Home \ Signature Roles \ Escape from Alcatraz (1979) — Clint Eastwood
CLINT EASTWOOD · 1979 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Frank Morris is a real-life prisoner at Alcatraz, the island prison said to be escape-proof, who plans, with two other inmates, the most famous prison break in American history.
Frank Morris is a real-life prisoner at Alcatraz, the island prison said to be escape-proof, who plans, with two other inmates, the most famous prison break in American history. Clint Eastwood plays Morris as pure method: quiet, watchful, patient, building dummy heads, digging through concrete with a spoon, and rehearsing every step of a plan that cannot afford a single mistake.
Director Don Siegel, who had directed Eastwood in Dirty Harry and Coogan’s Bluff, shoots the prison in cold, procedural detail, and Eastwood matches it with a performance of total restraint. The film’s final shot — a raft, or a body, or nothing, on the water — leaves the question of whether Morris survived deliberately unanswered. Eastwood’s Morris does not need the answer. He needed the attempt.
