![]() John Sturges’ 1963 film, on the other hand, plays like a puzzle that becomes an action film in the third act. ![]() The former is darker, more haunting, as its clandestine plotting builds toward a tense, explosive, and rather shocking finale. The two finest wartime prison camp movies ever made are The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape. Let’s examine just three (very different) films to better understand why prison is so often visited-and works so well-as a story device: The Great Escape, Raising Arizona, and, to honor its twentieth anniversary, The Green Mile. And yet, the imprisonment of others is perfectly acceptable as entertaining art in which to lose ourselves. And the prison movie, over many decades of cinema, has become a genre in itself.Īgain, the question: why? Why do they make this stuff? And why do we go out and see it, or sit back on our couch devoting hours of time binging? Movies and television ought to allow us opportunity to forget about our world and its problems in a defiant act of sluggish respite. It’s a movie about death-the fear of it, the release of it. It causes us to reflect, to ponder the choices we’ve made, to wonder which ones will have the longest lasting repercussions. And, in the end, Hanks’ Paul Edgecomb lives on, at 108-years-old, awaiting death, believing he remains as a consequence for letting John Coffey (Duncan)-a miracle from God-die. Still, through his suffering, others are healed. He lays down his life to be free of the suffering, not to bear it. In some ways, it’s a Christ story, though the allegory is an imperfect one, where the Messianic figure is burdened by his gift. It’s a somber movie about regret and punishment. Where that film is about hope and delivers an exclamation point of an ending that leaves you cheering while wiping the tears from your face, The Green Mile’s finale is downbeat. ![]() It’s a beautifully made film-deliberately paced, wonderfully acted, and it’s driven home by a waterworks-inducing string-heavy Thomas Newman score. When considering all the releases of that year, there’s none more emotionally affecting than the Tom Hanks, Michael Clarke Duncan-starrer. It’s never discussed as ‘90s great, let alone a film for the ages. But as Shawshank has endured in our hearts and minds as the beloved movie it deserves to be, The Green Mile is largely forgotten. It was another adaptation of a Stephen King work, and another period film set in a prison. The Green Mile did considerably better than Shawshank at the box office, yielding $286 million worldwide ( Shawshank only made about $28 million). And then, on December 10th of that year-twenty years ago today-Darbont’s new film arrived on the big screen. 1999 had already given us the likes of American Beauty, The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense. Once again, it was a seminal year for the cinema. Shawshank had become a classic by then, airing regularly on TNT since 1997 ( Ted Turner had acquired Castle Rock in 1993). Or maybe it’s because it was a prison movie.īy the time Darabont took his seat in the director’s chair again five years later, we were excited to see what he’d turned out. Perhaps it was the confusing title, or the fierce competition in what was a memorable year in film. Though nominated for seven Oscars, Best Picture among them, it didn’t take home a single statue. It didn’t happen immediately, but in the years after its release, Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption found its way onto every film lover’s list of favorites.
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