Writing about the hard-edged American filmmaker Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry”), the critic Andrew Sarris once made an offhand observation about Siegel’s 1979 “Escape From Alcatraz,” starring Clint Eastwood. Siegel, he wrote, seemed “to have been inspired by Robert Bresson’s ‘A Man Escaped’ (1956).”
Sarris is hardly the only writer to make that comparison. Reviewing “Escape From Alcatraz” upon its release, Dave Kehr, then the critic for the Chicago Reader, said that movie shared a “gravity and sparseness” with the Bresson picture and that “like Bresson’s films, ‘Escape’ subscribes to the theory that less is more.”
The connection is perfect, if perhaps counterintuitive. Bresson (1901-99) was the most cerebral, overtly theoretical French filmmaker of his era — and one of the most original. He invented a clipped style of filmmaking that is immediately identifiable, and whose influence has reverberated over time. Could Siegel (1912-91), a gifted mainstream director of action and suspense, really share that much with him? And if so, could watching their prison-break movies back-to-back act as a decoder ring for both filmmakers?
“Escape From Alcatraz”: Stream it on Amazon Prime or Hulu; rent it on FandangoNow, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu.
“A Man Escaped”: Stream it on the Criterion Channel or Kanopy; rent or buy it on Amazon or iTunes.
Although his career was broad enough to encompass science fiction and even a western with Elvis Presley (“Flaming Star”), Siegel developed a specialty in cop and caper movies. His politics were difficult to pin down — at least from the movies. “Riot in Cell Block 11” (1954) made a forthrightly liberal case for prisoners’ rights, while, in 1971, Eastwood’s title character in “Dirty Harry” personified police aggrieved by the Supreme Court’s 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona.
The common thread in Siegel’s films is an anti-authority streak — and Siegel, a master of efficient storytelling, never wastes a shot.
In that, he is similar to Bresson, a filmmaker who showed a little to convey a lot. More interested in “being” than “seeming,” he favored nonprofessional actors, whom he called “models.” In “Notes on the Cinematograph,” Bresson’s scattered, collected musings on filmmaking, the director writes of striving to remove any signs of mental activity from his performers; he wanted to capture the “automatism of real life.”
More than any filmmaker since the Soviet silent directors, he prized the suggestive power of linking two shots together to convey intangible ideas. Although sources vary on his religiosity, Bresson, raised Catholic, made movies that imbued ordinary objects with metaphysical significance. In “L’Argent” (1983), Bresson’s final film, a counterfeit bill spreads the sin of its creation as it passes from person to person.
The extraordinarily tactile “A Man Escaped,” which chronicles the getaway efforts of a French prisoner of war in 1943, makes life-or-death stakes of every sight and sound. Based on an account by the French resistance fighter André Devigny — and assuredly informed by Bresson’s own World War II experiences as a prisoner of war — it begins with a Bresson mainstay: a close-up of a man’s hands, in this case, those of the captive resistance fighter Fontaine in transit.
One hand reaches over to the car’s door handle as Fontaine plots to quietly slip from the moving vehicle. We hear the sounds of the gear shift. The slowing of the car offers opportunities; the wheels of a tram provide the cover of noise. We’re not even at the prison yet, and already Bresson has attuned viewers to subtleties of space and sound. And when Fontaine (François Leterrier) makes his abrupt exit, we hear gunshots directed at him, yet the camera remains fixed in the car, with the shooting barely visible in the background. Bresson rarely illustrates more than is necessary.
Soon, Fontaine will be in one prison cell, and then another; in both cases, every possession holds the potential of salvation. The film unfolds as a succession of small triumphs: Fontaine uses a safety pin to slip off handcuffs. He makes a chisel out of a spoon handle to carve through the wooden cell door. He communicates with neighboring prisoners by taps. (We later learn that this simple gesture may have delayed an inmate from killing himself.) The instantly recognizable sound of keys clanking against a railing signals the danger of a guard nearby.
There are obvious spiritual dimensions. Fontaine’s conversations through barred windows with a fellow prisoner acquire elements of counseling and confession. His escape relies on persistent, careful attention to the carpentry of the door. In his delays and indecision about when to make a break, he experiences lapses of faith. Remaining devoted over time — indeed, time itself — is everything: As Fontaine makes his way out, it takes him more than 20 minutes to reach the nearby edge of a terrace, because of the dangers of being seen and heard.
Maybe none of this sounds forbiddingly austere, but if it does, consider the many points of intersection that “A Man Escaped” has with “Escape From Alcatraz,” one of the top-grossing movies of 1979. Like Bresson’s models, Eastwood makes a natural stoic, and, as an established screen persona, he is effectively an actor more suited for “being” than “seeming.” “Escape from Alcatraz,” like “A Man Escaped,” opens with a period title card and the arrival of a prisoner, and it quickly attunes viewers to the sound of footsteps and shackles.
Objects take on outsize importance: Eastwood’s Frank Morris pilfers a nail clipper from the warden (Patrick McGoohan) and uses it to chip at corroded concrete in his cell. Like Fontaine, he makes a chisel out of a spoon. (The sound of whittling grows familiar.) A fan becomes a tool. A chrysanthemum turns into a secular article of faith. When the warden cruelly takes away the painting privileges of a prisoner, Doc (Roberts Blossom), Siegel immediately cuts from the pain in Doc’s face to a guard engaged in target practice. The edit has a Bressonian precision: With the simple boom of the gunshot and an abrupt zoom, Siegel aurally and visually underscores the agony of the confiscation.
“This is the rock, man, they don’t want you doing anything here but time,” says English (Paul Benjamin), the prison librarian, and as in “A Man Escaped,” time is paramount. Waiting a second too long to return to a cell bed or dithering over when to act means the difference between failure and success. When Frank and his accomplices dodge illumination on Alcatraz’s roof, the shot choices in the night scene closely parallel those in Fontaine’s final rooftop inch to freedom.
“Escape From Alcatraz” may be a blockbuster and “A Man Escaped” a canonical art film, but their main difference is in packaging. In suspense, terseness and economy, they belong together.
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