Knothead

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BRUBAKER

Directed by Stuart Rosenberg

Screenplay by W.D. Richter

It seems clear that Robert Redford has decided to place his talents and his star's clout more or less in the service of ideals he believes in. Though he is happy to entertain an audience, it had better be in the context of a story containing a liberal, humane moral. Somehow his roles --whether as investigative reporter or up-the-organization cowboy--suit him in his maturity, as they do not most other leading men, about whom the sweet odors of Bel Air and Rodeo Drive cling. There is something of the authentic knothead about Redford.

Brubaker, which is about the efforts of a warden to clean up what looks to be the foulest and most corrupt prison in America, is not as close to everyone's concerns as All the President's Men was, nor has it the knockabout charm of The Electric Horseman. But it is an often powerful film. Its most potent passages come at the beginning. Redford, in the title role, becomes an inmate in a prison in order to experience conditions there firsthand before he takes over as warden. Since I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang almost half a century ago, moviegoers have periodically been made painfully aware of how rotten life can be on a Southern prison farm. Director Rosenberg had a good go at the subject in Cool Hand Luke (1967). But never has the food looked so disgusting, or the living conditions so vile, as they are shown here. Nor have the reprisals and punishments been more brutally demonstrated. Also, the fact that the Brubaker character is modeled after Thomas Murton, an academic penologist who took over an Arkansas prison in the 1960s, gives the film a documentary urgency that its predecessors have lacked.

Brubaker, like Murton, discovers that the horrors of prison life are not waste products of idle sadism; they are manifestations of a wider corruption. The penalty for exposing these evils is death -- a sentence carried out by the venal trusties and implicitly condoned by their civilian counterparts, the local politicians and businessmen. It is the discovery of the victims' graves that brings Brubaker to its ambiguous climax.

In return for silence on the murders, Brubaker is offered a deal that would give him the money to put into practice all the reforms for which he has been campaigning. He refuses, evidently on the grounds that one cannot make deals with a system so mired in evil. The movie, though sympathetic to his stand, stops short of full endorsement. A larger good might have been accomplished through compromise.

The moral argument is not long or preachily dwelt on. Nor is a romance that might have developed between Redford and Jane Alexander, playing the Governor's aide who got him appointed. One sees the spark flash between them and then watches them immediately suppress it, as men and women often do when a larger task is at hand. Both are excellent, as are Yaphet Kotto and David Keith as prisoners trying to decide if they dare to give their trust to Brubaker. One might wish that Director Rosenberg could control his ever zooming, ever panning camera. Stillness would have served this grim film better.

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