The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Frank Darabont · a film · 1994 · 142 minutes, the theatrical cut · written for the screen by Frank Darabont from the novella by Stephen King
Mode
Prison chronicle in the classical Hollywood manner; friendship picture, escape story and moral fable in one
Mythos
The man buried alive in a stone house who digs his way out and is reborn through filth into a promised land by the sea; the wrongful prisoner who escapes with his jailer’s wealth
Phase
Nineteen years inside, 1947 to 1966, from a trial and sentence to an escape told after the fact, then a parole, a walk to an oak and a reunion on a beach
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 142 minutes, the theatrical cut; Red’s voiceover throughout; photographed by Roger Deakins, edited by Richard Francis-Bruce, music by Thomas Newman
Register
Grey stone and cold light in the yard, warm amber in the library and the cell at night; dread beneath, consolation above, a score that swells to meet it
Scale
Two friends, a prison and the men in it, a warden’s business, and twenty years of an outside world seen through posters and a street
Governing Proposition
A man convicted of a murder he did not commit serves nineteen years in a Maine prison, and the man who tells his story is the guilty friend who cannot imagine leaving. The film’s wager is that an institution remakes the men inside it until they need it, and that hope, against that, is a discipline kept in secret: a tunnel dug for nineteen years behind the image of a woman on a wall.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a trial and a sentence. In 1947 Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, is convicted of murdering his wife and sent to Shawshank State Prison in Maine. The story is told by another man: Ellis Redding, called Red, played by Morgan Freeman, a guilty man serving life. His voice runs through the whole film and governs its point of view. The film knows Andy as Red knew him, from outside, and what Red was not told, the viewer is not told. That one choice is the film’s form, and its reveal will turn on it.
The prison is shown first from the air, the camera rising over grey stone on arrival, and then from the inside on the first night, when a new man is beaten to death and the violence of Captain Hadley, played by Clancy Brown, is made the rule of the place. On the wall of Warden Norton, played by Bob Gunton, hangs a sampler, “Salvation lies within”, and his piety is the prison’s official face. The words will turn out true in a sense he does not intend: the hammer Andy needs will be hidden in a hollowed Bible, and the warden’s own ledger will be kept in a safe behind the sampler.
The film was made for Castle Rock Entertainment and distributed by Columbia Pictures, produced by Niki Marvin, photographed by Roger Deakins, edited by Richard Francis-Bruce, with music by Thomas Newman. It premiered at Toronto in September 1994 and opened in the United States on 23 September 1994. Its inheritance is the prison film and the friendship picture, told in the classical manner of the studio, and it does not hide that inheritance. Its turns are within it: an escape film made into a chronicle of time, the innocent man’s story told by the guilty one, and an escape kept from the viewer as it was kept from the teller. The form is a proven path, and the film perfects it more than it leaves it.
Movement II
Brooks Hatlen, played by James Whitmore, is an old man of the prison library, and parole is what undoes him. Red gives the condition a single word, “institutionalized”, and an account of the walls: first a man hates them, and in the end he depends on them. Brooks goes out to a halfway house, a supermarket, a street of cars that frightens him and a bird he cannot keep. He carves “Brooks was here” on a beam, and takes his own life. Whitmore makes his fear exact in a few scenes.
That is the film’s disclosure, and it can be stated and holds: an institution remakes the men inside it until they need it, and freedom becomes a thing they cannot survive. Under it lies a second: the prison is a business. Andy’s gift with figures, first used on the guards’ tax returns on the tar roof, passes into the warden’s service: Norton turns convict labour and a convict’s gift into his own money, laundered under the name of a man who does not exist. Against both the film sets hope, and shows it as a discipline rather than a mood: a practice kept in secret over nineteen years.
The disclosure is made clean, and that is what holds it. Andy is innocent, and his innocence spares the film the harder question of what the prison does to the guilty. Red is guilty, and the one place where his guilt is asked is a parole hearing, where it is given as a speech. The film says much of what it knows aloud, in Red’s voiceover and in Andy’s speeches about hope, and the image often confirms what the narration has already said. Brooks is the exception: what happens to him is shown, and it is the film’s most exact truth.
Movement III
In the spring of 1949 the roof crew drinks beer in the sun on the tar, the first thing Andy’s work with figures buys. Later, in the library his letters have built, he locks a guard in the toilet and puts the duettino from The Marriage of Figaro over the loudspeakers. The yard stops still. The camera rises over the upturned faces, and Red says he never knew what the women were singing about. It is the film’s purest height, and it is warm: an elevation of consolation, a few minutes of freedom held in a yard.
The film rises often, and its heights are of this kind. Below them runs a register of dread: the first night, Hadley’s violence, Bogs and the sisters beating Andy in the projection room, Tommy shot in the yard at night. Deakins lights the two registers apart, cold grey in the yard and warm amber in the library and the cell at night, without display. The elevation is held from the top by its means. Several rises are prepared to the edge of insistence, and Newman’s score swells to underline what the scene has already earned.
One law governs the range. Take the beating in the projection room and the white sand at the end, the farthest things in the film from one another: the first is what hope must survive, the second what it earns. Endurance rewarded is the law, and the roof, the library, the opera, Brooks’s death and the murder of Tommy each test it. The figure of the time is the cell’s wall. Rita Hayworth in Gilda hangs there, then Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, then Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., and with the ageing of faces they make nineteen years visible without a title card.
Movement IV
Tommy Williams, played by Gil Bellows, comes into the prison with a story: he has met the man who killed Andy’s wife. The story turns Andy’s hope into the warden’s danger, since Andy keeps Norton’s books and the false name, Randall Stephens, under which the money lies. Tommy is shot in the yard at night. From that moment the escape is necessary rather than chosen, and the film has built, in the tax returns, the library letters and the laundering, the instrument of Norton’s fall.
Then the cell is empty. Francis-Bruce cuts the discovery against the escape already done, so that structure and suspense are one: the poster is torn back to a tunnel, and nineteen years of digging with a rock hammer are recognised in one image. Andy crawls through five hundred yards of sewer pipe and comes out in a creek in a storm, his arms raised to the rain, the camera rising above him. The form has kept the secret as Red was kept from it, and when it opens, the viewer learns at once what the years were for. That recognition is the film’s knowledge of hope, and it is the place where the making carries most.
The myth is here and it is built. A man buried in a stone house digs through the wall behind the image of a goddess, passes through filth and is washed clean, and goes out to a sea that has, in his telling, no memory. The hammer was hidden in the Bible, and the ledger in the safe behind the sampler. The Count of Monte Cristo is named in the library, and the film carries its pattern: the wrongful prisoner, the patient escape, the jailer’s wealth taken. Then the fall of Norton: the ledger, the suit, the shoes, the newspaper, the warden’s suicide, Hadley led away weeping. It is tidier than anything the film has granted, and the law of endurance bends there toward reward.
Movement V
Red goes before the parole board for the last time and speaks to the boy he was. He is released, and the film sends him to Brooks’s room, under the same beam, where he does not follow Brooks. He walks instead to a field in Buxton, finds a black stone under an oak, and a letter. The argument is complete there. The film goes on to a beach at Zihuatanejo, where Red walks along white sand toward a man scraping a boat: a coda the argument permits more than compels, the consolation the whole tale has been told toward.
Few films have been returned to so often by so many. It failed in theatres and was made a popular classic by television and home video, and it has stayed on every home format and in polls of popular preference since. It survives whole as released, and its period setting has kept it from the look of 1994. Its reach in making was narrower: it set the pattern of the prestige King adaptation that Darabont followed with The Green Mile, and its imitators took its sentiment rather than its form. The return it receives is wide, and the film tends to have answered its questions before they are asked.
On the film desk it stands at 7.8, level with The Elephant Man, a tenth above Magnolia at 7.7 and two above Shadow of a Doubt at 7.6. What holds it in Tier III is plain. Its myth is built and its making is fine, but its form is a path already proven and perfected rather than left, its knowledge is often spoken where it could be shown, and its law bends at the end toward a fable tidier than the world it has shown. The film is at its truest where it is least consoling: Brooks under the beam, and the first night. It is at its greatest where secret and form meet, in the poster torn back to a tunnel.
Act III · The Twelve
Most parts pass the subtractive test, and the strongest are paid together. The rock hammer, the poster and the Bible are set down early and returned in the one reveal. Brooks is required: his parole, his room, his death and the words carved on the beam are the fate Red must refuse, and Red’s later walk through the same room makes the rhyme bear weight. Tommy is required, since his story of the real killer turns Andy’s hope into the warden’s danger and makes the escape necessary. The tax returns, the library letters and the false name build the instrument of Norton’s fall. The give: the narration states what the image has shown, and the beach is a coda the argument permits more than compels.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: an institution remakes the men inside it until they need it, and freedom becomes a thing they cannot survive. Red states it, in his account of walls first hated and then depended on, and in the word “institutionalized”; Brooks shows it with unusual exactness, a man undone by traffic, a supermarket and a bird he cannot keep. A second disclosure lies under it: the prison is a business, and the warden turns convict labour and a convict’s gift into his money, with the Bible as cover. Hope is shown as a discipline, kept in a hidden practice for nineteen years. What holds it: Andy’s innocence spares the film the harder question of what the prison does to the guilty.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Elevation recurs, and it is warm. Andy locks the guard in the toilet and puts the duettino from The Marriage of Figaro over the loudspeakers, the yard stops still, and the camera rises over the upturned faces. The beer on the tar roof in the spring of 1949 is a smaller height of the same kind. The reveal tears the poster back to a tunnel; the escape ends with Andy in the creek in the storm, arms raised to the rain, the camera rising above him. Beneath runs a register of dread: the first night, the fat man beaten to death, Hadley’s violence, Tommy shot in the yard. Held from the top because several rises are underlined by the score, and the elevation is consolation more often than transport.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The myth is built and bears the plot. A man is buried alive in a stone house, digs through the wall for nineteen years behind the image of a goddess, crawls through five hundred yards of filth and is washed clean in rain, reborn into a promised land by a sea that has, in his telling, no memory. The resurrection is the structure, not its decoration, and the Bible is its instrument: the hammer hidden in the hollowed book, “Salvation lies within” on the warden’s wall, the ledger in the safe behind it. The Count of Monte Cristo is named in the library, and the film builds its pattern. The particular stays particular. Held below the gate because Andy is kept almost opaque, so the pattern rests on his effects more than on the man.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the prison film, Birdman of Alcatraz, Cool Hand Luke, Escape from Alcatraz, and the Hollywood friendship picture, told in the classical form of studio narration. The turns are real. The film moves the prison picture from the escape thriller to a chronicle of time, nineteen years in a patient rhythm; it tells the innocent man’s story through the guilty one, so that the narrator’s rehabilitation becomes a subject; and it withholds the escape from the viewer as it was withheld from Red. The stake was a long, slow drama with no action until its end. What holds the axis lowest: the form is a proven path, the risk was commercial patience rather than formal, and the film perfects that path more than it turns from it.
Score: 6.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The narration is the instrument: Red tells the story, so the film knows Andy as Red knew him, from outside, and the escape is concealed from the viewer because it was concealed from the teller. When the poster tears and the tunnel opens, the viewer learns in one moment what nineteen years were for, and that recognition is the film’s knowledge of hope as a thing kept hidden. The span is made by the cell’s three posters and the ageing of faces; time is the medium the men serve. What holds it: much of the knowledge is spoken, in voiceover and in Andy’s speeches about hope, and the classical continuity is a container as often as an instrument.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Thirty-two years of return are evidence, and the return is wide. Few films have been watched again so often by so many, on television through the late 1990s and 2000s, on every home format and in polls of popular preference. It has sustained real questions: whether its Christian figure is meant or worn, the Bible used as a tool and the warden’s piety as a mask; whether the friendship is the film’s true love story; whether hope is shown as a discipline or sold as consolation; whether the beach betrays the novella’s open ending. What holds it: the film tends to answer its own questions in the narration, its meanings are declared more than buried, and criticism has studied it chiefly as a phenomenon of reception.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The film showed that the classical drama of patience, friendship and moral reward could still be made at a high finish in the decade of Tarantino and the independent revival, and it moved the prison film from escape to endurance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide in audience, it became the leading case of a film that failed in theatres and was made a popular classic by television and home video, and it set the pattern of the prestige King adaptation that Darabont followed with The Green Mile (1999). What holds it: its imitators took its sentiment rather than its form, and it did not reorganise what films could do.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across thirty-two years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, the theatrical cut, with no loss and no replacement by altered versions; restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous and as wide as a film of its decade can have: repeated broadcast, every home format, streaming, a place in the teaching of screenwriting and in popular film culture, and a standing in audience polls held for three decades. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the period setting of 1947 to 1966 protected it from the look of 1994, and nothing in it is topical. Thirty-two years of survival with presence at its widest carry the figure, which clears the bar with a tenth to spare.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Deakins’s photography is exact without display: the grey stone and cold light of the yard, the warm amber of the library and the cell at night, the aerial rise over the prison on arrival, the storm lit by lightning. Francis-Bruce’s cutting carries the reveal, setting the discovery of the empty cell against the escape already done, so that structure and suspense are one. Freeman’s narration is the film’s voice, carried at a level few voiceovers reach; Robbins holds a near-blank surface across nineteen years without losing the man; Whitmore makes Brooks’s fear exact in a few scenes. The planting and payment of hammer, poster, Bible and shoes is clean screenwriting. Held below: Newman’s score is too willing in the uplift, and the making is classical and sometimes underlines.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Bogs and the sisters beating Andy in the projection room, and Red walking along white sand toward a man scraping a boat. One law governs both, endurance rewarded: the beatings are what hope must survive, and the beach is what it earns. The law holds across a wide range: the roof, the library, the opera, Brooks’s death and Tommy’s murder each test it. It bends at the end. Norton’s fall runs on a tidiness the rest of the film does not grant, the ledger, the suit, the shoes, the newspaper, the suicide, Hadley led away weeping, and a world that has shown institutions cannot be beaten closes as a fable in which they are. It is a bending, not a contradiction: the tale is told by a narrator who hopes.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what 142 minutes hold. The orders are several and integrated: consciousness, Red’s fully and Andy’s from outside; friendship as the governing bond; the state as prison, court and parole board; labour, in the roof crew, the work gangs and the warden’s contracts; money, in the tax returns, the laundering and the false name; the law and its miscarriage; the sacred, in a Bible used as cover and as tool; art, in the library, the opera and a harmonica; and history, twenty years outside the walls seen through posters, a street of cars and a grocery till. What holds it: the family is present only as a murdered wife and absent kin, nature chiefly as promise, and the world outside the walls is a sketch.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 and The Made at 8.2. A film whole as released and continuously present for thirty-two years, its period surface protecting it from its own moment; a myth of burial, hidden labour and rebirth built into the plot itself; and a making in which the photography, the cutting of the reveal and the narration carry the film.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 6.7: the prison film and the friendship picture inherited in the classical form, turned toward a chronicle of time and a story told by the guilty friend, but on a proven path, at a commercial and not a formal risk. Next above it, The Encompassed at 7.3, where the world outside the walls is a sketch; then The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 7.4, a wide return to meanings the film has declared, and a reach in audience that did not change how films are made.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.7, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 7.8, Pressure on Tradition at 7.4 and The Swerve at 6.7 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 6.7, The Bottomless Well, 7.4, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8 from a sum of 93.0, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Shawshank Redemption as released in 1994, the theatrical cut of 142 minutes, from the trial to the beach: written for the screen and directed by Frank Darabont from Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, collected in Different Seasons (1982); produced by Niki Marvin for Castle Rock Entertainment and distributed by Columbia Pictures; photographed by Roger Deakins, edited by Richard Francis-Bruce, with music by Thomas Newman; with Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, Clancy Brown, William Sadler, James Whitmore and Gil Bellows. Later restorations repair the picture and bear on The Imperishable only. The novella is the film’s source and is not judged. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and three short phrases are given; the rest is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the box-office returns of the first release, the number of Academy Award nominations, the year of the film’s entry in the National Film Registry, the building where the prison scenes were shot, its standing in an online user ranking, the year in which the narration places the parole, whether any other cut exists, how the library shelves the novel by Dumas, and the effect of the title on the first release, are not given; nor are the scene count, the share of the dialogue or the shot lengths.