Prison stuff. In prison movies.
Chattahoochee. Is it a prison for mentally ill prisoners, or psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane? It’s a fine line, but if you’re looking for a prison movie, it’s the latter, I’m afraid. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 25th, 2017 at 5:32 pm. Updated on April 25th, 2017 at 5:32 pm.
Throughout this quintessentially English television play my mind kept oddly wandering back to that string of South Korean anti-capital punishment movies - like The Executioner (2009) and Harmony (2010) - often featuring kind, reformed, elderly prisoners who present no risk to the community, but who are still destined to be executed. Danny Lee (Tony Selby) is none of those things, but more like Lee Yong-gu in Miracle in Cell No. 7 (2013); an honest, loving and devoted family man, and also a gullible simpleton, around whom this appeal to the emotions in support of the abolition of capital punishment is wrapped after he too is sentenced to death. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 16th, 2017 at 11:14 pm. Updated on April 18th, 2017 at 8:36 pm.
The daughter of a professor, Gabrielle Carey rose to fame as a 20-year-old when her autobiographical teenage surfie-girl novel, Puberty Blues, co-written with her best friend, Kathy Lette, was published in 1979. Within a few short years Carey and Lette had fallen out and had nothing to do with each other. Lette’s life trajectory was somewhat different to Carey’s; she was later to become rich and even more famous after marrying high-flying barrister and TV personality Geoffrey Robertson QC (whom she met in 1988), while Carey’s identification with the underdog was cemented when she visited Parramatta Gaol as a reporter in June 1979 and promptly fell in love with prisoner Terry Haley. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 9th, 2017 at 6:13 pm. Updated on April 9th, 2017 at 6:13 pm.
“Then I woke up, and it was all a dream.” Or, in this case, an alcoholic stupor. It’s not clear what possessed director Fernando de Fuentes to settle on such a lame contrivance with which to end this film - an irresistible regression to childhood, perhaps, or a fear (more than ten years after the Mexican Revolution had just about petered out) that the army or their political masters would still take issue with him portraying them as corrupt… Either way, it’s an irksome way for the film, reputed to be the first major Mexican movie, to conclude. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 4th, 2017 at 8:41 pm. Updated on April 4th, 2017 at 8:49 pm.
I avoided this film for years, supposing that it had too little prison in it. And I was right to do so. Notwithstanding any inferences you might draw from the film’s title, the prison scenes are all over six minutes into the movie (of which fight scenes account for two, and a vaguely - and presumably unintentionally - homoerotic scene involving a boxer, his trainer and some rubbing alcohol in their cell account for another three). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on March 25th, 2017 at 10:35 pm. Updated on March 25th, 2017 at 10:35 pm.
We know that this is a great, real-life story. But why the need to retell it? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on March 11th, 2017 at 3:49 pm. Updated on March 11th, 2017 at 3:49 pm.
You might expect a range of helpful tips in a prison survival guide. In this slightly offbeat comedy-drama, it seems that there’s just one: buy your way out of trouble. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on March 6th, 2017 at 4:40 pm. Updated on March 6th, 2017 at 4:40 pm.
That this follows on from my review of Strange Cargo (1940) is pure coincidence, I can assure you, but the two films’ themes are eerily similar. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 28th, 2017 at 8:59 pm. Updated on February 28th, 2017 at 8:59 pm.
Aah! The delight of two movies in one… tempered only by one of them being rather drawn out, and the other a little weird. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 14th, 2017 at 9:10 pm. Updated on February 28th, 2017 at 7:31 pm.
I’ve been dudded, I’m afraid. Nearly all the internet synopses of this film say things like, “a paroled ex-con tries to go straight and reform a brutal reform school, only to face a frame-up courtesy of the school’s corrupt warden.” But it’s not a reform school at all, but a place to which boys from reform school are paroled (and the ‘paroled ex-con’ is not on parole, and the frame-up is not chiefly the warden’s doing). Anyway, this has the dubious honour of having absolutely no prison in it at all, although when the uniformed guards use their batons against the residents, it does seem a little like a juvenile jail. Oh well.
Posted on February 4th, 2017 at 3:43 pm. Updated on February 4th, 2017 at 3:43 pm.