Don Siegel’s prison film is stripped to the bone: a man, a cell, a spoon and a wall. It is patient, cold and quietly gripping, Eastwood has never been better used, and Patrick McGoohan’s warden is the best thing in it.
Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood, who had made Dirty Harry (1971) together, here make a prison film with almost nothing in it. A man arrives on an island. He finds that the wall is softer than it should be. Richard Tuggle’s screenplay has no speeches, no flashbacks and no family waiting on the mainland, and Siegel directs it as if any of those would have been an embarrassment. It is lean, cold and quietly gripping, and we recommend it, with one caveat: it will tell you nothing about how anyone in it feels.
The opening twenty minutes are close to wordless. Morris crosses the bay in the rain and is stripped, searched and walked naked down the block, and Bruce Surtees shoots it with so little light that we see him mostly by the wet on his shoulders and the whites of his eyes. The interiors stay dim throughout: the cells grey and green, the yard overcast, the nights lit by a searchlight and nothing else. Allen E. Smith’s cells are exactly as small as they need to be, and the vent grille Morris studies sits low, where a man has to kneel to work at it.
Then McGoohan arrives, and the film gets its opponent. His Warden clips his nails while telling Morris the rules, and speaks in a soft, reasonable, slightly amused voice that promises nothing good. Where Eastwood underplays, McGoohan underplays further, and their few scenes together are contests to see who can give less away. The script makes him a plain villain, and McGoohan is too intelligent an actor to leave it there. He lets us see that the Warden is bored, and that the cruelty comes from the boredom.
Eastwood has never had much range and here he does not need any. Morris watches, measures and waits, and Eastwood never asks for our sympathy, which is why we give it. The inmates around him are types rather than people. Roberts Blossom’s Doc paints portraits and grows chrysanthemums; Paul Benjamin’s English holds the top step of the yard and runs the library; Frank Ronzio’s Litmus keeps a mouse in his shirt; Larry Hankin’s Charley Butts, in the next cell, is nervous and eager. Each gets one trait and plays it well. Jack Thibeau and Fred Ward, as the Anglin brothers, are good-natured, practical and mostly there to carry things.
Here is the part we did not expect. Midway through, Morris is chipping at concrete with a sharpened spoon, a guard’s footsteps come along the walkway, and we found we had stopped breathing. Jerry Fielding’s score is a handful of low notes at the start and the finish and almost nothing between, so the sound of the film is the prison itself: doors, keys, boots on metal, the foghorn across the water. Ferris Webster cuts the digging as routine, the same few shots repeated night after night, and every repeat is another chance to be caught. We have sat through car chases that gripped us less than a man scraping plaster into a towel.
Doc’s story takes a turn that we will not describe. It is the one moment when the film shows what the place does to someone who cannot leave it, and it is over in a minute. We were shaken, and then slightly cross that the film treated it as a plot point. That is the limit of this kind of film: when it needs us to feel, it has to borrow the moment rather than build it.
Siegel had made a prison film before, Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), and that one was angry about the system. This one accepts that Alcatraz is a rock full of men and asks only whether one of them can get off it. It is far quieter than Dirty Harry, and the one in which Siegel’s plainness pays off most completely. It runs 113 minutes and carries a 15, mostly for the shower block.
Watch it in the dark with the sound up. The film is made of small noises, and most of them will frighten you more than any speech would have.
