25 Essential Prison Movies

“The Bridge On The River Kwai” (1957)
It might not be David Lean’s finest film — “Lawrence Of Arabia” surely tops that list — but “The Bridge On The River Kwai” comes damn close. One of the earliest films to tackle the experience of soldiers in Japanese POW camps, it sees a group of mostly British soldiers interred in a camp in Burma, where they’re put to work on a construction of the titular railway bridge, with senior officer Alec Guinness initially resisting, before deciding to keep up his men’s morale, and show their captors the British spirit, by complying, while an American soldier (William Holden) plots to destroy the completed structure. Based on a novel by “Planet Of The Apes” author Pierre Boulle, and written in secret by blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (though initially credited to Boulle, who couldn’t speak English), it’s an epic, deeply complex tragedy that examines heroism, compromise, sacrifice, national pride and class, and does so in a deeply gripping, surprising and emotionally potent manner, and with all the lavish spectacle that Lean was known for. And of course, there’s the famous and devastating conclusion, undercutting the seemingly pro-imperial elements earlier in the film with one of the more indelible images ever to capture the savage pointlessness of war.

“Bronson” (2008)
Nicolas Winding Refn’s pop art nightmare “biopic” tells the true-ish story of Michael Peterson, who at 19 attempted to rob a post office for a nominal sum of money and was captured and sentenced to seven years in prison. “Don’t worry, son, you’ll be out in four,” his mother tells him. But Peterson loves prison and yearns to be famous, taking on the name Charles Bronson and turning his many violent tendencies into “art.” As the title character, Tom Hardy gives a career -making performance, that combines perfectly with Refn’s thrilling direction, which sees him at his most full-tilt operatic: violent, gorgeously photographed, hilarious, embroidered with animation and slow motion that borders on still photography. Plunging the viewer into the dark recesses of Bronson’s maniacal mind Hardy and Refn deliver a funny, scary, psychotic jolt which yielded a surprisingly lukewarm critical reaction at the time. But that will probably be revised, as the film is discovered by a wider audience for being the movie that launched Tom Hardy’s career out of a cannon, and marked the opening salvo in a new, higher-profile phase of Refn’s. It seems destined for cult appreciation, if it’s not already there.

“Brubaker” (1980)
A dramatization of real-life  events, Stuart Rosenberg‘s return to the prison genre after the peerless “Cool Hand Luke” (he replaced director Bob Rafaelson, who was fired after allegedly punching the head of the studio) never reaches that touchpoint’s standards, but despite an overlong, made-for-TV feel, it deserves its spot here at least for showing us the other side of the coin. Following Robert Redford‘s crusading reform warden, it’s a harsh, unsparing, ultimately depressing look at the systemic corruption, deprivation and brutality in a Southern prison, and at how comprehensively the new warden’s efforts to clean it up are blocked and parried by the higher-ups who’ve managed to turn it into a profit-making private enterprise. Dealing in squalid details and admitting very little characterization, though, despite an early non-gravitas showcase from Morgan Freeman, and a supporting turn from Yaphet Kotto so good it threatens to become his film, Redford’s Brubaker, and too many of the other characters remain frustratingly out of reach as people, as opposed to archetypes. This anonymity is ironic, since it mirrors the best part of the film: the opening half-hour when Brubaker, disguised as a convict, wordlessly observes the horrors in the prison he’s come to change.

“Brute Force” (1947)
Burt Lancaster was a great choice to lead this Jules Dassin (“Rififi,” “Naked City”) prison break drama. Perhaps only rivalled by the likes of Robert Mitchum or Sterling Hayden as a star who knew how to leverage his natural physically imposing presence, here Lancaster uses that bulk and strength to dominate the screen while throwing punches and fighting his way out of a bad situation. The film leads up to a shockingly violent (at least for the time) prison riot, when the inmates can no longer take Capt. Munsey’s (a perfectly infuriating Hume Cronyn) sadistic tactics, as he holds power over his small kingdom, and they decide to put into action their long-plotted escape plan, which goes off, but not how you might expect. The cast all around is very good, but it’s Lancaster who really makes the material sing, leading the riot to its bloody conclusion. It’s a brawny, cynical film, in a way that almost prefigures a more modern era of downbeat anti-heroism in film and TV. And with Dassin a master subverter of the very genre conventions his films often  helped create (look at the near-silent robbery scene in “Rififi”), it is also a fascinating artifact in the history of the prison movie.

“Cool Hand Luke” (1967)
Coming right at the time when the fuse was lit in American cinema, ushering in an era of never-better Hollywood films that mixed low-budget European arthouse sensibilities with bigger budgets and established a new generation of stars, this Stuart Rosenberg (“The Amityville Horror”) masterpiece fits right in alongside the other oft-cited game-changing films of 1967, like “Bonnie & Clyde” and “The Graduate.” Legendary DP Conrad Hall shot the hell out of the picture and there are moments that have transcended the film to become part of popular lore, like the line “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate” and the famous 50-boiled-eggs-in-an-hour challenge. Even the overt Christian symbolism is handled deftly, adding layers to the film instead of hokiness. Anchored by a fantastic Paul Newman lead performance wherein he’s able to show just how multifaceted he is as a performer, while never stealing the spotlight from his co-stars (indeed, George Kennedy took home Best Supporting Actor honors), “Cool Hand Luke” is one of the greatest anti-establishment films of all time, and a sort of canary down the coal mine for the new independent movement of the 1970s, while also managing to be riotously entertaining and empathetic at the same time.