Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

Dirty Harry director Don Siegel reunited with Clint Eastwood for this taut 1979 thriller about real-life bank robber Frank Morris, who led the one possibly successful (bodies were never found) escape attempt from the notorious maximum-security prison on San Francisco's Alcatraz Island.

For almost all of its length, Escape from Alcatraz is a taut and toughly wrought portrait of life in a prison. It is also a masterful piece of storytelling, in which the characters say little and the camera explains the action. It's one of those very difficult exercises in which large emotions, like the compulsion to be free, are reflected in minute actions, like the chipping away at stone with a pocket nail clipper.

The major reason for Escape's success is Siegel's effortless expertise in re-creating the atmosphere of Alcatraz, an atmosphere in which, as the Warden says, good citizens were not made, but good prisoners were. As photographed by Bruce Surtees in rainy black and blue, the dogged, slow-motion swim through excelsior that constitutes prison existence is painfully and convincingly reproduced. For Eastwood, there is an extra bonus: if the milieu doesn't provide him with a reason for his stubbornly characteristic grimness, it does at least provide an excuse. [23 June 1979]

Beautifully served by Eastwood's self-containment, which is less granitelike than usual (he has a soft spot for that mouse), Siegel sets these various escapes ticking like a time bomb. [22 July 1979, p.67]

Screenwriter Richard Tuggle and director Don Siegel provide a model of super-efficient filmmaking. From the moment Clint Eastwood walks onto The Rock to the final title card explaining the three escapees were never heard from again, Escape from Alcatraz is relentless in establishing a mood and pace of unrelieved tension.