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“Escape from Alcatraz” is a well-structured piece that focuses one life in prison and it undertakes the task of showing complex sequences intricately woven together into simple storytelling. The film’s artwork executes myriads of emotions through a single action: one attempting to cut a nail and giving the audience a sense of freedom to ears shattering against a boulder. The film executes the overwhelming need to escape but does it through chipping away at a boulder with a nail clipper.
Clint Eastwood does a remarkable job chipping away at the mountain for the role he plays which is Frank Morris, a man whose life we know very little about apart from the fact that he Han prisoners has successfully escape prisons multiple time before getting locked into Alcatraz.
Extremely linear structures like McGoohan (Warden) focusing on the Alcatraz model gives away information about why Clint decided to chip into Mutiny. The brutal cliffs cascade down to the seawater. Eastwood is told by another inmate of a punishment for swimming. It is accompanied by numb arms, strong currents and an unwelcoming shore. You would have to accomplish all of this by the time the guards started their patrol.
What we seem to have here is a prison variant of the Locked Room puzzle. There’s no way out, and even if there was, you would die. An Eastwood character, a sinewy, muscular recluse loaded with rage, would find a challenge like that impossible to resist. Before getting to the escape attempt itself, however, we are first acquainted with the rituals of prison life, and it is in these portions where the director, Don Siegel, proves his particular genius.
Of all the Eastwood collaborators, two, Sergio Leone (the Dollar Westerns) and Siegel (“Coogan’s Bluff,” “Dirty Harry”), were the primary ones in constructing the Eastwoods’ screen self. He, too, has been on the ground of ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ earlier in his classic ‘Riot in Cell Block 11’ (1954).
The way Siegel expands on this story is an extraordinary feat of construction. We learn about prison etiquette, the peculiar methods of dehumanization this prison is famous for, the sadistic warden, and inmates such as Doc, who was a gifted painter, English, the bitter black librarian, and old Litmus with his pet mouse.
The creation of the escape plan itself is rather simple, even if Siegel has a bit of fun with telling some aspects of the story. But the escape itself is curiously unsatisfying. One of the great pleasures of films such as “The Great Escape” was following the intricate plan development and enjoying its execution. The escape in “Escape From Alcatraz,” sadly, is mostly just crawling down somber air shafts and creeping along a rooftop, in shadows so thick that, at times, we cannot believe what we are seeing.
In this case, the film does not conclude the way it so masterfully began. With “Escape from Alcatraz”, though, I think that is permissible. There are so many other aspects of the film that are good the performances, the characters, the attention to detail in prison life, and especially the pacing of events preceding the escape that make one appreciate how rare such craftsmanship is.
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