Veteran genre director Don Siegel directed this simple and gripping story about an actual escape from the supposedly escape-proof Alcatraz. Siegel is extremely good at this sort of thing (see his 1954 genre classic, RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11) and if you like to watch people doing a job, you
won't find it done better elsewhere.
The escape-proof "Rock" was designed in the early 1930s to hold the most infamous, incorrigible and escape-prone inmates in the federal prison system. Located in the dead center of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz played host to Al Capone and Doc Barker, among others, and was considered by J. Edgar
Hoover and other federal executives to be the only American prison from which no inmate could ever escape. In 1962, however, Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers did escape, resulting in the institution's closure.
This film is the story of that escape, convincingly enacted by Eastwood as mastermind Morris, a taciturn, calculating man with nerves of steel. Upon Morris's arrival at Alcatraz, he is met by a vain, smug warden (McGoohan) who informs him that he can forget about escaping; it has never been done
and never will be done. But as an inmate who has escaped from other prisons, Morris's attitude remains unchanged.
The pace of this movie is a bit slow, but Siegel's deliberate, sparse direction works to the benefit of a film where time is all his characters have. Surprisingly, there are few exciting set pieces and relatively little violence, yet ESCAPE is relentlessly tense. This production marked the fifth
time Eastwood worked with Siegel, his directorial mentor. leave a comment