Stir Fry

By J.S.

ON THE YARD Directed by Raphael D. Silver Screenplay by Malcolm Braly

This low-budget prison film makes several promising gestures in the direction of documentary honesty before giving up and turning slick. The result is mildly enjoyable and instantly forgettable. The narrative deals with the downfall of a boss con named Chilly (Thomas Waites), who runs a bookmaking operation and most of the other illicit action in the prison yard. He is a short, cocky fellow of 24 who keeps the other cons and a good many of the guards in line with brains and nerve, backed up by occasional knifings done by his chicano enforcer, Gasoline (Hector Troy). Chilly's boast, which he is intelligent enough to see as a hollow one, is that he has run every prison he has been in since he was 14. He has a loser's pride in his reputation; he keeps his word and enforces his rules.

A new guard captain sets out to break Chilly's power in order to establish his own rule. In the conflict, both Gasolino and a con named Juleson (John Heard) die as Chilly struggles to hang on. Juleson's characterization is interesting: he is a quiet, fairly bright middle-class wife killer who doesn't fit in the underclass prison society. One of the better scenes takes place in a group therapy session, in which the other cons (most of them actually inmates at the Rockview State Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania, where the film was shot) goad Juleson into talking about his wife.

The film is visually convincing; the faces are those of defeated men, and Rockview's cells and exercise yard are appropriately bleak. Brutality by guards is dealt with, but gingerly, and the coercive homosexuality in prisons is simply ignored, as is tension between black and white inmates. Realism fails partly because some of the principal characters, Chilly among them, are made a bit too likable by the story's occasional tendency to break down into bad guy-good guy situations. But the most important lapse is simply that the workings of the plot, which involves a not very believable escape, make life on the yard too lively.

Dullness and indifference are the reali ties of prison, but these, of course, are poor ingredients for a movie.

-- J.S.

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