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This is not a stylishly directed movie, something that works to its benefit. Through clear-eyed observation, the movie documents all the ways in which inmates are stripped of their dignity, so that the titular event takes on a certain urgency. Some of this is through deliberate, pointed acts (the warden cruelly takes away painting privileges from an inmate), but others are from the mundane details of prison life. When you think of nudity in prison movies, it's usually in a more salacious context, the requisite titillation we expect from WIP flicks. Here, presented as frankly as it is, it feels dehumanizing. (There's perhaps more to unpack with respect to the gender dynamics at play with this element, but I don't think the movie is ignorant of them.) The filmmakers managed to shoot this in the real Alcatraz, and the movie gets a lot of its effect from the deadening physical realities of living in this particular setting.
It's maybe a bit startling to learn this was directed by Don Siegel, as the compassionate streak towards inmates here feels starkly at odds with the tough-on-crime sentiment of Dirty Harry. Both films star Clint Eastwood, who plays things with his usual steely understatement, perhaps more so here, as he's given next to no backstory. This is another area where the movie excels, as it's able to flesh out its characters through intelligent casting, small bits of action and carefully observed dialogue. This is all the personality the characters are allowed to still have (one of them has a phone conversation with his wife cut short when he tries to explain the prison's rules), so it makes sense we get to know them on such terms. The character we learn the most about is a black inmate played by Paul Benjamin, who got handed an excessively punitive sentence for killing two white assailants in self defense. He bonds with Eastwood over a slowly developing mutual respect, although both characters prod their racial divide. This element might bring to mind the embarrassing dynamics in The Mule, where an octogenarian Eastwood is cool enough to hang out with Latino drug dealers a quarter of his age and sling racial shittalk around without getting stomped, but let's just say it's handled a lot more convincingly here.
When the movie shifts to the escape itself, many of these qualities still hold. There are no great moments of excitement, but instead an almost pathological procedural quality. Eastwood uses nail clippers to scrape away at a grille in his cell. He can't get a good grip on the clippers so he steals a spoon. He needs to weld them together so he procures a dime and matches. And so on and so forth. The actual escape is depicted with a similar terseness, characters crawling through the crevices of the prison, ducking out of the sightlines of the guards, their navigating of the prison's architectural rendered with a real tactility. It doesn't exactly end with a bang, but maybe that's the right choice.
Escape from Alcatraz (Siegel, 1979)
This is not a stylishly directed movie, something that works to its benefit. Through clear-eyed observation, the movie documents all the ways in which inmates are stripped of their dignity, so that the titular event takes on a certain urgency. Some of this is through deliberate, pointed acts (the warden cruelly takes away painting privileges from an inmate), but others are from the mundane details of prison life. When you think of nudity in prison movies, it's usually in a more salacious context, the requisite titillation we expect from WIP flicks. Here, presented as frankly as it is, it feels dehumanizing. (There's perhaps more to unpack with respect to the gender dynamics at play with this element, but I don't think the movie is ignorant of them.) The filmmakers managed to shoot this in the real Alcatraz, and the movie gets a lot of its effect from the deadening physical realities of living in this particular setting.
It's maybe a bit startling to learn this was directed by Don Siegel, as the compassionate streak towards inmates here feels starkly at odds with the tough-on-crime sentiment of Dirty Harry. Both films star Clint Eastwood, who plays things with his usual steely understatement, perhaps more so here, as he's given next to no backstory. This is another area where the movie excels, as it's able to flesh out its characters through intelligent casting, small bits of action and carefully observed dialogue. This is all the personality the characters are allowed to still have (one of them has a phone conversation with his wife cut short when he tries to explain the prison's rules), so it makes sense we get to know them on such terms. The character we learn the most about is a black inmate played by Paul Benjamin, who got handed an excessively punitive sentence for killing two white assailants in self defense. He bonds with Eastwood over a slowly developing mutual respect, although both characters prod their racial divide. This element might bring to mind the embarrassing dynamics in The Mule, where an octogenarian Eastwood is cool enough to hang out with Latino drug dealers a quarter of his age and sling racial shittalk around without getting stomped, but let's just say it's handled a lot more convincingly here.
When the movie shifts to the escape itself, many of these qualities still hold. There are no great moments of excitement, but instead an almost pathological procedural quality. Eastwood uses nail clippers to scrape away at a grille in his cell. He can't get a good grip on the clippers so he steals a spoon. He needs to weld them together so he procures a dime and matches. And so on and so forth. The actual escape is depicted with a similar terseness, characters crawling through the crevices of the prison, ducking out of the sightlines of the guards, their navigating of the prison's architectural rendered with a real tactility. It doesn't exactly end with a bang, but maybe that's the right choice.