![]() ![]() Pacing is quite subdued, but this helps enhances the creaky mood and sophomoric nature of Alcatraz. There's nothing overwrought here and gladly it doesn't succumb to that. But it when comes to the forefront it manages to be cunning, but also touching. The well-articulated script by Richard Tuggle is scanty with a lot of quiet patches. It starts of small and stays that way to the end, even with its dominantly large situation. The smartly layered plot works this into the characters very successfully and despite the predictability, it stays admirably honest without the need of sensationalising the facts and ambiguous conclusion. Like quoted in the film the rock would either break you or inspire you to fight on. There's nothing explosive and downright exciting, but there's spirit lurking under the cold looking domain that eventually comes through. The build up doesn't sway off course, but sticks to its simple narrative and characteristics with effective results. It's hard not marvel at Siegel's sturdily compact craftsmanship in depicting the dour prison life with moody realism and how the story eventually folds out into a tautly drawn up break out attempt. Campbell Bruce's novel (and the supposed true story) of the only three men to break out of Alcatraz. On their filth and final partnership they come up with another genuine winner in the shape of the grippingly harrowing and sedated prison yarn shaped off J. ![]() You can always count on the influential pairing of Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel. Morris actually discovers a possible way of escape and carefully plans it out with the aid of a couple of inmates. Through a small glimpse of hope and luck. Morris makes some friends, but also an enemy which wants to see him dead, after turning down his proposal with brute force. The prison warden intends to keep it that way. The maximum security prison life is jarringly miserable and hopeless. ![]() There's so much else that's so good in the film - in the performances, the characters, the minutely observed details of prison life, the timing of events leading up to the escape - that we realize how rare such craftsmanship really is.Frank Morris was a bank robber who has escape many prisons in his time, but for his troubles his transported from Atlanta and shipped off to the rock they call Alcatraz. With "Escape from Alcatraz," though, I think that's acceptable. So the movie doesn't have the ending that its superb beginnings had us expecting. The escape in "Escape From Alcatraz," alas, is mostly just a matter of hunching down gloomy air shafts and inching along a rooftop, in shadows so dark we're sometimes unsure what's happening. ![]() One of the great pleasures of a film like "The Great Escape" was to watch the plan as it developed, and then relish its unfolding. But then the escape itself is strangely anticlimactic. The development of the escape plan is pretty straightforward, although Siegel has some fun with one element of the plot. We learn prison discipline, we learn the ways of dehumanizing that are peculiar to this prison, we meet the sadistic warden, and inmates like Doc, a gifted painter English, a bitter black librarian, and old Litmus, who keeps a pet mouse. The way Siegel develops this story is a triumph of narrative. He has also been over the territory of "Escape from Alcatraz" before, in his classic "Riot in Cell Block 11" (1954). Of all the directors Eastwood has worked with, the two most influential in shaping his screen persona have been Sergio Leone (of the Dollar Westerns) and Siegel (" Coogan's Bluff," " Dirty Harry"). But before the escape attempt itself, we're introduced to the daily routines of prison life and it's in these sequences that the director, Don Siegel, displays his special talent. A challenge like that is irresistible to this Eastwood character, a lean and muscular loner containing great angers. You can't get out, and if you do, you die anyway. What we basically have here, then, is a prison version of a Locked Room mystery. A fellow inmate ( Paul Benjamin) tells Eastwood what happens if you get that far: The tides make the mile swim seem like ten, the water's so cold your arms turn numb, and you can't make it to shore in the time-intervals between convict counts. Early on, we see why: The warden ( Patrick McGoohan) hovers over a model of Alcatraz and we see the sheer walls falling down to the rocks and the sea. ![]()
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