“Midnight Express” (1978)
Alan Parker’s “Midnight Express,” based on Billy Hayes’ memoir (and adapted by a young Oliver Stone), stars Brad Davis as a young American busted for smuggling hash in Turkey, leading to a brutally tough five-year stretch that takes in cruel beatings, attempted sexual assault and a loss of hope and humanity. Parker, in an unlikely follow up to “Bugsy Malone,” brings a sense of music-video style to the hellish surroundings, and it’s undoubtedly grittier than most prison movies that had come before it, his camera never shying away from the ugliness, even if that ugliness looks quite pretty. But the film feels like a bit of a relic these days. Is it the way it shies from its source in rejecting the idea that Hayes could have sex with men inside (ironic, given the joke about Turkish prisons in “Airplane!” a few years later)? Is it Giorgio Moroder’s banging, but now ill-fitting synth score? Or the overtly racist depiction of the Turkish, which many of the filmmakers have since apologized for? It might have been a multiple Oscar-nominee at the time, but now it feels a little creaky, but it’s still pretty much a must-see for any true enthusiast for the genre, if for nothing else than to note how much is has changed over the years.
“Papillon” (1973)
While regarded in many circles as one of the classic prison dramas, perhaps what distinguishes Franklin J. Schaffner’s “Papillon” from most prison films is its exhausting sprawl. At 2.5 hours (which feels longer), Schaffner’s prison loyalty drama tracks an unlikely friendship between a brute (Steve McQueen) and a thinker (Dustin Hoffman) who come to a mutual understanding early on: physical protection in exchange for escape-plan assistance. But it also spans a few overlong decades. Charriere (McQueen), the safecracking man with the titular butterfly tattoo, fails in several of his attempts to escape and is rewarded by trips to the hole that last for several years (and take Hoffman out of the picture for long stretches). Based on an autobiography of a prisoner who actually escaped from the brutal French penal colony of Devil’s Island depicted in the film, “Papillon,” perhaps a little too faithfully adapted, takes on the dimensions of an endurance film with McQueen appearing as a gray-haired man in his 50s who is broken, but not quite defeated. Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated score lends the movie some epic largesse, and McQueen’s performance is pretty solid, but the overstressed triumph-of-the-spirit theme leaves one a little fatigued by the end. Which is perhaps the point.
“A Prophet” (2009)
Director Jacques Audiard finally took home the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for “Dheepan,” but he’s been a force in world cinema for some time now, and his best film to date is this superbly crafted crime epic, which tracks the six-year prison term of Malik (Tahar Rahim, in a star-making turn), who enters jail at 19 with little chance of survival and comes out a top-tier criminal leader. The portrayal of life in the prison is detailed and lived-in, displaying a mix of grit and strange beauty while also satisfying (and elevating) expected genre beats. That’s Audiard’s gift as a filmmaker; all his work is based in familiar genres, but he twists and subverts enough to carve out his own memorable niche. Take the ethereal, supernatural elements in “A Prophet”: they feel unexpected (and for some, out of place), but they’re kept in the periphery just enough so as not to detract from Malik’s main arc. His criminal education in jail proves to be Audiard and co-screenwriter Thomas Bidegain’s biggest statement, meaning that while it’s a terrific prison story, “A Prophet” should also be remembered as one of the great crime films of this past decade.
“R” (2010)
This brutally honest, criminally under-seen Danish prison drama makes something of a trilogy with “Starred Up” and “A Prophet” in its portrayal of prison hierarchies and social structures. But “R” (a reference to the lead character, Rune, played by the great Pilou Asbæk), while seeming familiar at first, earns its spot on this list because of the way it uses the tropes of the prison movie only to undercut them in several successive rug-pulls. Writer/directors Tobias Lindholm (Thomas Vinterberg‘s frequent writer and director of similarly visceral Playlist favorite “A Hijacking”) and Michael Noer add to a gritty prison drama a shocking, almost Hitchcockian twist which reinforces the grim reality of this world: the weak will always be weak in this place, and control of one’s fate is but an illusion. Cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck employs docu-real stylistic techniques, like an always-mobile, hand-held camera, which lends the film a sense of urgency that is wholly appropriate, but the film is constructed in a deceptively artful way: while it feels like it’s simply unfolding in front our eyes in a verite style, its thrust is pointed, and its pacing keeps you hooked. It makes us anticipate Lindholm’s next film, “A War,” even more.
“Rescue Dawn” (2007)
Outwardly one of the more straightforward films from the brilliantly eccentric Werner Herzog, “Rescue Dawn,” adapted from his own documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” is actually a pretty successful attempt to marry the director’s trademark obsessions to a more “Hollywood” narrative. Christian Bale‘s uncompromising portrayal of the indomitable Dieter Dengler a POW in a Laotian camp, along with Steve Zahn‘s great, less-heralded turn, gives it that Hollywood gloss, yet it deviates from the star vehicle paradigm in ways that, sadly, the director’s most recent film “Queen of the Desert” does not. And so we get the brutality and torpor of the first half, which shows how the human spirit can be progressively degraded through torture and isolation, followed by the messy escape attempt, in which we never learn the fates of most of the men, while Bale and Zahn flee their bamboo jail only to find themselves imprisoned in the dense crush of the jungle outside. It is, of course, a testament to a man’s unbreakable spirit, but simmering just beneath that is a real sense of Herzogian despair at just how much one might need to sacrifice to an uncaring, wild world simply in order to survive.
