Prison stuff. In prison movies.
Henry Fonda stars as Clarence Earl Gideon in this episode from the ‘Hallmark Hall of Fame’ TV series. It’s not a prison movie, although it is as a prisoner that Gideon lodges a petition with the Supreme Court of America, asking that it rule the refusal of his trial judge to appoint a lawyer to defend him as unconstitutional. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 9th, 2010 at 7:12 pm. Updated on January 10th, 2010 at 10:07 pm.
This is a Women-in-Prison exploitation movie with a twist: the prison’s exploitation of the women is greater than the filmmakers’. That said, the filmmakers are not entirely innocent; they commit quite a few crimes of their own. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 2nd, 2010 at 8:46 pm. Updated on January 10th, 2010 at 10:11 pm.
It’s hard to imagine a film where a jailbreak is so pivotal to the plot being less of a prison movie. Rather than a prison movie, it’s a bit of your traditional slow-burning action thriller, stiffened by some fine, largely understated performances. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 2nd, 2010 at 1:19 pm. Updated on March 6th, 2016 at 10:03 pm.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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… Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on December 6th, 2009 at 3:51 pm. Updated on January 11th, 2010 at 10:12 pm.