Cinema Speculation

Escape from Alcatraz

(1979)

Escape from Alcatraz, a film I didn’t like when it came out—I’m sure it was just too dry for the seventeen-year-old me—proved a revelation on a re-view a few years ago. Cinematically speaking, it’s Don Siegel’s most expressive film. During his days in New Hollywood Siegel shot some terrific action scenes: The final fatal shootout for Richard Widmark’s Madigan. The pool hall fight (a real showstopper) in Coogan’s Bluff. The entire school bus sequence in Dirty Harry, as well as that film’s action introduction of hot dog Harry vs. the Black Panthers (the scene suffers a little now due to its obvious backlot quality. Are they in San Francisco or Hazzard County?). The machine gun shootout in The Black Windmill (explosions of muzzle flash, bullet casings, and splintered wood). The actual action part of the bank robbery in Charley Varrick. The attack of Harry Bascom of Bascom Auto Repair (Siegel regular John Mitchum), the first of the sleeper agents that Donald Pleasence wakes up in Telefon.

Yet unlike Leone, Peckinpah, (Peter) Hyams, and De Palma, Siegel never engaged in cinematic set pieces, until the beautiful, practically wordless opening sequence of Escape from Alcatraz.

The sequence not only takes its time, but it also seems to go back in time. On one hand, it feels like the no-nonsense fifties Siegel of Baby Face Nelson & Private Hell 36—though tellingly, not like the docu-style of Riot in Cell Block 11. But on the other hand, never before and never again would Siegel engage in this type of cinematic bravura.

From Eastwood’s first appearance as Frank Morris, being led off the ferry in the pouring rain onto the isolated island in his raincoat. To the older but still virile Eastwood (who looks as if he’s been chipped from granite rock as much as the penitentiary) being walked into processing in his old-school gray suit (back in the day when people went to prison in suits and it wasn’t a statement), being made to strip while the prison doctor examines his mouth like livestock. To being marched naked through the cell block (brilliant), the sound of his bare feet slapping out a rhythm against the cold concrete floor that echoes against the stone walls of the Rock. To the final moment when Morris is placed in his cage, the cell door is slammed shut, and the guard says the first real line in the film, “Welcome to Alcatraz,” punctuated by a Mario Bava–like thunderclap and lightning bolt. “Bravo!”

Siegel’s next film after the critical and financial success of the Eastwood prison picture would be his Burt Reynolds’ caper comedy Rough Cut. On that film Siegel would end up getting fired by the producers and replaced, for a few days anyway, by Bond director Peter Hunt, and writer Larry (TV’s M*A*S*H) Gelbart would have his name removed from the credits.*

In Burt Reynolds’ autobiography, he mentions the elderly Siegel spent half the movie asleep in his chair. And when you see Rough Cut, you can believe it (that may be the reason he was fired).

But as the opening sequence in the Eastwood picture proved, not only was the old man wide awake on Escape, but fully engaged and inspired to test his craftsmanship and technique.

I suspect the reason for Siegel’s full engagement on the Clint Eastwood Alcatraz picture—as opposed to the Charles Bronson espionage picture Telefon before it, and the Burt Reynolds caper comedy Rough Cut after it—was on Clint’s film, the director had something to lose.

What do I mean by that? We’ll get into that in a minute, but first, leaving Escape from Alcatraz for a moment, let’s discuss the Charles Bronson spy film Siegel made before the Eastwood prison drama.

For most of the seventies, the two action stars that ruled the globe were Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. (After The Towering Inferno, Steve McQueen abdicated his throne to drink beer and get fat with Ali MacGraw in Malibu.) In America, the third was Burt Reynolds, who, for a time eclipsed both Clint and Charlie. So much so, both Clint and Charlie tried to do their own version of a comedic Burt Reynolds–like action flick. Breakout for Bronson (good), and Every Which Way but Loose for Clint (abysmal, but successful). But Burt’s films, while they did great in the States—and killed in the South—never traveled as well to Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa as the Eastwood and Bronson pictures did.

In Europe that third spot would go to either Franco Nero or Alain Delon, depending on the year.

In Japan it would be Takakura Ken.

Even Christopher Mitchum was a big noise in Spain due to his pretty decent Spanish Revengeamatic Summertime Killer, directed by Spaniard action maestro Antonio Isasi.

The only really serious threat to Bronson and Eastwood’s worldwide dominance came from Hong Kong’s Bruce Lee. But the actor’s untimely death would stop the competition before it ever really got started.

However, Charles Bronson, by the end of the seventies, was looking a little long in the tooth—little did we know then that Bronson still had more than a decade of action films in front of him. So by the time he did his best picture during his tenure at Cannon Pictures, J. Lee Thompson’s delightfully lurid Kinjite (the movie where Charlie shoves a dildo up a guy’s ass in the first scene), it looks like an action picture starring a Terror-era Boris Karloff.

During the same period when Burt Reynolds was kicking ass with Gator, Smokey and the Bandit, and Hooper, and Eastwood was laying waste with The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Enforcer, and The Gauntlet, Bronson was getting passe with mediocre efforts like St. Ives, Breakheart Pass, and The White Buffalo.

In an effort on the studio’s part to keep Bronson from getting marginalized, they wisely deduced that it wasn’t Bronson’s age that was sapping his energy—considering how old he was, he looked remarkably good back then—it was his habit of working with tired old hacks like J. Lee Thompson (I love Thompson and Bronson’s Cannon Pictures of the eighties, but their seventies movies are lackluster) and Tom Gries (how did Ted Post miss the call?).

The last Bronson films to make any real noise were his excellent turn in future action auteur Walter Hill’s first film, Hard Times, and the very good—offbeat—Frank D. Gilroy comedy From Noon Till Three, which provided Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland with easily her best role. Most of the roles in her husband’s films were marked by her miscasting. But, for once, she was perfectly cast in the comedy. In fact, she’s better cast than he is, though he’s quite funny, and at the finale, quite poignant. The whole enterprise is even romantic, because it’s obvious the only reason Bronson did the movie was to provide Jill with that role.

At some point Bronson being comfortable on the set became more important than the movie, hence working time and time again with helmers like J. Lee & Gries. So in an effort to resuscitate Bronson’s waning career in the mainstream of commercial Hollywood filmmaking, action master and Eastwood mentor Don Siegel was brought in to pump some life into “the ugly one” (one of Charlie’s nicknames in Italy).

Unfortunately, it sorta worked the other way around.

In his autobiography Siegel recounted his Telefon experience with Bronson was prickly and the script was stupid. Which reveals all you need to know about the take-the-money-and-run aspect of the endeavor. The wacky Manchurian Candidate–like story tells the tale that during the Cold War fifties, Russia planted a bunch of deep-cover sleeper agents in America near important military installations. The sleeper agents don’t know who they are, they’ve been brainwashed into believing they’re Americans. But when a certain Robert Frost poem is recited to them, it triggers their assignment, and they suicidally sabotage military targets. The plan was ultimately abandoned by the Russians, and the sleeper agents are left where they were to live out the rest of their lives as Americans.

Until thirty years later when an evil rogue Russian mastermind named Dalchimsky (played by Donald Pleasence), with a hard-on for the world, has a list of names and starts calling the sleeper agents on the telephone (hence the title) and setting them off. Bronson plays KGB agent Grigori Borzov and Lee Remick plays a CIA agent who joins forces with Bronson to assist him in killing Dalchimsky (the only reason that Pleasence doesn’t just call all the agents in one hour, is that if he did, there’d be no movie).

As I said, the idea is wacky.

In fact the Zucker brothers did a takeoff on it in one of the Leslie Nielsen Naked Gun movies and didn’t bother to add any jokes.

But just because the premise is nutty doesn’t mean it’s bad.

In fact, it’s far out enough that in the right hands, it could have been a stone gas. But those right hands definitely didn’t belong to old fart Siegel, who blew the picture’s chance for success by de-emphasizing the kooky elements and emphasizing the dull ones.

Siegel not only wasted his time, he wasted the Stirling Silliphant and Peter Hyams (who should have directed) script.

The scenes where the sleeper agents are activated are a blast (almost all Siegel regulars: Mitchum, Sheree North, and Roy Jenson).

And Donald Pleasence, as he is in all of his pictures for Siegel, is a theatrical beast. Not to mention his reading of the Robert Frost trigger poem, once heard, is never forgotten.

DALCHIMSKY

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

but I have promises to keep,

and miles to go before I sleep.

Remember Nikolai, miles to go before you sleep.

But in his autobiography, Siegel admits to finding the plot dumb, so naturally he decided not to feature it. I always wondered why the film starts out such fun, only to turn into such a snooze once Bronson and Remick enter the picture. So MGM’s idea of bringing in a big director gun to keep Bronson vital was a bust.

After this film Bronson would forever be banished to second tier status.

So while Siegel took the money and ran on Telefon, and took the money and slept on Rough Cut, Escape from Alcatraz gave him one last artistic erection. The difference between Siegel on the Eastwood film, and the other two films with Bronson and Reynolds, was on this prison film Siegel had something to lose. . . . his reputation.

With Richard Tuggle’s taut, minimalist script, he had the best material for a cracking good picture in some time. Siegel was also returning to the playing fields of two of his biggest past triumphs, the prison picture and a Clint Eastwood picture.

The old lion always made it very clear he considered his docu-style prison fifties muckraker Riot in Cell Block 11 as his first real (good) movie. In regard to a picture whose technique and intensity rises to the top of its field—be it prison pictures, fifties crime films, or old movies playing late at night on local television—Riot in Cell Block 11 is hard to beat. With Riot in Cell Block 11, not only did the Don Siegel “B movie maestro” reputation begin, so did his penchant for violence and brutality, and his talent for (when left to his own devices) excellent casting.

Scary Neville Brand, and even scarier Leo Gordon, have as much to do with Riot in Cell Block 11’s success as Eastwood does with Escape from Alcatraz.

But, finally, the reason for Riot in Cell Block 11’s reputation was simple: it was the best prison movie ever made.

In his autobiography, Siegel speaks of Escape from Alcatraz’s scribe Richard Tuggle telling him that Riot in Cell Block 11 was his favorite prison film.

But Alcatraz was also his first collaboration with Eastwood since their phenomenal success with Dirty Harry (it would also be their last).

Magnum Force was written for Siegel (Ted Post did it), and Eastwood offered Don Every Which Way but Loose, which Siegel said he turned down because he didn’t think Clint could pull it off (it turned out to be Eastwood’s biggest hit up to that time. . . . Ugh).

But after a few films with other stars, Matthau, Michael Caine, Bronson, and John Wayne, this was a return to the kind of picture the old man did best, with the actor he did it best with.

There would be no sleeping in the chair on this movie.

A bad movie from this script would not only signal the old dog was washed up, but it would tarnish both the memory of Riot in Cell Block 11 and Dirty Harry and Siegel’s privileged place as the man who understood Eastwood. Not to mention by this time, as much as Clint respected Don, if Siegel fell asleep in his chair on the Alcatraz set, he’d probably wake up to find Eastwood directing the picture.

Eastwood, from the very beginning, always had a clear understanding of his own iconic persona and so did Siegel. No other director, including Leone—judging by the harsh, insulting remarks Sergio made at Clint’s expense during the publicity for Once Upon a Time in America—understood Eastwood better. And Eastwood didn’t trust anybody with his carefully crafted persona the way he trusted Don Siegel.

Siegel and Eastwood were always in clever cahoots with how they exploited Clint’s iconic image.

First as a handsome young stud in Coogan’s Bluff and The Beguiled, then away from westerns into urban crime dramas with Dirty Harry.

With Harry Callahan, Eastwood was brought up to date, and the only true western heir to John Wayne was turned into the quintessential cop of the seventies, the decade when cops replaced cowboys as the action film heroes of choice.

And in Escape from Alcatraz, yet again, Siegel and Eastwood had a new plateau to break through.

An older, middle-age Eastwood.

And, as was their way, they exploited the hell out of it.

Eastwood’s naked walk through the corridors of Alcatraz is simply a thing of cinematic beauty. But it’s highly doubtful Eastwood would have trusted this type of imagery with the other directors he was working with at the time, James Fargo and Buddy Van Horn.

And while I don’t know this for a fact, my guess is Eastwood might have been too self-conscious (i.e., embarrassed) to direct himself in a scene like that.

By this time in their collaboration, many of the creative decisions are the joint decisions of two simpatico minds. I can imagine Eastwood and Siegel in a script meeting discussing how long can they go in the picture before Frank Morris says his first line. Then how few lines can he speak after that. How few lines can all the characters speak, except for Patrick McGoohan’s loquacious and sadistic warden. And speaking of iconic persona manipulation, McGoohan tweaks his own. The former Prisoner (Number Six) trapped on an island prison, is now in control of the most famous island prison since Devil’s Island. Only this time McGoohan gets to play “Number Two.”

And his opening speech to Eastwood’s prisoner, “We don’t make good citizens in Alcatraz, but we do make good prisoners,” echoes the speech Patrick Cargill’s Number Two gives McGoohan in episode 14, “Hammer into Anvil.”

What’s so intriguing about the way Siegel opens the picture is that as bravura as it is, it also has a starkness—I’d describe it as a cool boil—that seems appropriate for the film’s period setting.

A genuine stylistic prison film precursor to Escape from Alcatraz is the first of the fourteen films in the Japanese action film series Abashiri Bangaichi (1965) starring Japan’s answer to Eastwood, Takakura Ken, and directed by Ken’s Siegel, Teruo Ishii. This stark stylistic black and white snow-set prison escape adventure is a perfect companion piece to the Siegel and Eastwood endeavor (it’s highly unlikely Siegel would have ever seen Abashiri Bangaichi, but not unthinkable that Eastwood may have viewed it for its possible remake potential).

Escape from Alcatraz concerns the, supposedly, true story of armed robber and prison escape artist Frank Morris’ arrival to the prison in the early sixties. Almost everything about the movie seems a throwback to another time. The way Eastwood seemed not like his normal self, but like a fifties tough-guy actor. Yet in trying to think of an appropriate fifties equivalent, I couldn’t. The most hard-boiled badasses of that Eisenhower era, like Ralph Meeker and Charles Bronson, and laconic tough guys like Robert Mitchum, Brian Keith, and John Garfield all talked a blue streak.

Among those fifties tough guys, only Alan Ladd knew how to keep his mouth shut. But the diminutive Ladd could never compare as a camera subject with the massive Rodin-chiseled Eastwood.

Where the throwback quality is most profoundly felt is in the very genre of prison films itself. Starting with Harvey Hart’s (underrated director) very filmic adaptation of John Herbert’s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes, starring Wendell (The Sterile Cuckoo) Burton and Zooey (I Dismember Mama) Hall in 1971, the subject of male domination by homosexual rape was introduced into the genre.

The subject was timidly touched on again in the TV movie Truman Capote’s The Glass House. But the true reality of the racial implications of prison rage rape against the machine wasn’t dealt with forthrightly until ex-convict Miguel Pinero’s play and later movie adaptation Short Eyes changed the prison film genre forever—the resulting Robert Young–directed film was also rereleased as an exploitation film, retitled Slammer (which I saw at the Carson Twin Cinema, on a double bill with Richard Pryor’s Which Way Is Up?).

And this reality at the time was compounded by the landmark television docu-special Scared Straight!

Post-Scared Straight!, not only every story about prison had to deal with the threat of homosexual rape, any thoughts you might think about prison had to deal with it as well.

The only reason Jamaa Fanaka’s shoddy prison pic Penitentiary, made the same year as the Siegel film, was a surprise hit was the “bustin’ the new bronc” cell fight, an exciting, compelling, and seemingly realistic new addition to the genre.

Escape from Alcatraz represents—at the height of that awareness—the last time a convincing prison story could be told that didn’t dwell on those male-rape aspects. And even this film couldn’t completely ignore it.

The film’s most unconvincing scene is a ludicrous attempt by some barrel-built prick to bust Morris in the shower. As if anybody would earmark the forty-five-year-old Clint Eastwood for homosexual subjugation. So instead of the sexually violent and racially motivated survival of the fittest warped society of desperate felons, Siegel’s picture, maybe for the last time (without being a thirties period piece), could dwell on old-school prison genre concerns.

In the first half, the brutal isolation, monotonous regimented routines, numbered privileges, and that character that had all (except for women-in-prison films) but disappeared from the genre, the cruel sadistic warden, are depicted. In the second half, the film deals with something else that had been all but ignored by the genre in the last decade, a masterly crafted, minutiae-filled escape plan.

Most movie prison breaks are exciting high-flying affairs, milked for every second of nail-biting suspense. Oliver Reed and Ian McShane’s prison escape at the beginning of British action maestro Douglas Hickox’s crime film Sitting Target is a perfect example.

But Morris’ constant chipping away at the Rock with a pair of nail clippers at first seems futile, then impressive, then finally heroic. Almost everything about the escape strikes you as unique.

Morris’ first revelation that maybe he’s found a way off the Rock isn’t presented the way we’ve become accustomed to. We don’t see Morris moseying along the corridor, suddenly spotting a flaw in the stone fortress that only he can recognize. Morris doesn’t have one big eureka idea.

One tiny reveal reveals another minutia of opportunity.

All the step-by-step moments of the escape become intriguing, and by the time you’ve put together a clear picture of the plan, you’re fascinated.

The constant chipping away of the Rock, the collecting of the clothes for their moonlight swim (the faultiest part of the plan, and what surely killed them in real life), the paper-mache heads they painstakingly paint and sculpt (the image Siegel uses for the closing credits), the jerry-rigged welding gun they build to cut the cell bars.

The plan takes such talent and intelligence that if they hadn’t died, you can’t help but think it could have won them parole.

By the same token, all the qualities involved in the escape attempt–discipline, skill, intelligence, talent, daring–could equally apply to Siegel’s technique in depicting the escape.

In the same way that Morris chips away at the Rock, Siegel chips away at Tuggle’s scenario.

As simpatico as Siegel and Eastwood were as artists, Siegel and Morris were as simpatico in methodology.

Morris uses lifelong learned methods of ingenuity, practicality, and experience to dig through that rock wall.

Siegel takes lifelong learned lessons of ingenuity, practicality, experience, and skill and applies them to his use of montage. Siegel is almost as silent as Morris, preferring to illustrate via montage than explain through expositional dialogue.

After beginning his career in the film business creating montages for other director’s movies (Casablanca & The Roaring Twenties, among many others), the first really significant montage he ever used in his own work belongs to this late-in-life masterwork.

Did Morris and his compatriots escape?

I’m sure they were dead ducks nineteen minutes after they hit the water.

But the real true-life escape is Siegel escaped letting his pal Eastwood down. These two men shared an artistic collaboration between great star and great director that will stand aside the greatest of all time. A big part of that collaboration is both men owed the other more than they could ever repay.

With Siegel, Eastwood had escaped flash-in-the-pan status inside the Hollywood studio system (as opposed to staying in Italy, like Lee Van Cleef, and cranking out pasta-land potboilers).

With Eastwood, Siegel had escaped anonymity, becoming a major A-list Hollywood filmmaker fairly late in life.

And when these two old compadres, with a friendship based on mutual respect, admiration, masculinity, and love, did the impossible—escaped from Alcatraz—they slammed the iron door behind them.