Prison stuff. In prison movies.
Director Jean-Pascal Hattu set out, one imagines, to create a movie full of longing and quirkiness. A movie of melancholic remembrances prompted by smells and touch and things imagined and things unsaid. It only half works. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 13th, 2010 at 9:38 pm. Updated on April 13th, 2010 at 9:39 pm.
It has just about everything, this movie with prison reform at its rather smug heart – violent escape bids, papier-mâché dummies in beds, murders, a brutal Warden… And it’s the only prison movie I know where the prison itself does the narration, not unlike Mr Ed: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 12th, 2010 at 9:19 pm. Updated on August 19th, 2012 at 5:18 pm.
Kathleen Storm (Sylvia Sidney) is a flower shop girl who is being aggressively pursued by gangster Kid Athens (Earle Foxe). Athens has to lie low for a while and asks Kathleen to lie low with him; she declines, seemingly (and improbably) having just discovered (after going out with him for a bit) what he does for a living. The smitten Athens ain’t too pleased, and swears that no-one will take his place. As luck will have it, within hours she meets engineer Standish McNeil (Gene Raymond) and within weeks she has married him, is lying horizontally with him, and is preparing to travel with him to his next work assignment in Russia. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 10th, 2010 at 6:32 pm. Updated on April 10th, 2010 at 6:45 pm.
My wife tells me that I have trouble in admitting I’m wrong. Luke Sinclair (Dorian Harewood) won’t tell the Parole Board that he was wrong in having killed the man who was taunting him after being acquitted (on a technicality) of killing his wife and daughter, so he is forced to do most of his 15 year sentence. For his obduracy he is also required to reprise the Nicolas Cage role in Con Air (1997) in this low-grade thriller, also known as Steel Train (to distinguish it from what? Papier-mâché Train? Polyester Train?). They could well have called it Con Rail. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 5th, 2010 at 6:06 pm. Updated on April 5th, 2010 at 6:06 pm.
In 1939 Mutiny in the Big House hit the cinemas, with an awfully idealised portrait of a prison chaplain. This movie, released the following year, gives us much the same fare – but because the chaplain is distrusted and reviled for most of it, it’s much more palatable. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 4th, 2010 at 8:29 pm. Updated on April 4th, 2010 at 8:29 pm.
There’s a little bit of prison action here. Four times the chief protagonist goes to jail. On one occasion he even stands on the scaffold on which he is supposed to hang. But it’s far from a prison movie. Instead, it’s a rather courageous satire, highly critical of the folly and dishonesty of Hungary’s post-war communist regime. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 4th, 2010 at 6:41 pm. Updated on April 25th, 2020 at 1:11 pm.
This is a simple story about honour. And love. And how one man finds them both on an island penal colony. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on April 2nd, 2010 at 5:21 pm. Updated on April 2nd, 2010 at 5:35 pm.
I confess that haven’t seen the original Green Street Hooligans, and I don’t think I’ll be tracking it down soon. Mind you, those who have seen both seem to agree on two things: that this film is the inferior of the two and the sort of sequel that gives sequels a bad name. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on March 28th, 2010 at 2:11 pm. Updated on March 28th, 2010 at 2:11 pm.
It’s not uncommon, in my experience, for certain corrections officers to be attracted to the most extraordinarily difficult prisoners; there is something in being seen to be the only one who can manage the unmanageable, or the only one who seems to understand what makes the monster tick. Perhaps that’s what drove Henry Lesser to become the confidant of serial killer Carl Panzram. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on March 22nd, 2010 at 9:59 pm. Updated on March 6th, 2016 at 1:45 pm.
Prisons are all about finding a suitable balance between things that inevitably seem to be in conflict. The individual’s needs versus the system’s needs. Security versus rehabilitation. Cost effectiveness versus quality. Etcetera. And this classic riot movie exemplifies all those inherent conflicts – from the most visible (prisoners creating disorder in opposition to order) to the more subtle (yet bitter) disagreements at the most senior levels about how prisons ought to be run… and how a riot ought to be controlled. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on March 20th, 2010 at 2:53 pm. Updated on August 29th, 2019 at 8:48 pm.