This has been referred to as India’s answer to The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and you can sort of see why. Both feature an innocent man in jail, denied justice, and both Andy Dufresne in Shawshank and Parag Dixit in this movie are detached outsiders in the prison environment. But that’s about where the similarity ends. While Andy calmly and patiently plays the game, Parag is intense, humourless, and in a perpetual seethe at the injustice of it all. (more…)
Posted on December 27th, 2009 at 8:03 pm. Updated on January 2nd, 2010 at 11:26 am.
Based on a true story, this follows Peter Madagin, an angry teenager who gets 5 years in an adult prison after a railway engineer dies in the train that he and his mates derail while mucking around, acting tough. It’s hard work empathising with him – so hard, in fact, that the film doesn’t work. Well, that’s just one of the reasons the film doesn’t work. (more…)
Posted on December 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm. Updated on December 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm.
A trap for young players: Synopses of this movie invariably have The Three Stooges ‘going undercover’ in a jail to prove the innocence of their three fiancées’ father, Warden Stevens, who has been framed and finds himself a guest of his own establishment. Well, yes, they do go undercover, but as nightclub patrons and not, as one might reasonably expect, as prisoners or even guards. Oh, well… (more…)
Posted on December 25th, 2009 at 10:41 pm. Updated on December 25th, 2009 at 10:41 pm.
If this is a satire of The Big House (1930), I’m afraid the satirical bits largely passed me by. Other than perhaps poking fun at an arsenal of weapons that suddenly appears in the hands of the prisoners in the final few scenes, I’m not sure that I saw much of a connection between these two prison-movie heavyweights. This was Laurel and Hardy’s first full length talking movie, and the first movie-length talkie prison comedy, by my reckoning. And better than their shorter silent prison films by quite a margin. (more…)
Posted on December 19th, 2009 at 9:50 pm. Updated on December 27th, 2009 at 8:38 pm.
This is a remake of The Criminal Code (1931) and Penitentiary (1938). Publicity at the time of its release proclaimed that it’s about ‘a convict’s love for a Warden’s daughter.’ It is that, but it’s much more about the criminal code and where a prisoner’s loyalties lie. And it does of pretty good job of it, too. (more…)
Posted on December 12th, 2009 at 7:46 pm. Updated on October 19th, 2013 at 6:06 pm.
There’s a lot to like about this film. It’s got a bit of a thriller element and has a some delightful, hard-bitten, scheming exchanges between the prisoners. But then it seems that the scriptwriters had a collective mental block and came up with an earthquake, of all things, as the means by which the main protagonists are able to effect an escape, even though one of them is already armed with a gun. Still, I suppose it’s more plausible than a meteorite landing on the prison, or invading martians whisking them away. (more…)
Posted on December 6th, 2009 at 4:37 pm. Updated on December 9th, 2009 at 10:29 pm.
The credits of this film thank the Grafton Correctional Institution and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. You wonder what they got out of being associated with this piece of tripe. Perhaps they weren’t warned about the storyline, because you’d think that they might have wanted to distance themselves from its themes of high level corruption and murder rings operating in Cleveland’s prisons. (more…)
Posted on December 6th, 2009 at 3:51 pm. Updated on January 11th, 2010 at 10:12 pm.
Shankar (Rashid Farooqi), a farmer, and his wife Champa (Nandita Das) are Pakistani Hindus from the ‘untouchable’ caste. Their son, Ramchand (Syed Fazal Hussainas the younger boy), is a wilful little brat. He refuses to go to school and complains when his father gets a bigger meal. In a fit of pique he kicks over a cup of tea his mother has poured for him, and storms off… past his father working in the fields and unwittingly across the border into India, where he is immediately captured by the military. His father goes looking for him and he, too, is arrested. Shankar is accused of being a spy, beaten and tortured… and then thrown into prison, along with his 8-year-old son. It’s 2002 and tensions between India and Pakistan are high; it’s not a good time to be straying into enemy territory. And not a particularly good time to be an 8-year-old in an adult prison. (more…)
Posted on November 30th, 2009 at 9:10 pm. Updated on March 25th, 2016 at 11:23 am.
Comedy duo Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey made more than 20 feature films together from 1929 to 1937. Like Laurel & Hardy and The Three Stooges (and the execrable Ernest in more recent times), it was inevitable, I suppose, that at some stage they would set one in a prison. But when one of the early critical scenes in Hold ‘Em Jail involves them being left completely alone in the Warden’s office for quite some time – until they are joined by the Warden’s daughter and sister for some serious flirting – you know that its heart is perhaps not in the prison at all. (more…)
Posted on November 28th, 2009 at 11:12 pm. Updated on December 11th, 2009 at 8:57 pm.
Fascinating prison, this. There’s this solid, imposing wall surrounding a maximum-security prison, around which – if I’ve got this right – there are acres and acres of Toronto forest and a scalable, razor-ribbon-topped fence. It’s a prison where prisoners escape over the 7 metre wall with ease, only to routinely get run down by highly trained attack dogs in the foresty bit. No wonder people start asking questions. (more…)
Posted on November 16th, 2009 at 9:49 pm. Updated on December 28th, 2010 at 6:59 pm.