We in Southern California don’t seem very good at keeping
our felons where they belong. Over the last few weeks, we’ve listened
breathlessly to news reports about three accused killers who escaped by
rappelling down (via a rope of braided bedsheets) from the roof of an Orange
County jail. The fact that they were considered armed and dangerous didn’t make
us feel particularly good. I just read a harrowing story about a Vietnamese
immigrant cab driver who was commandeered at gunpoint to drive the three around
Northern California. At night in a seedy motel room, he listened to them
arguing about whether or not to kill him.
They’re back in custody now (phew!), after more than a week
of freedom. (Fortunately, the least vicious of the men, the one who ultimately
turned himself in to authorities, saw fit to protect the cabbie from his
murderous partner in crime.) But around the time they got caught, another
inmate escaped, this one from an L.A. lockup. And this morning my newspaper
brought me the story of an L.A. County gang member released by accident, even
though a murder rap was pending. Oops!
The whole thing, of course, has got me thinking about
movies. As we know, there are plenty of great films about dangerous convicts on
the lam. Here’s one oldie: The Petrified
Forest, starring Humphrey Bogart in a star-making role. It’s not Bogart but
Leslie Howard who’s the movie’s hero, the character for whom we’re rooting. Bogart,
though mesmerizing, is dangerous and scary: not anyone you’d want to hang out
with. (Bogart was to play a similar role in The
Desperate Hours, before permanently evolving into a movie good-guy.)
But it occurs to me that over the decades we’ve come to root
(at least when we go to the movies) for convicts who manage to break free from
their prison cells. Back in the Production Code days, it was a given that
lawbreakers had to be punished and escapees had to be tracked down by the
forces of law and order. Since then, though, we have developed a curious tendency
to view prisoners with sympathy, seeing them as wrongly convicted or as guilty
only of minor transgressions that we can somehow excuse. Perhaps it’s a
holdover from the turbulent Sixties: today outlaws appeal to us as charismatic
anti-heroes. The judges, the wardens, the prison guards: these are the people
we mistrust, and we’re glad to see them thwarted in their attempts to bring
down men and women who should be roaming free.
Examples? How about The
Fugitive, both the TV series and the 1993 film, which focus on the flight
of a man (Harrison Ford in the movie) wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder?
Then there’s The Rock (1996): its
plot is so convoluted as to defy description, but one of its chief heroes (Sean
Connery) is the only man ever to escape from the fortress-like island we call
Alcatraz. But the best example is The
Shawkshank Redemption (1994), a film so well-loved that it was just added
to the National Film Registry administered by the Library of Congress because
of its cultural and aesthetic significance. Its protagonist (Tim Robbins), has
been convicted of a double murder he didn’t commit. He suffers horrors like
months of solitary confinement, but ultimately makes a triumphant escape.
Then of course there are all those Roger Corman flicks I
worked on – movies with titles like Caged
Heat and The Big Bust Out --in
which invariably innocent (and scantily clad) young ladies break away from
their sadistic captors. But that’s a story for another day.
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