People were incarcerated on the 22-acre island (which took its name from the Spanish word alcatraces, which is most often translated as "pelican" or “strange bird”), since the 1850s, but it was only transferred to the Department of Justice in 1933, when it got a makeover with more secure cells, guard towers, and protocols that accounted for prisoners multiple times a day. narvikk/iStock via Getty ImagesĪlcatraz Federal Penitentiary was famously one of the most unforgiving prisons of the 20th century. The water surrounding Alcatraz was believed to prevent successful escape. Long before the advent of internet sleuths and true crime specials, the country would be transfixed with their audacious bid for freedom-and whether they had really made it out alive. In just under two years’ time, the Anglins and an accomplice named Frank Morris would put that reputation to the test. So in 1960, prison officials who were wary of their determination to regain freedom decided to send the brothers to the one place in the country that had proven to be completely escape-proof: Alcatraz, a fortified island in San Francisco. Both had also tried to run from chain gangs. The Anglins were caught and arrested just five days later in Ohio, and all three went to prison.Įventually, John and Clarence ended up at Leavenworth, a penitentiary in Kansas, where Clarence attempted to make a break for it by trying to smuggle himself out in two enormous bread boxes John likely assisted him. Not that they had time to do much with the money. For the Anglin brothers, three of 14 children who grew up in poverty-stricken areas of Georgia and Florida, it was a life-changing amount of cash. The men wielded a plastic firearm to scare employees and exited with over $18,000, the equivalent of $174,000 today. On January 17, 1958, the Anglins, along with their older brother Alfred, stormed into Alabama's Bank of Columbia. There's so much else that's so good in the film - in the performances, the characters, the minutely observed details of prison life, the timing of events leading up to the escape - that we realize how rare such craftsmanship really is.For brothers John and Clarence Anglin, the story of the most infamous prison escape in modern history began with a toy gun. With "Escape from Alcatraz," though, I think that's acceptable. So the movie doesn't have the ending that its superb beginnings had us expecting. The escape in "Escape From Alcatraz," alas, is mostly just a matter of hunching down gloomy air shafts and inching along a rooftop, in shadows so dark we're sometimes unsure what's happening. One of the great pleasures of a film like "The Great Escape" was to watch the plan as it developed, and then relish its unfolding. But then the escape itself is strangely anticlimactic. The development of the escape plan is pretty straightforward, although Siegel has some fun with one element of the plot. We learn prison discipline, we learn the ways of dehumanizing that are peculiar to this prison, we meet the sadistic warden, and inmates like Doc, a gifted painter English, a bitter black librarian, and old Litmus, who keeps a pet mouse. The way Siegel develops this story is a triumph of narrative. He has also been over the territory of "Escape from Alcatraz" before, in his classic "Riot in Cell Block 11" (1954). Of all the directors Eastwood has worked with, the two most influential in shaping his screen persona have been Sergio Leone (of the Dollar Westerns) and Siegel (" Coogan's Bluff," " Dirty Harry"). But before the escape attempt itself, we're introduced to the daily routines of prison life and it's in these sequences that the director, Don Siegel, displays his special talent. A challenge like that is irresistible to this Eastwood character, a lean and muscular loner containing great angers. You can't get out, and if you do, you die anyway. What we basically have here, then, is a prison version of a Locked Room mystery. A fellow inmate ( Paul Benjamin) tells Eastwood what happens if you get that far: The tides make the mile swim seem like ten, the water's so cold your arms turn numb, and you can't make it to shore in the time-intervals between convict counts. Early on, we see why: The warden ( Patrick McGoohan) hovers over a model of Alcatraz and we see the sheer walls falling down to the rocks and the sea.
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