The Shawshank Redemption Retrospective
There is often a gulf between the movies that audiences adore and the films that critics find worthy, something that is incredibly apparent when you compare two Top 250s: IMDb’s user-rated list and Sight and Sound’s once-in-a-decade poll selected by critics and filmmakers. Currently, The Shawshank Redemption stands proud at the pinnacle of IMDb, but it doesn’t even merit a slot according to the industry experts who vote for Sight and Sound.
Over 30 years after it was first released, the almost universal love felt towards Shawshank is all the more remarkable considering it flopped hard at the box office initially. Why does Frank Darabont’s prison tale strike such a chord with so many people?
Unless you’ve been locked up in solitary confinement for the past three decades, you probably know how the story goes. The Shawshank Redemption opens with Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) sitting drunk in his car, loading a revolver as his wife and her lover are locked in the throes of passion.
Skip forward to 1947 and a judge condemns him to two consecutive life sentences for their murders. Dufresne is shipped to Shawshank State Prison, where he is taken into the care of pious warden Sam Norton (Bob Gunton) and his guards, led by brutal Captain Hadley (Clancy Brown). Dufresne keeps to himself at first, but can’t help attracting the attention of the sadistic Sisters, a cruel gang who sexually assault him every chance they get. He also catches the eye of Ellis “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), a wily lifer who enjoys a special status among the inmates as a smuggler of contraband.
Red gradually befriends Andy after the former banker approaches him for a rock hammer to shape small stones, and later a poster of Rita Hayworth. Andy’s life inside changes after he makes the risky move of approaching Hadley with a proposition: he’ll help him avoid tax on inheritance in exchange for a bucket of cold beers for his friends. Soon he is offering financial advice to every screw in Shawshank including the warden himself, who wants Andy’s help laundering money. Ingratiating himself with the warden has another benefit. Hadley pays a little visit to their leader, Bogs (Mark Rolston), and cripples him.
Over the years, Andy devotes himself to improving the prison library and the lives of his fellow inmates. In 1965, he takes Tommy (Gil Bellows), a young delinquent, under his wing, helping him study so he can start a better life when he gets out. Crucially, Tommy has some information pertinent to Andy’s case: In another joint, he was cellmates with a psycho who claimed he had murdered Andy’s wife and boyfriend.
Andy approaches the warden with the news, seeking a re-trial, but Norton has no intention of letting his personal banker go. Not only is Andy making him wealthy, he also knows too much about the corrupt activities going on inside Shawshank. He throws Andy in the Hole and has Tommy shot dead in the meantime.
When Andy is released from solitary confinement and learns the news, he finds himself at a low ebb. Red fears that Andy might take his own life, especially when he asks him to procure a length of rope. But Andy is far more cunning and resilient than that, and he has the perfect plan to escape Shawshank and torpedo Norton’s corrupt reign.
That’s the main story thread. Just as important are the tales of Red and an old-timer named Brooks (James Whitmore). Red has been inside since his teens and is repeatedly turned down for parole, to the point that he thinks he’ll never get out. Besides, he fears that he has become institutionalised like Brooks, the kindly old man who does the library cart run. When Brooks is paroled, the film gives us a heart-breaking vignette. After so long inside, Brooks is totally lost and alone back in the real world, and hangs himself.
When Red is finally paroled after Andy’s escape, we see him following in the footsteps of Brooks, even lodging in the same room where the old man ended his life. It looks bleak for Red, too, but there is a major difference – Andy has given him hope.
The Shawshank Redemption flopped when it was first released, an inauspicious start for a film that would become one of the world’s favourite movies. Many reasons for its initial failure have been put forward. Prison films were not a popular genre at the time, it had an incomprehensible title, and there were no female characters to speak of. Perhaps more damagingly, it suffered from bad timing with a September release that saw it lost among huge hits like The Lion King, True Lies, and an effects-laden feel-good movie called Forrest Gump. It was also closely followed by Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which had generated white-hot buzz after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In that environment, people just weren’t drawn to a slow, dark, talky, character-focused prison drama with very little action.
Fittingly for a story of dogged perseverance, The Shawshank Redemption took a long while to reach the screen. It was a passion project for Frank Darabont, Hollywood’s Mr. Stephen King - apart from The Majestic, all his movies have been King adaptations, following up Shawshank with The Green Mile and The Mist. As a young jobbing filmmaker, Darabont contacted the author in 1980 about turning one of his stories, The Woman in the Room, into a short film. By that point, King had already set up his “Dollar Baby” scheme which allowed fledgling writers, producers, and directors to buy the film rights to his short stories for just $1.
It took Darabont three years to realise the project and next on his wish list was a story from Different Seasons with the unwieldy title Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The collection was King’s attempt to expand his horizons as a dramatic writer beyond the horror genre that made his name. The quartet of stories, each taking its theme from a different season, proved a fertile source for feature film adaptations. Bryan Singer brought Apt Pupil (subtitle: Summer of Corruption) to the screen in 1998 after Rob Reiner turned The Body (subtitle: Fall from Innocence) into the coming-of-age classic Stand by Me in 1986.
Darabont waited until he got a full screenwriting credit under his belt for 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors before he approached King again with an offer for Shawshank (subtitle: Hope Springs Eternal). This time, he stumped up $5000. King wasn’t convinced of the story’s cinematic potential, but it was all clear to Darabont. As it turned out, King never cashed the cheque and later returned it framed to the film-maker.
It took Darabont another five years to get around to actually turning the story into a screenplay. When he did, it became hot property. Rob Reiner, who also directed Misery for Castle Rock, the studio he co-founded, wanted to take it on and offered Darabont a cool $3 million to take the reins. But it was Darabont’s baby and he stuck to his guns, insisting on directing the film, too.
Darabont’s screenplay is the major strength of the film. Beyond all the heartfelt dialogue and classic lines, it’s a beautifully structured nesting doll of a script that sets up so many details that pay off to maximum satisfaction later on in the movie. He also found ways to expand on King’s story and make key details carry more dramatic heft, particularly in the cases of two side characters: Brooks and Tommy.
In the novella, Brooks is only mentioned in a few paragraphs, but Darabont turned him into a substantial character. Played so endearingly by veteran James Whitmore, Brooks’ sad arc is probably the most heartbreaking moment in the film, foreshadowing what might become of Red and underscoring the theme of institutionalisation.
Similarly, Darabont wrung the most out of Tommy’s character to raise the stakes. In King’s story, Tommy cuts a deal with the warden in exchange for his silence, receiving a transfer to a soft minimum security prison. In the film, his callous murder is the moment when we realise just how infernally corrupt Norton and his henchman Hadley really are, increasing the threat in the third act and making their comeuppance a real punch-the-air moment.
For all Darabont’s improvements, his screenplay wasn’t completely perfect. He concluded with Red on a bus, travelling to the Mexican border and hoping that the Pacific Ocean is as blue as it is in his dreams. It’s a great line to finish a movie with, but for once we got an example of positive studio interference. Castle Rock producer Liz Glotzer reasoned that after everything that went before, it would be a crime to leave the audience dangling without seeing Andy and Red reunited. She pushed for the final scene on the Zihuatanejo beach, putting the final feel-good cherry on top of a narrative that contains so much darkness and hardship in the gloomy confines of Shawshank prison.
Darabont’s insistence on directing Shawshank also significantly changed the cast line-up. Reiner wanted Tom Cruise to play Andy and Harrison Ford in the role of Red, but Cruise didn’t want to work with an unproven director. Arguably, that combo might have helped the Shawshank become a hit from the start, but would the film have been any better?
With Darabont calling the shots, Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman took the parts instead. Both actors had been around for a while but they were hardly household names at that stage in their respective careers. Robbins was coming off the back of good notices for two films with Robert Altman, The Player and Short Cuts, while Freeman was a late bloomer, finally receiving big parts in Glory, Driving Miss Daisy, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Unforgiven in his fifties.
As it turned out, both actors were perfectly cast. Andy is a mystery, although he is the central character – he has to be for the nature of his escape to pay off. Robbins also has an unknowable quality to him and was able to keep audiences simultaneously at arm’s length while still rooting for him
The story takes the unusual standpoint of telling his story from another person’s perspective, namely Red. Stephen King originally wrote him as an Irishman, but Freeman makes total sense in the role with his innate dignity and wisdom. Notice when Andy asks him why his nickname is Red, he responds: “Maybe it’s because I’m Irish,” a little nod to the source material.
On its initial release, The Shawshank Redemption only made back $16 million from its $25 million budget. By contrast, Pulp Fiction racked up $213 million worldwide against an initial budget of $8 million. Although Shawshank was widely regarded as a box office bomb, come award season it still received seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Actor (Freeman) and adapted screenplay. Conspicuously, Darabont didn’t receive a nod for director, perhaps reflecting his low-key handling of the material. It was the highest nomination haul for a Stephen King adaptation to date, but it was very much an also-ran at the 1995 Academy Awards as Forrest Gump took home Best Picture, Director, Actor (Hanks), adapted screenplay, and a few others.
Shawshank’s glory lay ahead. Much like John Carpenter’s The Thing in the previous decade, the film found its true home on rental and network TV, building the strong word-of-mouth that would eventually take it to the top of IMDb’s viewer-rated Top 250. Darabont’s movie knocked the previous champ, The Godfather, off its perch in 2008 and, with a lofty score of 9.3, looks unlikely to relinquish top spot any time soon.
So why does The Shawshank Redemption prove so enduringly popular after its initial failure 30 years ago? Watchability is a big factor; like Goodfellas, it’s one of those movies that lends itself to repeat viewing and, if it happens to be on while you’re flicking around through the channels, you’re likely to be in to the end. It’s a film that doesn’t flaunt its craft but the quality is woven into its fabric, from Darabont’s detailed screenplay and uniformly excellent performances to the understated elegance of the cinematography from Roger Deakins, who was just establishing himself as a d.p. of major repute at the time.
Beyond that, Shawshank strikes a chord with so many people because it does a rare thing: It captures hope without descending into schmaltz, although some more hard-nosed critics have accused it of sentimentality in the past. I disagree wholeheartedly with that perspective and I feel sorry for those who feel that way. This is a film that doesn’t shy away from putting its viewers through the wringer, mirroring Andy’s escape – we are forced to wade through rivers of shit to eventually emerge cleansed and joyous at the other end.
There can be no true happiness without knowing discomfort and hardship. In that sense Shawshank is a close cousin of It’s a Wonderful Life, which also takes its protagonist to the brink of despair before bringing us love and joy. In his quiet way, Andy overcomes his travails to bring brief moments of light into a harsh and unforgiving place, risking his life to earn a bucket of beers for his fellow inmates ,and taking a stint in the hole just to give them a few moments worth of beauty by playing Mozart over the Tannoy system.
For Andy, striving for freedom isn’t a bright burst of balls-to-the-wall rebellion like it is for characters like Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) in The Great Escape or Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He needs to bide his time and spend years in league with the Devil before he can finally gain his divine liberation. This, we instinctively feel, is the way of the real world – perhaps it is a reflection of the film’s slow-burning power that when Nelson Mandela, who himself spent 27 years in prison, met Tim Robbins, all he wanted to do was talk Shawshank.
This is the core of why Shawshank means so much to so many people, and its director and stars have plenty of thoughts on the matter. In the Making Of documentary, Freeman cuts a wry commentator, but even he is visibly close to tears analysing Andy’s plight and redemption:
“Maybe one of the most fortunate things to happen to Andy was Shawshank. It forced him to reach for parts of himself that no other form of existence would have forced him to reach for. Strength, courage, fortitude… he would never have had to fathom.”
Tim Robbins sums up the film’s appeal succinctly:
“People feel trapped all the time. You don’t need the brick and the mortar and the bars to be in prison.”
Sadly, over the past few years with the COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis biting hard for many people, it’s easy to see why many people may feel imprisoned and relate so strongly with Shawshank. Robbins has had many conversations with folk who have found it therapeutic:
“I swear to God, all over the world—all over the world—wherever I go, there are people who say, ‘That movie changed my life.’ ”
Frank Darabont has echoed the words of Robbins:
“I've gotten mail from people who say: ‘Gosh, your movie got me through a really bad marriage,’ you know, or ‘a really bad divorce.’ Or ‘it got me through a really bad patch in my life,’ ‘a really bad illness,’ or ‘it helped me hang on when a loved one died.’”
This is why Shawshank is far more than a prison break yarn for so many viewers. It’s a movie that reassures us that there are noble intentions and hope in the world, however bleak things may seem at times. From my own perspective, I’ve watched it with my eight-year-old daughter, a decision that raised the eyebrows of some of my friends. I had to fast-forward past some of the darker moments like beatings, sexual assault, murder, and suicide, but I chose the film for her because I’m trying to raise a good and moral person. I believe that Shawshank is a story that promotes friendship, kindness, resilience, intelligence, and courage - all merits that I want to instil in her as she grows up. And I believe that movies like Shawshank will help her take heart no matter what life throws at her in the future.
So there you have it, our retrospective on The Shawshank Redemption. Are you a fan of the film? What are your personal experiences with it? Let us know!
