No-one is ever clean in noir, and Walters is no exception. His moral probity is undermined by an addiction to alcohol induced by long exposure to the sheer brutalism of the prison industrial complex. Walters has a weak position in the prison hierarchy, and he knows it. This ambivalence is established immediately when he encounters Joe returning from solitary in the prison corridor. He calls to Joe, indicating he meant to come down and visit … before trailing off unconvincingly. Collins’s disdainful scorn leaves Walters cowed and shamed in his wake. Immediately afterwards, Walters is advised to ‘straighten out’ by a secretary in preparation for a meeting with the Warden, while a black prisoner servant called ‘Calypso’ (Sir Lancelot), who acts as a singular Greek Chorus throughout the film, adds another sympathetic dose of whiskey to Walters’ glass when it becomes clear Munsey will be present. The darkly comic character of this exchange is undercut when Calypso asks Walters why he doesn’t leave the prison: Walters response is that Calypso has little choice and neither does he.
Walters lowly position within the prison hierarchy is clarified in a meeting with Munsey, the revanchist prison governor, McCallum, and the decent but defeated Warden, Barnes, concerning the age-old punishment or rehabilitation debate. After one intervention, the governor derides Walters as a ‘better philosopher than a doctor’, with neither role welcome. However, after the governor demands absolute discipline and the ‘strictest control’ of the prisoners under threat of dismissal, Walters rises to his feet, passionately decrying the prison as ‘one big human bomb’, kicked, smashed and provoked until an inevitable explosion arrives. Neither the Warden nor Munsey back him up and the governor responds to Walters’ calls for greater understanding and patience by dismissing him as a ‘drunkard’ and a ‘dreamer’. From this point onwards every time Walters’ speaks, he calls into question the entire prison regime. This burden of ethical responsibility, complicated by a serious drink problem, is carried off superbly by Smith.
As the new disciplinary regime ratchets up the tension, the Warden, Munsey and Walters gather to discuss a forthcoming meeting with McCallum. When the Warden leaves, the cocksure Munsey extols the fascist virtues of authority, order and control to Walters, mocking the ‘infection’ of the Warden’s weakness. The scene compounds the key ethical themes in the film, with Munsey advocating strength, discipline, power and punishment and Walters, pouring drink after drink, defending tolerance, compassion, understanding and rehabilitation. When Munsey chastises Walters for his drunkenness, Walters responds by saying he is an ordinary man getting drunk on whiskey, while Munsey––ensconced in the Warden’s seat like ‘Caesar, trying out his throne’––is ‘drunk on power’. It’s 1947, two years after the fall of Nazism, Dassin had been in the Communist Party until 1939 and would end up being blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1949. When Walters accuses Munsey of sadism and the suicide of a prisoner he had been leaning on for information, and Munsey’s response is that he is ‘just following orders’, the connection between the crimes of the past and present are crystallised. Munsey’s response to Walters’ unflinching accusations is ‘the brute force’ that Walters had accused him of all along.
Walters’ affinity with the prisoners is illustrated with two beautifully performed sequences. Firstly, Joe visits Walters’ office on a fabricated errand and casually asks him the time. At just this moment a prisoner who had planted a gun on Joe is killed by fellow inmates in the workshop. In a masterful scene of understated dialogue, Walters subtly intuits Joe’s role in the murder and recognises the cruel informal justice of the prison population, fatefully accepting his complicity as a constructed alibi. Secondly, utilising Doctor’s privileges to access prisoners at work, he whispers in Joe’s ear that Munsey is onto his plan of escape. The dreary resignation etched across his face following Joe’s doomed response, ‘thanks for trying Doc’, encapsulates his forlorn position as a decent man in a terrible place and time. After the failure of the escape plan and an ensuing prison riot, Walters tends to the injured Calypso, who winces in agony. ‘This place is full of pain, Calypso’, he says, before beseeching his friend: ‘why do they do it, they never get away with it … but they keep trying’. He rises from his seat and turns directly to camera, framed by the bars of a prison window, and declaims in a bleak address that reaches out beyond the prison population, to both himself and the audience: ‘Nobody escapes. Nobody ever really escapes.’
Smith’s performance bursts through the confines of a minor role to provide both the film’s ethical centre and tragic coda. Most intriguing is how he mediates a posture of progressive certitude with a defeated air of melancholy. For anyone with even a hint of compassion or social conscience his tragic performance speaks powerfully across the ages.
