Escape from Alcatraz

Director: Don Siegel

1979 / 112min / 35mm

Siegel’s fifth and final teaming with star Clint Eastwood, by then an established director in his own right, is the closest an American prison break thriller ever came to the absorbing, process-driven, largely dialogue-free approach to the subject matter found in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. Eastwood plays the real-life Frank Morris, who, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin (here Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau), became the only three men to have successfully escaped the confines of the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, the year before its 1963 closure. The FBI concluded to their satisfaction that the men had drowned in San Francisco Bay, closing the case in the year that Siegel’s film was released, though the film itself seems less than certain…

Distributor: Paramount