![]() 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. 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. Escape From Alcatraz (1979) features Clint Eastwood as Frank Morris, a real life convict in the real prison of Alcatraz. 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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