There are echoes of all sorts of other movies in Diamond Geezer (known as Rough Diamond in Australia). The plot (master criminal seeks perfect alibi by escaping from prison, committing a huge robbery and then returning to prison before anyone notices that he’s been gone) is very reminiscent of Two Way Stretch (1960). The main character, Des (David Jason), seems to borrow some features from ‘Blanco’ Webb, the elderly prisoner Sir David played in the Porridge TV series. And the prison’s top dog, Mr Fellows (Gary Whelan), carries on a fine British film tradition [The Italian Job (1960), and Porridge (1979) for starters] of crime lords ruling the prison from their prison cells, not always in a gentlemanly manner. It’s all very comfortably familiar. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 17th, 2010 at 4:38 pm. Updated on January 25th, 2010 at 11:45 pm.
Carl Upchurch had it tough. Born in 1950 in South Philadelphia, his first memory was apparently of his grandmother killing his grandfather. He grew up in gangs and in and out of trouble, and spent 10 years in jail. Then he found ‘the light within’ and became a religious man, a voice against his fellow prisoners’ meek acceptance of the inevitability of their lives and their incarceration, and an activist for political and social reform. Conviction is his story. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 11th, 2010 at 7:24 pm. Updated on January 11th, 2010 at 10:08 pm.
To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to this movie. At all. A young rapper from a drug-infested ghetto in Washington DC goes to jail. I’m not a fan of hip-hop, and I’m not a big fan of gangsta angst in prison movies. And then there’s the film’s tag: Slam – All in Line for a Slice of Devil Pie. What?! But it’s much better than all that. It’s a powerful story which refuses to accept that it should be the lot of so many young African Americans to finish up in jail, sending a message similar to the one American Me (1992) gave about gang life destroying the potential of young Hispanic kids in LA. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 10th, 2010 at 10:02 pm. Updated on March 25th, 2016 at 6:56 pm.
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.