Escape From Alcatraz
(1979)
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Based on the true story of the only escape from Alcatraz--a maximum-security prison built on an island located in shark-infested waters to contain the most dangerous, hardcore criminals and most gifted escape artists in the U.S.--ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ stars Clint Eastwood as inmate Frank Morris, the man who plans the escape. When he arrives at Alcatraz in 1960, Morris has an interview with the pompous warden (Patrick McGoohan), who assures him that the prison is escape-proof, well aware of his record of prison breaks. Upon entering the prison population, Morris makes friends with some of the more human inmates, including Doc (Roberts Blossom), an old lifer who paints in his cell; and English (Paul Benjamin), the prison librarian. Less engaging is Wolf (Bruce Fischer), a huge prisoner who tries to stab Morris during a knife fight in the exercise yard after the latter had refused the hulk's generous offer to become his punk. Morris emerges from his punishment in solitary to find that his old friends, the Anglin brothers Jack (Fred Ward) and Clarence (Jack Thibeau), have arrived. He knows that with them he can make a break. This meditative, deliberately paced film might be the only Zen prison movie on record. Eastwood, Siegel, and screenwriter Richard Tuggle brilliantly evoke the look and feel of prison life in this exhaustively researched project, eschewing excess violence and histrionics as they make clear how much patience, ingenuity, and careful planning are involved in an escape of this magnitude. |
Don Siegel did much to establish his reputation with Riot in Cell Block 11 in 1954, and he went back behind bars for this tough and compelling reconstruction of the only successful escape from San Francisco's notorious island prison in its 29-year history. Driven stir crazy by the strictures of warden Patrick McGoohan's regime and the brutality of his fellow inmates, Clint Eastwood plans an ingenious bid for freedom with Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau. Blessed with expert performances, Siegel shoots the preparations with an attention to detail that exerts as strong a grip as the events of the escape itself.
Halliwell's Film Guide
A dour, terse, depressing prison movie which makes an uncomfortable star vehicle and not very much of an entertainment, but does preserve a certain integrity right to its ambiguous ending.