The worst thing about keeping a cinephile’s bucket list is that you never know what you’ve been missing until you hunt for something you know you’ve missed.

“Brute Force” might be the greatest prison break movie from the film noir era.

It stars Burt Lancaster and a near Who’s Who of the great character actors of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

It was scripted by Richard Brooks, who had launched star Lancaster’s career by adapting Hemingway for “The Killing,” and who went on to script “In Cold Blood,” “Elmer Gantry, “Blackboard Jungle,” $Dollars,” “The Professionals” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

Director Jules Dassin first showed his flash and flair with this film, and would go on to make “Topkapi,” “The Naked City,” “Rififi,””Night and the City” and “Never on Sunday.” Dassin ensured “Brute Force” would both live-up to its title, with inmate rough justice for “stool pigeons” and sadistic guard rubber-hosing and wanton mass shooting. But Dassin and Brooks tuck that brutality into a film of poetic dialogue and lovely grace notes.

“Everything’s OK? What’s OK? NOTHING’S OK. It never was and never will be until we’re out. GET that? OUT!”

The flawless compositions, with Garbo’s favorite cinematographer William H. Daniels’ camera work that takes us into an inmate-administered “execution” and hurls us into a riot in the yard make this film the epitome of “genre picture” as art.

My favorite touch? Casting singer and actor Sir Lancelot as a calypso singing Greek chorus, fleshing out character introductions and situations by tossing out this inmate’s (scripted) DIY verse explaining many a moment.

Lancaster’s Joe Collins comes out of solitary, and “Calypso” hints at what’s to come, and happen to the stoolie who put him there.

“My ol’friend Joe was in de hole, it was worse from where dey diggin’ coal. He comes out holdin’ very high his head, and the man to blame, soon be very dead!”

The athletic Lancaster’s Joe is one of the toughest and most powerful inmates at overcrowded Westgate Penitentiary. He doesn’t have to lift a finger, once he’s out of solitary. His five adoring cellmates — played by character acting legends John Hoyt, Jeff Corey and Whit Bissell, including the short-lived character mug Jack Overman as an ex-boxer and “introducing” Howard Duff, who’d make his mark as well — tell him “We’ve made arrangements.”

The prison is, as most prisons always are, a political football, packed and roiled with violence with an ineffectual warden (Roman Bohnen) at a loss and a higher-up telling him to “keep it under control” because “We don’t want to be bothered any more.”

Sadistic Capt. Munsey (Hume Cronyn, pint-sized evil) has his own way of doing things. Cross him and you end up digging “the drain pipe,” a tunneling job that’s basically a death sentence. Inmates have “accidents” around Munsey.

Joe wants out. Joe’s always wanted out. But things have to turn a tad more dire before his whole cell and the white-haired senior man in the yard (Charles Bickford) will buy into a scheme that starts to half-form in his and others’ heads.

Brooks’ script shows us the back-stories of most of the men in the cell, Joe included. The flashbacks are a catalog of “Where I went wrong” and “the woman waiting for me” (or who “left me holding the bag”) memories. Duff plays a soldier who took the rap for a shooting in uniform, with Yvonne DeCarlo as his Italian paramour. Joe’s not told his sickly wife (Ann Blyth) he’s in prison. But she won’t get that cancer operation without him with her.

Mild-mannered Bissell is the bespectacled, mousie guy who stole to keep an out-of-his-league beauty (Cora Raines) in fur.

Hoyt makes a perfectly vulpine gambler and hustler who can laugh about the woman who hustled him.

“I wonder who Flossie’s fleecing now?”

The flashbacks slow what is often a breathless thriller, giving the script and the viewer a pause before a no-holds-barred finale whose clever problem-solving, sprawling action and compact shot selection is the template for every prison break/riot movie that’s come since.

If Dassin and Brooks didn’t take their feet off the gas every so often, lines like the prison being “one big humming bomb” would slip by, and this Bickford/Lancaster exchange wouldn’t resonate.

“That’s cemetery talk!”

“Why not? We’re buried, ain’t we? Only thing is, we ain’t dead!”

The thing about the best noirs from that Golden Age is the way they crackle and pop off screen in ways both wholly modern, and thrillingly theatrical.

If “Brute Force” isn’t on your own “Greatest Pictures of the Past” bucket list, you need amend that list.

Rating: TV-14, violence, sadism

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Yvonne DeCarlo, Charles Bickford, Ann Blyth, Jeff Corey, John Hoyt, Whit Bissell, Roman Bohnen, Anita Colby, Jack Overman, Sir Lancelot and Howard Duff.

Credits: Directed by Jules Dassin, scripted by Richard Brooks. A Universal release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:38