Jacques Becker's "le trou" is generally looked upon as the best French prison movie ever.This one is the nadir of this kind of stuff.I do not know who could do worse.Jacques Becker's grande oeuvre avoided all the clichés:the wardens were not the baddies for instance.Claude Brasseur's homosexual sadistic brute is cliché itself.How could this thespian agree to play such a demeaning part?It seems that one man out of two is gay in this clink!the others are either "innocent " Arabs (but the scenarists quickly abandon them to their sad fate) or lunatics (a guy is always singing a Michel Polnareff-french singer of the sixties- tune,using a pipe end as a microphone).A drag queen spends the WHOLE movie in the solitary,actually a real dungeon, without light! :Amnesty International where were you when we needed you?Even Jose Giovanni ,who wrote the screenplay for "le trou" and who spent some time in jail in his youth never went as far as that when he depicted the hell of the French prisons.Actually the director was looking towards Quentin Tarantino for violence models.