The “nail-biting” British prison movie Quentin Tarantino called the genre’s “perfect example”
There’s barely a subgenre in cinema that Quentin Tarantino isn’t familiar with, and for all of his knowledge about sexploitation and substandard slashers, he’s always had a softer spot than most for the prison film.
It’s unimaginative to say they don’t make ’em like they used to, but they don’t. While there are still plenty of movies made that unfold inside the walls of a detention facility that are worth checking out, an increasingly lost art is the high-stakes thriller that revolves entirely around an escape attempt.
Again, they haven’t gone extinct, but it’s been a long time since the glory days. Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger faced off and teamed up in 2013’s Escape Plan, but that feels like the last time at least one genuine Hollywood icon sent themselves behind bars to cook up an elaborate method of extraction in a pulpy, propulsive thriller, and it wasn’t very good, either.
Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood’s Escape from Alcatraz remains one of the best examples of the niche form of filmmaking, which is predicated entirely on a well-known actor and an accomplished director partnering for a relatively inexpensive but still atmospheric exercise in one man’s desperate attempt to free themselves from incarceration, and it’s one of Tarantino’s all-time favourites.
The two-time Academy Award winner also owns Steve McQueen’s personal print of 1973’s Papillon, and while he doesn’t rate the picture itself too highly, the fact that he went out of his way to acquire the actor’s copy of the classic prison thriller underlines that his appreciation for the genre runs at least as deep as his appreciation for its leading man.
However, while Tarantino may have called Siegel’s spiritual predecessor to Escape from Alcatraz, 1954’s Riot in Cell Block 11, “the best prison film ever made,” he didn’t cite it as the definitive example. Instead, that honour fell to a journeyman English director’s attempt, which he cited as the high watermark.
When commenting on his ongoing adoration for Eastwood’s Alcatraz in his book Cinema Speculation, the auteur took a moment to celebrate the merits of a British-set prison break flick that actually captured all of its prison footage in Dublin, due to the UK film industry’s reluctance to allow movies to shoot on location in the early 1970s.
“Most movie prison breaks are exciting, high-flying affairs, milked for every second of nail-biting suspense,” Tarantino wrote. “Oliver Reed and Ian McShane’s prison escape at the beginning of British action maestro Douglas Hickox’s crime film Sitting Target is a perfect example.”
What makes Sitting Target stand out is that, technically, it’s not really a prison break movie at all. Yes, McShane and Reed’s convicts break loose, but the real crux of the plot is the latter, a convicted murderer, ditching any plans to lay low in favour of killing his wife after discovering she’s become pregnant with another man’s child. As far as plots go, it’s dark, but that’s less of a concern to Tarantino than the prison break itself, which he called the epitome of perfection.
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