The Shawshank Redemption

It is little surprise  to find out that Frank Darabont is an unabashed Frank Capra fan because that director’s sensibility is immediately suggested by this well-crafted buddy film based on a novella by Stephen King entitled “Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption”.

Shawshank is the name of the prison to which a Jimmy Stewart-ish Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) gets sent for the murder of his wife and her lover at the end of the 40s and where he meets another lifer, an avuncular black inmate(Morgan Freeman) who provides the narration to Andy's story.  Darabont, a former TV writer who adapted King’s story and was making his directorial debut does a solid job in seamlessly presenting the feel-good yarn with its typology of characters, aside from the leads, including a corrupt prison boss (Bob Gunton) and his sadistic henchman (Clancy Brown), an old-timer (James Whitmore) running the prison library and so on. 

Although Darabont does address the brutality of the prison he does in such an anodyne way as to have virtually no impact, his protagonist, despite all his horrors,  coming up, so to speak smelling of roses thanks to an indomitable optimism, with the director, at the request of the production company, Castle Rock, even adding on a glibly cornball ending, one not in King’s original text.

Although it was nominated for seven Academy Awards it won none and did not do particularly well at the box office however it found a remarkable second life on the rental circuit, where the film’s shortcomings were re-interpreted as virtues by Joe Citizen and the film now regularly tops all manner of mid-brow Best Film lists (on IMDB it gets a 9.3 rating compared to Casablanca’s 8.7 and Citizen Kane’s 8.5)

 

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