Prison stuff. In prison movies.
Also known as The Concrete Jungle. Advertised when it was released as ‘The Toughest Movie Ever Made in Britain’, this is part underworld movie and part prison movie. (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 3:20 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
Yes, that’s right; ‘Nu zi jian yu’ becomes ‘Women Prison’… and that sets the standard for the sub-titling throughout. It’s an entertaining prison movie for traditionalists: a fight for top dog, a naïve first-timer, a brutal, corrupt officer, an escape, some sexual assaults, and even a disturbance that requires the use of tear gas. Not unlike the 1987 Hong Kong film about a male prison, Prison on Fire, in some ways. (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 3:16 pm. Updated on February 23rd, 2013 at 10:14 pm.
23 year old Sean Penn plays a Chicago schoolboy Mick O’Brien, who has a long rap sheet and ultimately gets sent to a juvenile institution for driving his car into (and killing) the 8-year-old brother of his arch enemy in the schoolyard, Paco Moreno. At the time, he was being pursued by Police from the scene of a crime where he and a mate were all balaclava’d up, ready to rip off Paco’s gang’s drug stash, before another gang started shooting and people got killed. You get the picture; they’re young, but bad dudes. (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 3:09 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
This is your line-and-length type prison movie, scoring awfully high on the cliché count. Which is a shame because it’s co-written by Truman Capote and is filmed grainily on location in a prison in Salt Lake City (I just can’t work out which one) with plenty of prisoners as extras. The backdrop is stunning and the film should be better. (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:51 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
A made-for-TV women’s prison movie that tells a sad, bleak tale, with a certain grittiness to match. (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:47 pm. Updated on January 1st, 2019 at 9:30 am.
Quaint and oddly acclaimed film which is not a prison-based Inferno as the title might lead one to expect. (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:10 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
‘A Song of Love’. Jean Genet had all the credentials to write and direct a prison movie – in his younger years he was a petty thief, vagrant and prostitute and spent a number of years in juvenile and adult penal facilities. This 26-minute, soundless, black & white film draws on some of that experience, and no doubt his experience as a gay man in prison. (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:04 pm. Updated on May 7th, 2020 at 9:46 pm.
This purports to be the true story of Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four. The Belfast-born Conlon and three others, suspected by Police of being a crack IRA death squad, were convicted of the 1974 Guildford pub bombings, and his father, aunt and other members of her family were convicted of bomb-making. They were arrested just a couple of days after the British Police won new anti-terrorist laws that allowed them to hold terrorism suspects for seven days without charge, and Conlon claimed that Police used that time to beat confessions out of him and his co-accused, with whom he lived briefly in a London squat. (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 1:53 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
Having been very critical of Midnight Express for its xenophobic vilification of the locals, I was keen to see a slightly more trustworthy portrayal of the Turkish prison system. And the two films are different; while Midnight Express has not one prison guard who is neither corrupt nor brutal, Duvar has… one! (more…)
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 1:38 pm. Updated on April 28th, 2020 at 10:14 pm.
I grew up with Porridge (the TV series), and when I started working in prisons I thought it more accurately portrayed what life inside the walls was really like than the more dramatic images of prison on TV – which usually concentrated on the violence and brutality. It showed humour, it showed some mutual regard (and some mutual contempt) between prison officers and prisoners, and it showed good-hearted, bumbling staff working alongside officious, cynical ones. Not so many good officers, now that I come to think of it.
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 1:26 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.