The ‘Shawshank Redemption’ scene Morgan Freeman saved from disaster
It might be damning the film with faint praise in a way, but The Shawshank Redemption is nonetheless in with a very good shout at being named the greatest movie to ever bomb at the box office.
For reasons that remain unfathomable, looking at the Stephen King adaptation’s pristine reputation in the hallowed halls of cinematic history, audiences weren’t exactly queuing around the block to immerse themselves in the elegiac prison drama that can bring a tear to the driest of eyes.
While re-releases eventually saw it turn a profit on the big screen, after its first ten weeks in cinemas, The Shawshank Redemption had only earned $16million, falling well short of its $25m production budget. Of course, these days, it’s one of the most beloved movies of all time, but Morgan Freeman has an especially complex relationship with the film.
He may have earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’, but the shoot saw him regularly butt heads with director Frank Darabont. Freeman has been in plenty of classics, but it’s The Shawshank Redemption people want to ask him about more than any other, and it’s a line of questioning he’s grown actively irritated by as the years progress.
Fortunately, one of those instances of director and star finding themselves in disagreement was of immense benefit to the film as a whole, with Freeman standing his ground and flat-out refusing to shoot an addendum to the final scene that would have taken a pitch-perfect finale and drowned it in an overpowering amount of cheese.
The final shot of Freeman’s Red and Tim Robbins’ Andy Dufresne being reunited on the sandy beaches of Zihuatanejo is one of the most iconic final shots in modern cinema, but for inexplicable reasons, Darabont thought it would have worked better if the former had sauntered into the shot and announced his arrival by busting out a harmonica solo.
Thankfully, Freeman found the suggestion to be “sort of asinine, sort of cliches, sort of unnecessary” and decided he wasn’t going to do it. There was plenty of debate over the scene itself, with the definitive resolution of Red and Andy being reunited proving to be an unexpected point of contention between various parties, even if it would have been a kick in the teeth for The Shawshank Redemption to bow out with any sort of ambiguity given the overall tone of the picture.
Still, Freeman swaggering onto the beach playing the harmonica and Andy’s requisite reaction shots to the ditty being played on the instrument easily carries the potential to be either unintentionally hilarious or downright stupid, and everybody knows that no matter how great any movie is for 99% of its running time, the first thing anyone walking out of the theatre would have remembered was the shitty ending.
