Review #1,405: 'Escape from Alcatraz' (1979)

Before their falling out, director Don Siegel and actor Clint Eastwood made some great films together, beginning with Coogan's Bluff in 1968 and ending with arguably their finest work, Escape from Alcatraz in 1979. Like Eastwood's character Frank Morris, Escape from Alcatraz is lean and no-nonsense, set completely within the walls of the infamous island prison. It's also a masterpiece of visual storytelling, with Siegel displaying a skill for capturing the routine of life in Alcatraz, from the small individual cells to the mundane work cycles, all combining to create an overall sense of hopelessness for those destined to rot away on the Rock. Morris has been placed there because he has escaped from every other prison he's been sent to, and nobody escapes from Alcatraz. He is quickly informed by a fellow inmate that should you even manage to get out of your cell, it's a mile away from land and the cold will kill you before the next prisoner count.

This revelation would crush the souls of most men, but Morris simply sees it as another challenge to overcome and quickly starts to plan a break-out. It will take time however, so he must endure the harshness of prison life in the meantime. Alcatraz is a place of punishment, not rehabilitation, and the quietly sadistic warden, played by Patrick McGoohan, appears to be proud of the prison's reputation of making good prisoners, not citizens. We are gradually introduced to the other inmates: There's the eccentric Litmus (Frank Ronzio), who convinces a new arrival that he is actually Al Capone, artist and amateur botanist 'Doc' Dalton (Roberts Blossom), black librarian English (Paul Benjamin), and eventually Morris' old acquaintances and brothers Clarence (Jack Thibeau) and John Anglin (Fred Ward). Morris quickly makes an enemy in Wolf (Bruce M. Fischer), when he clobbers the would-be rapist for making advances in the shower room. With Wolf waiting impatiently in solitary for revenge and the threat of a cell move looming, Morris steps up his efforts, finding hope in the crumbling concrete around the grille in his cell.

The escape itself is a magnificent, meticulously researched sequence that arrives at the climax, but before that we are ushered into the harsh realities of prison life, and what it takes to survive and maintain your sanity in such brutal surroundings. Siegel skilfully builds dramatic tension in a suffocating, cramped confinement. Alcatraz was no ordinary prison. It was an intricate machine designed to crush the spirits of those serving time, where a luxury could be taken away in an instant for the pettiest of reasons, leaving you with nothing but walls and your thoughts. Siegel doesn't necessarily side with the prisoners - with one exception, they all certainly deserve to be locked up - but he is keen to point out that such mental abuse doesn't do anybody, especially society, any good. This sense of injustice is certainly what seems to be driving Morris, and you'll be willing him on when the date is finally set. The escape is actually relatively straight-forward, but Siegel makes it nail-biting nonetheless. This also fits in with the whole docudrama feel, sticking closely to how it actually went down back in 1962. The ending eerily lets you ponder their fate for yourselves. They were never seen again, nor were their bodies discovered.


Directed by: Don Siegel
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Patrick McGoohan, Roberts Blossom, Jack Thibeau, Fred Ward, Paul Benjamin, Larry Hankin
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #1,264: 'The Beguiled' (1971)

As the opening titles of The Beguiled flicker by with a collection of grainy photographs from the brutal American Civil War, it would seem we're in familiar tough, manly action territory, especially when the names of Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood flash on screen. These feelings appear to be confirmed as Eastwood grizzled Union officer John McBurney comes into shot, clearly wounded and hanging on for dear life following a bloody battle with Confederate soldiers. He is discovered by Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), a 12 year old student at the nearby Seminary for Young Ladies, who quickly takes a keen interest in the handsome but battered young man. As some bloodthirsty Confederate soldiers trot by and they are forced to hide, John plants a lingering kiss on the child's mouth, which immediately cause feelings of discomfort for the viewer. No, The Beguiled is not your typical Siegel tough-guy actioner, but something all the more fascinating and complex.

John is eventually smuggled back into the school run by Miss Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page), a woman with a secretive past of her own. She wants the Union soldier gone immediately, but the soldier is charming and badly wounded, so she and the fellow ladies of the school tend to his injured leg and give him a bed. He is kept under lock and key, but he is often visited by the curious ladies, including virginal teacher Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman) and precocious 17 year old student Carol (Jo Ann Harris). With Martha still insistent on turning him over to Confederate troops once he has regained his strength, John seizes the chance to seduce as many of them as he can, taking full advantage of their time away from men and natural curiosity towards the opposite sex. He becomes unnervingly comfortable with his methods of manipulation, and is soon playing the women off one another. But these ladies have seen it all before, whether it be a father, a sibling or a drunken soldier stumbling onto the school grounds with cruel intentions.

The Beguiled is a film about jealousy, sexuality and bitterness, so it's no surprise that it flopped and didn't go down well with fans of Siegel's tougher, more straight-laced output. The film also threatens to venture into horror territory, as emotions begin to spill over and John's scheming becomes apparent. There were cries of misogyny upon the film's release, but although the claim is certainly open for debate, this is not a film by a director who hates women. To label the film misogynist would be to cruelly over-simplify it, as the likes of Martha and Edwina aren't just coy women to be easily taken advantage of, but incredibly complex characters both scarred and enlightened by past experiences with men. John is clearly the most loathsome character, an evil man who uses his physicality and charm to worm his way into their lives and gain their trust, and Siegel makes little attempt to make him sympathetic. It's an incredibly claustrophobic and intense experience, with career-best performances from Page and Hartman. It is Siegel's favourite of his extensive filmography, and it isn't difficult to see why.


Directed by: Don Siegel
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page, Elizabeth Hartman, Jo Ann Harris, Pamelyn Ferdin
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #954: 'The Killers' (1964)

Originally intended to be the first 'TV movie', Don Siegel's brutally thrilling and ice-cool adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's story was deemed too violent for the small screen. With filming taking place as John F. Kennedy was assassinated and one key scene certainly bringing the incident in Dallas to mind, The Killers was tactically granted a cinema release instead. Such a talented and experienced cast, and a director who delivered at least one masterpiece throughout his career, The Killers was always going to be too good not to appear on the big screen. More of a re-make of Robert Siodmak's 1946 film than of Hemingway's text, Siegel drops the film noir tone in favour of bright and sunny exteriors, while somehow heightening the sense of pessimism throughout.

After a routine hit in which race-car driver-turned-teacher Johnny North (John Cassavetes) is gunned down at a school for the blind, hired killer Charlie (Lee Marvin) and his partner Lee (Clu Gulager) discuss the strange way Johnny allowed himself to be killed and offered no resistance. Deciding the circumstances are too strange not to warrant further investigation, and with the possibility of recovering a missing $1 million, the two thugs interview Johnny's former mechanic friend Earl (Claude Akins). He tells them of Sheila (Angie Dickinson), the femme fatale who stole Johnny's attention, and her lover, the fearsome mob boss Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan), who embroiled Johnny and his skills behind the wheel in a million-dollar heist.

Appearing in his final movie role before moving into politics and becoming one of America's most infamous presidents, Reagan steals the movie as the slimy gangster Browning. He apparently hated the role, and had always played the hero during his career, but he proves to be surprisingly apt at playing a loathsome criminal. The Killers is remarkably tough, emphasising the roles of Marvin and Gulager's heartless brutes, who both have no qualms about dangling a woman out of a high-rise window. Despite Marvin's hulking presence, its actually Gulager who steals their scenes, with his mix of all-American handsomeness, preening narcissism and emotional coldness giving dimension to his stock character. The sickly brightness of it all does little but highlight the film's budget constraints, but The Killers thrills thanks to Siegel's unfussy direction and terrific performances all round.


Directed by: Don Siegel
Starring: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Clu Gulager, Claude Akins, Ronald Reagan, Norman Fell
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #511: 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' (1956)

The first of many adaptations of Jack Finney's novel 'The Body Snatchers', - which was originally serialised in Colliers Magazine in 1954, - Don Siegel's film set the science fiction template for cinema narratives about control, and the subversion of individualism. Whilst it has been reported by Finney, Siegel, and others involved in the production, that no political or metaphorical message was intended (they all simply thought that they were making a thriller), the simple story of aliens quietly invading our world and replacing us with emotionless replicas, was an irresistible package that was open to many contemporary interpretations.

The America of the 1950's was one of social convention and conformity, and the desire to present an habitually formal appearance. The outsider who sees behind this veneer is a dangerous person, transgressing from normal linear passages. The teenagers of America (as seen in James Dean's Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)) were a dangerous new opponent to the hypocritical values of the countries proverbial "dream". Therefore, the pervading consensus in political and social attitudes was to distinguish individualism, and to suppress those random and spontaneous desires.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kevin McCarthy's Dr. Bennell's hysteria is revealed at the start of the film, his recollection of the past days events, told not only to clear his own anxiety-riddled memory, but to also defend his sanity, to confess his erratic behaviour as non-conformist, and to logically explain the reason he "stood out from the crowd". In the next scene the doctor is calm, respectable looking, merging into small town life. He begins to hear reports about people behaving unusually. Close family friends becoming devoid of emotion over night. In a later scene, Bennell and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), an old friend of the doctors, watch a haunting image from a window. A congregation gathers in the town centre, as pods (the alien, plant-like objects that duplicate the humans) are distributed for the indoctrination of their children and loved ones. A violent response to the rise of adolescent rebellion, from the formative generation, but also a more sinister political philosophy.

When the pod people begin enveloping the inhabitants of Santa Mira, their ideological conspiracy is an easy metaphor for the political machinations of McCartyism, the propagandist attack on communism, and the perceived danger to American values; or a reflection on the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany in the 1930's. In these context's, it is the loss of personal freedoms and individual rights, brought on by political conformity, that transforms the population into zombies. Without these fundamental human emotions and freedoms, we are simply mechanisms to order. Nothing unique comes from that. As Dr. Bennell discovers the ramifications of conformity, he disputes the outcome; he doesn't want to lose love, anger, frustration, or grief. These emotional reactions to the various obstacles of life or essential to our originality.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn't at all unique in its themes. Many of the decades science fiction films were expressing similar fears of invasion (The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), War of the Worlds (1953)), but Siegel's was a far more subtler production, than some of the more lavish special effects driven movies. Partly, no doubt, to the minuscule budget. But the film is still effective today, the pace building tension throughout, and revealing increasingly horrific and terrifying images. Over fifty years later, it is consistently the best adaptation of the source novel, and the alarming themes of global control and political corruption, are still relevant (possibly more insipidly) in the twenty-first century.


Directed by: Don Siegel
Starring: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones
Country: USA

Rating: *****

Marc Ivamy