IIRC, it was 19 years.
No, but he did say “Pass me a 1040” (tax return) as if nothing had ever happened to him.
BULLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLSHIT
I ABHOR that movie. I cannot even watch it again to see if I may be wrong. Life is NOT like that. Every character in that film was phoney.
And I still want to know how the warden’s suit fit him so well when he was so much taller and thinner.
Oh yeah…it’s just a movie. Anything is possible. He just let out the pants and lengthened them with the string he had been collecting in his cell all those years in prison.
I suppose all you people who liked this nonsense loved “Remember the Titans?” Another realistic inspiring film.
p.s.
Read Fallen Angel’s post above again and again. Angel has it exactly right.
Fallen Angel doesn’t have it exactly right. He is voicing his opinion, not a fact.
As far as the rest of your generalizations go, it seems to me that you bent over to get the soap in county lockup and still have issues. I don’t know how many rape victims you know, but the ones that I know are hardly pathetic and bruatalized figures.
It’s a MOVIE. If you want facts, 100% realism, and something that matches true life, watch documentaries. Might I suggest a few books or documentaries on POW’s so get a concept of what happened in many camps on a daily basis.
You didn’t like the movie. Cool. Don’t generalize real people based on a movie that is a fantasy story to begin with. It cheapens the people.
I’ve never seen the whole movie. I saw clips from it and it was was so freakin cheesy that I knew I couldn’t sit through it with a straight face.
But I never could stomach primitive melodramas.
“Eight years in, feels like you’re gonna die.
But you get used to anything,
Sooner or later it just becomes your life.”
Bruce Springsteen, “Straight Time”
I’ve seen this movie something like 20 times. It is one of my comfort movies–I know that I’m going to enjoy myself every time I see it, even though I know every moment by heart.
Andy is repeatedly sodomized by Bogs and The Sisters. It isn’t rape, which can only happen with people of the opposite sex. This is an important detail, because the warden makes more than one show of being a devout Christian who will not allow certain things to go on in his prison. He specifically mentions the Sodomites in this regard, obviously viewing himself as God and the inmates as the Sodomites that God struck down, yet he allows a group of inmates to sodomize whomever they like with the cooperation of the guards simply because it causes him no harm.
Red tells us in voiceover that this is happening on and off, that Andy goes out of his way to avoid The Sisters, and that he’s able to fight them off sometimes.
The scene in the projection room isn’t meant to indicate that Andy found a way to keep from being abused by them. He refuses to give Bogs a blow job, ie, he’s telling them that he won’t be a willing participant. If they’re going to get satisfaction from him, they’ll have to take it. It shows us that even in such a horrible situation, he’s able to exert some kind of control.
It does have an effect on him. Red tells us in voiceover that it nearly destroyed him, and most likely would have in the end had it not been for the incident on the license plate factory roof. This is about two years in. Shortly after Andy saves the guard a bundle of money, he’s beaten and sodomized in the movie theater. The timing here is critical–this is just after he’s asked Red for the Rita Hayworth poster, meaning that he’s found the flaw in his cell, and has a reason to go on with his life, such as it is. This is, however, the last such incident, due to Andy being under the protection of the head guard.
This is three years after the last incident. In that time, the assaults had stopped, the gang badly beaten by the guards, and the leader of the gang responsible had been so brutally beaten so he was confined to a wheelchair for life and ate through a straw. Andy had gotten revenge, a better job, made some close friends (something new for him), and most importantly, was working towards a lifechanging goal. His circumstances had changed for the better, and he had good things to look forward to.
For someone so obsessed with such a small detail, you seem not to have noticed the details here. It would have been quite easy for the filmmakers to miss this one, but they actually nail it on the head, and make a point of showing it to observant viewers.
A finely tailored men’s suit should have pants that brush the tops of the shoes without stacking (wrinkles caused by the pants resting on top of the shoes) while standing straight. When Andy enters the bank wearing Warden Norton’s suit, the camera focuses on his feet, where we see the pant legs are at least an inch, perhaps two inches, short of his shoe tops. A scene later, when Warden Norton gets the bible from his safe, a second shot focuses on his pants and shoes, where we see the pant legs resting on the shoe tops with a significant stack, indicating that the pants were likely an inch or two too long. That’s a two to four inch difference in how long the pants were on each man.
Hardly a leader. Red is a loner who “can get things”. For this reason, he’s left alone. He has a small group of loosely knit friends, most of whom seem to be outcasts of some kind. I suppose that among this group of five or six people, he might be considered al leader of sorts.
The warden protects Andy and affords him special privileges for the vast majority of that time, due to Andy’s processing the warden’s graft. When Andy is asking the warden’s help to get a new trial, and Andy calls him “obtuse”, he threatens to take away Andy’s “one bunk Hilton”.
I agree. The Shawshank Redemption is overrated in the same way and to the same degree as Steinbeck’s writing.
Seems an odd criticism. Do you automatically rule out any movie from possibly being good if it is not 100% realistic? If a movie is bad because it portrays a larger-than-life protagonist who overcomes insurmountable odds, I would think that would rule out about 3/4 of all movies.
Number Six I loved your post, because it hit lots of nails on the head. This is stuff I didn’t have time to do yesterday (all the quotes and stuff), but it’s my “comfort film” too. The only thing you said that I would take exception with is:{quote]It isn’t rape, which can only happen with people of the opposite sex.
[/quote]
Rape is any sex where one (or more) of the participants are unwilling, and clearly Andy was unwilling. Othewise, Red never would have said “Sometimes he was able to fight them off, sometimes, not”.
Excellent post Number 6! 
norinew: I am aware that in common usage, “rape” refers to any forcible sex. Technically, however, rape as a legal term refers solely to forcible penile-vaginal sex. The term for any other type of forced sexual activity is sodomy or forcible sodomy, depending upon the jurisdiction. Most of the time, I wouldn’t bother to point out the difference, but in this movie, the warden makes a point of threatening Andy with being “cast among the sodomites”, ie he’d allow potential attackers free reign on Andy.
This is important because the warden is a bible thumping hypocrite when it comes to denouncing the sodomites yet does nothing about that very problem in his own prison. See, the Bible denounces sodomy vehemently–God destroys an entire city because of it–but isn’t so harsh on rape. As a test of Job’s faith, God sends Job an angel in the guise of a man, which Job is to protect. When a crowd of men in Sodom show up at Job’s house demanding that the Angel be sent out so that they may “know” (forcibly sodomize) him, Job offers one of his daughters instead as compensation. Job passes this test by being willing to have his daughter gang raped to prevent the angel being sodomized.
The warden, who claims to be a servent of God, uses the threat of sodomy to get Andy to do what he wants, precisely the opposite of what one of God’s most faithful servants. This is why I made the distinction regarding rape/sodomy.
Fallen Angel
Totally disagree with you there. I understand it’s a matter of subjective interpretation but I felt the performances were understated and immensely powerful. The standout performance for me was Brooks (James Whitmore). The scenes leading up to his suicide really hammered home the message that if you’re sent down for life, that is exactly what they take. Brooks is immediately reduced from being an important, educated man in Shawshank, to being a useless, befuddled old man on the outside. His confusion and fear is palpable, even though the performance is very subtle and understated. When he is reading out his own suicide note in a voice over his emotional turmoil is kept hidden, beneath the surface when it would have been so easy to overplay it. That, combined with the excellent cinematography, makes his character one of the most sympathetic I’ve ever seen.
Morgan Freemans performance was superb as well. Over the years the layers of jaded cynicism which envelop his character are slowly broken down by Andy’s indominable spirit. His final parole speech, when compared to his first scene when he takes bets on which new inmate is going to crack up first shows just how much Andy has changed him. Again, it is wonderfully understated, subtle yet immensely powerful.
Those two performances are the best, IMO but I can’t think of any particular instances when any other member of the cast puts a foot wrong.
Just my 2 cents.
Ben.
P.S. - John Steinbeck was one of the greatest authors ever to walk the earth IMO
To continue this hijack farther - that also depends on jursidiction. In mine, rape is not limited to “forcible penile-vaginal sex” and the activities described in the film are rapes.
In Maine today there doesn’t seem to be a crime of “rape” at all. It looks as though the crime is “Gross Sexual Assault” and is not limited at all in reference to the genders of the criminal and victim. However, I am too lazy to do the necessary work to find what the deal was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
This was probably true when the film was set, but it’s not universally true now. The criminal jurisdictions in the UK now use the word “rape” for such an attack on a male.
Regarding the film itself, I was one of the few to see it in the cinema when it came out (not that I’m a very regular film-goer). I’m afraid thought it was sentimental melodrama.
A few years later I saw a Robert Bresson film from the 1950s called “A Man Escaped” (in French) about a guy who escapes from a Nazi prison in Paris. It covers similar ground, including the spiritual aspects of the escape, but is much shorter, and I think it’s the best film I’ve ever seen.
I’m a sucker for a prison movie.
I’m sure anyone who had ever had to experience prison first hand would probably find it deeply offensive. Much like combat veterans regarding war movies as rubbish.
Steinbeck is god.
End of rant.
This is one of my favourite movies, too. Unlike Jeff Olsen’s revenge theory, for me, it’s a movie about strength and hope. Andy didn’t let anything beat him. He was a quiet, strong man who didn’t give up, no matter what happened to him. My favourite line is “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing, and no good things ever die.”
StG
Um…you’re mixing up a couple of stories here, and Job was not in either of them. In Genesis an angel visits Lot in Sodom, some Sodomites come and start hollering for the fresh meat, and Lot offers up his daughter instead. The Sodomites refuse. God then destroys Sodom, not for homosexuality but for their inhospitality to the angel.
There is another very similar story in Judges in which a “Levite man” and his concubine are visiting a man in Gibeah. A similar scenario ensues with some “wicked men of the city” (not Sodomites).
The two men toss the concubine out the door and she gets gang raped and killed. The next morning the Levite man chops up his dead girlfriend into twelve parts and sends the parts to “all the areas of Israel.” It’s a pretty twisted story, even for the Bible. Check it out.
At least Remember the Titans was based in realism unlike the complete fabrication which is Shawshank. I’m sure there were fabricated elements but nobody around here (the real events took place in nearby Alexandria) seemed to mind.
Sorry if I don’t share your feelings that every movie that’s not completely realistic sucks. I mean, I would agree with you and all, but that would require disregarding EVERY SINGLE MOVIE EVER MADE.
djf750, you clearly have some misperceptions of Shawshank. I recommend you go watch it again and maybe then your memory will be refreshened for a more accurate post to spew your anti-shawshank point of view.