If I’d been asked this last year I might have said The Great Escape or The Shawshank Redemption, wonderful movies both and tough to choose between.
But that was before I saw Le Trou. It’s a 1960 B&W French movie directed by Jacques Becker. It is set in 1947 in La Santé prison in Paris and tells of 4 cellmates who are planning an elaborate escape. Just as they are ready to begin the operation a young man is moved into their cell. Can he be trusted? So this gem of a movie begins and I give nothing away when I say that towards the end there is a camera shot so sudden and unexpected that it takes your breath away.
Astonishing film and IMHO the greatest prison escape movie ever made. (It also works on different levels, class differences being a crucial subtext of the work).
I saw the thread title and thought “well, Le Trou is excellent, but no one will have even heard of it.”
The first time I saw it was in French with German subtitles, neither of which I understood. And I missed the beginning. So I didn’t get a lot of the story, but the getting-shit-to-work-ness of the escape is riveting. I wrote down some names from the closing credits so I could look it up on IMDb, and then Netflixed it when I was back in the States.