Of course.
Anyway, it never even occurred to me that Andy was guilty. Never read the story, but the movie is among my favorites. Something about the pacing and the narration (sorry, don’t mind me) really does it for me.
The better question would be “What did you think Andy was going to do with the rope?”
I didn’t get that from the novella - the almost continual assault that Andy received at the hands of “The Sisters” wasn’t nice and friendly. It only stopped because Andy became useful to some of the people in power, and their way of dealing with it was to beat the leader of the group almost to death (if I’m recalling correctly).
I know one scene where it’s firmly established. Tommy tells the gang about a conversation with another inmate from another prison he was in. The other inmate talks about how he was banging this rich society chick, and ultimately claimed responsibility for an identical murder.
Also, while it’s not factual; Red asks Andy why he ‘did it’ (talking about committing murder. Andy says “I didn’t, since you asked.” Red then said “you’ll fit right in here,” thinking that Andy was just saying that like everybody else; but he wasn’t. He was sincere when he said it; contrast that to when he was asked about the murder by Tommy where he instead answers with sarcasm, something to the effect of “I’m innocent, my lawyer screwed me!”
I probably wouldn’t rank it as #1; but it certainly passes two of my litmus tests for a good movie. 1) Would sit and watch it again? Yes. 2) Is it good enough that when I’m flipping channels, I’ll stop and watch it? Yes again. Have you ever been in jail? First of all you’re talking about prison from 60 years ago. Second you’re looking at an extremely small subset of people. I’ve been in jail (but not prison) a couple of times; I’ve always found there to be some people you just didn’t want to be around, and some that weren’t too bad. It’s like anything else; you gravitate towards those that are similar to you. So I wouldn’t say it was LAUGHABLY unrealistic. You have a few old men, an innocent man who used to be a banker, a young teenage ‘rebel’ type; and a couple of more ‘nice guys’ that’s hardly indicating the inmate population is portrayed as a fun loving bunch. How violent would that subset really be?
I absolutely loved the novella. It’s actually one of my favorites from Mr. King. The movie I can take or leave. But I do like both Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. Although in my head there is no way that Red was a black man.
I’m a sucker for stories of redemption. Oh…and I voted that Andy was innocent. Period.
Now if someone would just make a kick-ass movie based on ‘The Long Walk’, my life would be complete.
Oh, you just know they’d mess up the ending.
I don’t think anybody missed that; it’s a major plot point. But it’s hardly in “the first few scenes”; it’s halfway through the movie.
It also doesn’t really firmly establish Andy’s innocence. It just establishes that Tommy told a story. Tommy could be lying. Tommy could be telling the truth, but Blatch was lying. It certainly bears investigating, but it’s hardly conclusive.
That would be beyond awesome.
That’s the danger - Stephen King is known for not being great at endings, but “The Long Walk” has just about the perfect ending.
The sewer pipe scene from “Shawshank Redemption” has stuck with me ever since I first saw it - I don’t think I want anything bad enough to crawl through 500 yards of tiny little sewer pipe to get it.
I thought Andy was innocent but he acknowledges his part in his wife’s murder by being the kind of husband he was, yet married her, the kind of woman she was. Kind of like what Edward Norton’s character said to Naomi Watts’, in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil: “It was silly of us to look for qualities in each other that we never had.”
Stephen King is a lot like Somerset Maugham: incredibly popular and rich, and generous to other writers. But not great. Not Tom Clancy bad, but just good. His characters do get redeemed or otherwise transformed, but they’re still flat.
So yes, Andy didn’t do it because that would require a dimension he didnt have.
I find the movie’s being at the top of the IMDB list so baffling that I honestly wonder if there isn’t some sort of monkey business going on. I base this on the facts that:
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While is is a good movie, it’s not the best movie I’ve ever seen, or even one of the 200 best movies I’ve ever seen, and
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I have never in my entire life met someone who thought it was their favourite movie, or who thought it the best movie ever. In fact, in discussing great movies, I don’t remember it even making it into the conversation.
Anyway… in the novella it is unambiguously the case that Andy Dufresne is innocent. I thought it was pretty clear in the movie, too.
Incidentally, I believe Tommy and Blatch were telling the truth and Andy is innocent. I just think there is an argument to be made, and the case is certainly not conclusive.
I’ve never read the novella, so I can’t comment on that.
I don’t. I know more than a couple of people who consider it their favorite movie of all time.
Seriously? Sure it does. Tommy had enough conviction on the story that it ultimately got him killed. The idea that Blatch was lying is just ludicrous. How could someone lie the exact same story? My God, what would it take to firmly establish Andy’s innocence in your mind?
First of all, read post 32. I think Andy was innocent. I also think that “an argument can be made”.
Tommy didn’t know he was going to get killed. Andy was the first person in his life that saw something in him; maybe he wanted to do something nice to help him out, and maybe work a deal with the prosecution in the process.
I don’t think it happened, but I think it can be argued.
Maybe Blatch knows the story. having read about it in the papers. So, because he is insane, and because he wants to establish himself as big, badass prison psycho, he tells the story of how he killed some chick and her boyfriend for giving him shit, and got away with it. References it to a real case so people will think he’s the real deal.
I don’t think it happened, but I think it can be argued.
My real point however, is that Reality Chuck claimed that it was firmly established “in the first few scenes”, which the Tommy/Blatch sequence is not. He may be talking about the novella, which I haven’t read, but he hasn’t come back to clarify.
Well, I wasn’t sure. So, I didn’t think any of the choices.
I know by the end that I was suspecting that Red was going to find the gun in the box under the Obsidian in Buxton. . . so maybe by the end I thought he might be guilty. . . and still think he may have been. . .
I have actually been in all of the NYC jails–working–I was not incarcerated. And they were all scary, high stress, uncomfortable places. It was about 20 years ago, not 60, so maybe criminals got tougher in the 40 years hence. Anyway, I don’t think it’s a terrible movie–I would sit and watch it again. In fact, I would go hang out there, because as I stated earlier, it just seemed like a pretty friendly bunch of guys, and in my opinion totally unrealistically so. To an earlier poster, I did not read the novella; I only saw the movie (so I cannot comment on how realistic the novella was).
It’s hard for me to remember, but I think I believed in Andy’s innocence all along. (You see, I bought Different Seasons the day after I first saw Stand By Me and read the other stories later. I read Shawshank in bits and pieces, mainly out of order, and I think it was the last of the stories I read from first to last.)
As for the gang of likable inmates–well, I agree with the idea that certain kinds will gravitate together. There’s also the fact that there wasn’t a “gang” in the book, though Red mentioned certain inmates by name and the specifics of their crimes.
And one thing I noticed about the movie, having already read the book when I saw it–with most of the “good guys”, the ones we’re supposed to like, the screenplay doesn’t go into detail about any of their crimes. I think this is so we DO sympathize with them–if we knew that some of them were guilty of, say, rape or child-killing, we couldn’t sympathize.
For example, the book’s Red starts off the story by explaining his crime. He was forced into a shotgun wedding with a rich girl he knocked up but couldn’t stand, and forced under her father’s thumb. He took out an insurance policy on his wife and fixed the brakes of her car–but didn’t know that she was going to pick up the young neighbor lady and her baby girl. All three were killed. In the movie, Red admits he’s guilty of murder but doesn’t reveal any of the specifics, and only refers to himself as “that young stupid kid who committed that terrible crime,” so for all we know, movie!Red panicked during a robbery and shot a cop. (Which leads to a bit of Fridge Brilliance about Freeman’s casting–a black man in the 20s would be more likely to go away for life even if it WAS murder two.)
Or take Brooks. In the book, Brooks is described and dismissed within a couple sentences–there’s no major subplot with him. (He doesn’t commit suicide, but dies in an old folks’ home.) But Red does reveal that Brooks “killed his wife and daughter after a losing streak at poker back when Coolidge was President.” Wisely, this is also never revealed in the movie, because if we knew that Brooks had killed his wife and child–CHILD–our only reaction to his suicide would be “good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Definitely one of my favorite movies of all time. And I never questioned Andy’s innocence until I saw the Family Guy parody. (even then I only entertained the possibility of his guilt.)
“You remember the name of the town, don’t you?”
“DAMN!”
I believed his testimony from the beginning of the movie. He admitted he was at the house, had been drunk, but was starting to sober up. Furthermore in movie world if Tommy were only trying to help out Andy they would have made that a plot point as it would have made his death scene so much better. I don’t see how, in the movie, you could even consider Andy was guilty.