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A reconsideration of Riot in Cell Block 11, and a belated "you're welcome" to Bresson. The penitentiary is a basket of rotten eggs in the void, first seen as a chunk of rock in the rain by the newly-arrived convict (Clint Eastwood). The warden gloats over the Alcatraz maquette in his office, and lays down the law accordingly: "We don't make good citizens, we make good prisoners." The escape is a methodical affair suspended between two images, the protagonist chipping away at the wall of his cell with a nail-clipper and the papier-maché dummy head filling half the screen at the close (cf. Ray's Bitter Victory). Like Losey or Becker, Don Siegel shoots the prison less for suspense than for compact abstractions of oppression, loneliness, comradeship, revolt—nothing embodies its view of the human condition like the shot of fugitives ducking for cover while the searchlight from the guard's tower slices through the darkness. Hierarchy depends on how high one can sit on the steps in the yard (battered concrete grays and frigid nautical blues anchor the composition), the only women are wives and daughters tearfully mouthing "I love you" from the other side of the visiting room's window. The veteran librarian (Paul Benjamin) matches wry wits with Eastwood while remembering a brush with Alabama racists, the resident portraitist (Roberts Blossom) is a serene soul who quotes Mark Twain and then hacks off his fingers when his paintings are taken away. Grilled frames and hard pans, "lots of time to practice," a summarization right out of Beckett ("We count the hours, the bulls count us, and the king-bulls count the counts"). Siegel's most crystalline articulation of his obsessive-outsider motif, practically a haiku collection building to the vision of men bobbing away in Stygian waters. Cinematography by Bruce Surtees. With Fred Ward, Jack Thibeau, Larry Hankin, Frank Ronzio, and Bruce M. Fischer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |