to society. Like Caryl Chessman, he had just enough brilliance and flair for publicity to amass widespread public sympathy for his cause.

The position of the Federal Bureau of Prisons is masked in the silence of periodic reviews of the case and a persistent refusal to parole Stroud, despite decades of "good behavior." Stroud killed his first man in Alaska in a fight over a prostitute. The picture begins when he kills his second, a prison guard who aroused Stroud's ire in the crowded mess hall at Leavenworth. His mother goes all the way to President Woodrow Wilson to win a commutation of the death sentence to life imprisonment.

Then begins the soulless parade of empty months. One day, as Stroud paces around the prison yard in a scene so desolatingly forlorn that Dante might have pictured it as another circle of Hell, a cloudburst drops a baby sparrow at his feet. Stroud carries it to his cell, cradles it in a sock, nourishes it on ground-up cockroaches. Relatives of other prisoners start sending them canaries. Soon the entire isolation block is trilling, and convicts who get bored with their pets give them to Stroud to keep. With painstaking perfectionism, he fashions cages out of packing crates. A septic fever epidemic decimates his aviary. He pores over biology books, concocts trial-and-error medicines until he discovers a cure. With the help of a bird-loving widow (Betty Field), he markets the medicines.

Then a prison fiat says: no more pets. The resourceful Stroud discovers a legal loophole that permits him to marry the widow while still in prison. This touches off a byplay with public opinion to enable him to keep his birds. But not for long. With no explanation whatsoever, Stroud is abruptly transferred by prison authorities to Alcatraz.

Whatever the merits of the bird man's case (at 73, he now is confined at the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo.), Bird Man of Alcatraz is an impressive movie. Director John Frankenheimer makes graphic the crushing sterility and despair of prison existence, the way the pent-up longing for life and freedom fastens touchingly on tiny things. As an infant canary kicks and squirms its way out of its natal shell, the owner-inmate lights up a cigarette butt, as a proud father would a cigar.

The entire cast of Bird Man is superb, especially Neville Brand as a soft-spoken prison guard and Telly Savalas as Stroud's humorous cell neighbor, both of whom break through the bird man's embittered aloofness to show him that the community of man is not all enemy country. The film's overall indictment is of the penal system as a profoundly damning instrument of society. Bird Man of Alcatraz argues forcefully and with eloquence that the destruction of individual dignity, the reduction of a human soul to a numbered automaton, is as great a crime as any for which men are jailed.

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