Reeling Backward: "Escape from Alcatraz" (1979)

Director Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood made four films together in the space of three years from 1968-71, including "Dirty Harry," but hadn't worked together in awhile by 1979 -- and never would again.

Partly that was due to Eastwood taking over the helm of most of the films he appeared in, after an apprenticeship that began with 1971's "Play Misty for Me." But it also was because the two wrangled over rights to the spec script by Richard Tuggle, who spent six months researching the infamous prison after reading the book by J. Campbell Bruce. Siegel ended up buying the rights to the screenplay out from under Eastwood's nose. They went ahead with "Alcatraz" for old time's sake, but never made another picture together.

The film is a well-done iteration in the prison drama genre, though it doesn't really break much new ground. Eastwood delivers his typical inscrutable tough guy performance of that era; you can pretty much swap out his acting style between movies without missing a beat.

But it worked, so why change? As the old saying goes, actors play roles but stars play themselves.

What I found most interesting about it is how much later films, particularly "The Shawshank Redemption," resemble it. Keep in mind the latter movie only came out 15 years after "Alcatraz" did, and Stephen King's novella, upon which "Shawshank" was based, was published in 1982. I'm not accusing anyone of lifting from anyone else, but let's just say there seemed to be a lot of "inspiration" going on between the three works.

The similarity in character types is pretty amazing. The main character, Frank Morris, is a fairly non-communicative fellow, smarter than the rest, whose arrival shakes up the status quo in the inmate populate. He befriends an older black man, English (Paul Benjamin), a long-timer whose wisdom and caution have propelled him to the top of the food chain. He's threatened with homosexual rape by a vicious thug, Wolf (Bruce M. Fischer), who wants to turn Frank into his "punk," aka prison wife.

Sounds familiar, huh? Well, the parallels go even further.

There's an old man, Doc (Roberts Blossom), who leaves the story about halfway through under tragic circumstances that underline the plight of the main character. In this case, Doc is an artist who lives to paint portraits. He does one of himself with a flower pinned to his shirt, representing "the part they can't take away." But the spiteful warden (Patrick McGoohan), who thinks the purpose of Alcatraz is punishment rather than rehabilitation, takes away Doc's paints, crippling his spirit.

A young uppity inmate, Charley Butts (Larry Hankin), enters the story around the same time Doc leaves, whose gentle nature and enthusiasm for life lifts the other prisoners' mood. He gets roped into Frank's plot to escape, along with two generic tough guy brothers, John and Clarence Anglin (Fred Ward, Jack Thibeau), who are veteran jailbreakers.

Throw in a few other archetypal prison types -- like Litmus (Frank Ronzio), who puts up a hard front but keeps a pet mouse in his pocket -- and you could almost transpose the entire cast of "Alcatraz" into "Shawshank" without much of a bump. (Danny Glover has a blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo that marks his feature film debut.)

It should be noted that Frank and the Anglins were real people, while pretty much everyone else is made up or a variation on reality. There was indeed a fourth inmate in on the escape attempt who was left behind, but his name wasn't Charley Butts. The real guy cooperated with investigators and never received any punishment for his collaboration.

Pretty much the entire second half of the film is a tense crime procedural as Frank and his co-conspirators work out the method of their escape. Using a nail clipper -- ostensibly stolen from the very desk of the warden himself -- welded to a spoon handle, Frank chips out the rotting cement around the grate underneath the sink in his cell. The three men squeeze through into a utility corridor, climb up and out the roof by bending some bars with a pipe and use life preservers and a crude raft fashioned from raincoats to swim away.

To conceal their work, they dump the gravel from their excavations into the prison yard through their pant legs, as we've seen in "The Great Escape" and countless other prison break films. They fashioned paper mache dummy heads, complete with pasted hair from the prison barber, to make it look like they were asleep in their bunks. And similarly fashioned facade grates covered the holes in their cells.

"Escape from Alcatraz" was filmed in the actual prison itself, which was shut down shortly after the Morris escape in 1962, but remains a tourist destination to this day. All the automatic cell doors and everything else still worked, though the studio had to spend half a million dollars to run massive power lines under San Francisco Bay, since the prison's electrical plant no longer functioned.

Obviously, this lends the film a lot of innate authenticity, as we get to see how inmates lived and moved around in cells that were literally the size of a broom closet -- 5 feet by 9 feet. Watching how the men arranged their meager belongings on shelves, or using their commodes as a desktop, I kept musing to myself that prison inmates were the original pioneers of the "tiny home" fad.

There's never really a huge sense of peril in the movie since it's, y'know, Clint effing Eastwood. Unlike Andy Dufresne, you just know he's not going to take it up the keister from time to time. Although it is notable that Frank is marched into the prison in the buff, which as far as I know represents Eastwood's only nude scene in his long career.

Historically, it is highly debated what happened to Morris and his two fellows. Alcatraz had long been fabled as the prison from which no one escaped alive, and there's a certain inspiration for officials to want to keep that streak alive. No bodies were ever found, so there's no way to be certain either way.

"Escape from Alcatraz" looks at first glance like a by-the-numbers prison flick that borrowed heavily from other movies -- until you realize other movies are borrowing from it.

Reeling Backward: "Hell Is For Heroes" (1962)

By all accounts the production on "Hell Is For Heroes" was a total nightmare. And yet, the final result is a gritty, compelling war picture notable for its unblinking look at the horrors of combat. It's one of the earliest movies I can think of where a character dies not with noble silence, but screaming and convulsing while trying to keep his intestines inside his body.

Steve McQueen, an ensemble player who already felt like he should be paid and treated like the big star he was yet to become, was a surly jerk to cast and crew. Screenwriter Robert Pirosh was tasked with recreating the gritty feel of his masterpiece "Battleground," basing much of the plot and characters on his own World War II experiences. He was to have directed it, too, but walked off the project after dealing with McQueen's attitude.

The story, which reportedly was supposed to focus more on Bobby Darin's wisenheimer character, Corby, was rewritten after McQueen was cast, making his moody Private Reese the spotlight. Trusty action movie director Don Siegel ("Dirty Harry") was brought in as a replacement, a move that likely saved the picture.

It was so low-budget that other stars James Coburn and Fess Parker were essentially parachuted into the production a few days at a time while filming other movies. Bob Newhart wanted to go do stand-up comedy instead, and kept lobbying to have his nebbish character killed off. The props and costumes were cheap and unreliable, and eventually the studio just called a halt to production and told the filmmakers to edit together what footage they had.

For all this, "Hell Is For Heroes" is a worthy inheritor of other realistic war films like "Battleground" and a precursor to bloodier depictions of violence that would come with "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Wild Bunch."

And whatever McQueen's disposition toward the cast and crew, he's at his anti-hero cool best. He had the uncanny ability to fashion characters who seemed both remote and identifiable to audiences. His indifference was his hook.

Story-wise, there's not much to it. An American company of dogfaces expects to be sent home, but instead they're sent back on the line to plug up a hole on the front. A puppyish Polish refugee named Homer (Nick Adams) tags along everywhere, hoping to eventually join the soldiers on the trip home. At the last minute Reese (McQueen) joins the second squad as a reinforcement, and immediately sets about alienating everyone.

Reese, wearing a beard and a scowl, is too old and battle-hardened to be a private, but that's because he was just court-martialed down from master sergeant for going crazy on leave, crashing a colonel's jeep. He's a classic film archetype, seen more in Westerns and Japanese samurai flicks: the warrior who lives to fight, and isn't much good for anything anytime else.

The officers are attempting to outfox the Germans, moving in an entire company and then moving them out again quietly, hoping the enemy doesn't notice. That leaves the depleted second squad -- just six men -- to hold the line. The idea is the reinforcements will arrive before the Germans have noticed how thin they are, but of course things don't work out that way.

The rest of the squad is a typical war picture troupe. Coburn is Henshaw, the owlish corporal who likes to fix things. Harry Guardino is the commanding sergeant, Pike, who's smart enough to listen to Reese's advice on battle tactics. Corby (Darin) is the scrounger, always wheeling and dealing. There's Kolinsky (Mike Kellin), the only one who speaks Polish, and the quiet, naive Cumberly (Bill Mullikin)

Parker plays another sergeant who knew Reese back when. Newhart joins them halfway through as Driscoll, a weak-kneed private from the typing pool who got lost with his jeep full of typewriters, and gets conscripted (him, not the typewriters).

The squad comes up with some clever ideas of how to generate enough noise and activity to make the Germans think there's still a whole Army company defending the area. Henshaw rigs the jeep to groan and backfire like a tank. They string wire to ammunition cans filled with rocks or coins and hang them out in no-man's land, so they can pull on them and draw enemy fire.

It seems the Germans even rigged up a microphone in the bunker when they previously held the area so as to spy on the Americans. Driscoll is assigned to stay in the pillbox and simulate the radio chatter of a busy unit, drawing on Newhart's standup routines faking one end of a telephone conversation.

Nevertheless, the Germans do send a patrol to probe. Reese, using grenades and his M3 automatic "grease gun," manages to kill most of them, but some escape to report back. Reese decides the only way to make the Germans hesitate on a full-scale assault is to sneak across the battlefield and blow up their main bunker with a 40-pound charge.

This leads to a very tense scene of Reese, Henshaw and Kolinsky crawling through a minefield on their bellies, feeling for the triggering prongs with their fingers. It's certainly the film's visceral highlight.

"Hell Is For Heroes" is one of those forgotten war pictures that deserves a better place in the cinematic pantheon. Sometimes even when a shoot goes to hell, the result can still pack a wallop.