Brubaker

Redford is Brubaker, all gritty integrity and inner resolve as the new warden of a Southern prison farm, who arrives disguised as a prisoner so that he may better expose the mugging, raping and murdering cesspit he discovers. By its attribution of every evil to simple human greed, the melodrama remains hamfisted; while Rosenberg's direction (the original director, Bob Rafelson was fired for thumping the producer) signals 'realism' with crude denim-blue tints in every image. After two hours and ten minutes one is left only with a numbing awareness of Redford's charmless charm, the macho image unable (unlike Eastwood or Reynolds) to even contemplate self-irony.