Brooks Was Here

Veteran actor James Whitmore passed away this past Friday. He was a true professional from the old school of acting. Recognizable by his bowlegged cowboy style of walk, I'd seen him mostly in Westerns and War movies when I was a kid. I also spotted him in in a Twilight Zone episode or two. But it was his role in one of my favorite movies, Shawshank Redemption, that left an impression on me so strongly.

In Shawshank he played the wise old institutionalized convict, Brooks Hatlen, who'd been inside so long that he'd grown to depend on the prison walls as his safety from the outside modern world. When he was finally paroled, after serving about fifty years or so, he was so scared to leave the prison he almost murdered another inmate just so he could stay. Once on the outside he continued to contemplate ways to get himself thrown back in the clink.

What James Whitmore did in his final scene as Brooks Hatlen was show us a glimpse of what it must feel like to be locked up for fifty years then set free in a fast moving world where nobody knows you, nobody cares about you and everything seems foreign.
As Brooks said while putting on his prison issued suit and tie in his boarding room before deciding to check out, "I'm tired of being afraid all the time, I've decided not to stay."

Yes, James Whitmore always put a bit of himself in the roles he played, and it was that soulful self of his that captured your imagination while watching him in a movie.

I almost forgot to mention. Before checking out of his room permanently, Brooks left behind the only mark that a convict who'd spent just about his entire life behind bars could. He took out his pocket knife, probably a violation of his parole to have, stood up on a wooden chair and proceeded to carve three scraggly words into the old chalky headboard above the rafters. Those three words were as good as having a headstone in a plot at a cemetery for good old Brooksy. It said as much about him as anything on a gravestone could ever have read. Those three words?

"BROOKS WAS HERE"


James Allen Whitmore, Jr.
(October 1, 1921 – February 6, 2009)

IMDB Link to James Whitmore

Pictures of Ohio State Reformatory (Shawshank Prison)