Escape From Alcatraz

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Escape from Alcatraz. I liked it.

I must see it.  Those “old filmmakers” had different mentality and I kind of like it too.  He’s a master, but the “masters” who are dominating Hollywood at this moment lack some quality that those old masters had.  Maybe not only Hollywood people, but we got fat mentally.

Melville is a very different mentality. He directed Delon in Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge. This film, Army of Shadows was made in 1969 but never released in America till 3 years ago. Melville usually made gangster films. His gangster films were informed by his experience in the resistance…his resistance films were informed by his gangster films. The resistance fighters are like gangster, the gangsters are like resistance fighters.

Escape From Alcatraz is much the same. Tough guys against an oppressive authority. They win - maybe - but there is no rejoicing in victory. In both films the ending is truncated, incomplete. In Alcatraz for example, we see the three men swimming out into the water. Then day, discovery of escape, search…the men are never found. A mystery. Did they drown or reach land? The movie is based on a book, a fictionalized, I think, account of the only ‘successful’ escape from that prison. But the real case the book is based on is only a ‘successful’ escape because the bodies were not found. Nothing was heard of the men. To this day we don’t know what happened.

And the movie respects that. We get a clue that they reached another island in San Francisco Bay. Nothing else.

What is important in both films is a test of integrity, spirit, manhood. What counts is not to give in, not to give up, go on fighting. Doesn’t matter if you make it or not. Doesn’t matter if you defeat the Germans or not. Only that you try, and go on trying.

Both are existentialist works in this regard.

(21 January 2009)