Brubaker (15)

If The Shawshank Redemption is the doleful labrador of prison films, then Brubaker, starring a gutsy, convincing Robert Redford, is the snarling bulldog.

Henry Brubaker (Redford), Wakefield State Prison’s new warden, has heard all the rumours about unsafe conditions and rampant mismanagement. The food and cells are abominable; prisoners are tortured and used as slave labor for local businessmen. So to get a good sense of where his priorities should lie, he masquerades as a prisoner ahead of his first day. He keeps himself inconspicuous, and watches as the rumours prove themselves not just true but worse than he possibly could have conceived.

Several key prisoners are wary of Brubaker's reformist zeal. An inmate guard (Yaphet Kotto) retains a "show-me" attitude, and a lifer (David Keith) finds it difficult to believe that any warden could care about the dignity of convicts. Eventually they both are won over.

Craftily well-directed by Stuart Rosenberg (The Amityville Horror), Brubaker is granite-hard and, despite the odd drift into impassioned cliché, truly gripping. This muck-rake through America's infected soul could be viewed as one of the last hurrahs of the '70s.