Canon City (1948)

Several of the toughest inmates in a Colorado state penitentiary near Canon City (pronounced 'Canyon City') are planning a getaway. They include Jeff Corey and Whit Bissell, both serving time in solitary. One of the inmates tries to get Scott Brady to join them, but he refuses. However, after hearing he won't be up for parole for another 10 years, he gives in. The group of 12 men manage to escape, and end up in a snowstorm. They split up and take several families hostage in search of guns, food and cars, while the authorities try to capture them.Apparently based on an actual prison break that happened a year earlier from that same prison, the movie even includes the actual warden as himself! Starting off with the authoritarian voice-over of Reed Hadley, the voice-over then becomes the (unseen) interviewer of the warden, which was weird to say the least. The first 20 minutes or so of the movie also includes several interviews with actual inmates, as well as actual prison life footage. Quite interesting, esp a long-time inmate (50 years!) who said he didn't want to be released anymore, as he had nothing outside to live for.Once the movie really starts, it moves at a rapid pace. Breaking out of prison seemed pretty easy tho, which makes you wonder why the warden looked so smug in the intro?! In any case, as the split up groups of escapees invade several homes, the movie becomes quite suspenseful. The tensest scenes are those where Corey ('Follow Me Quietly') is inside the home of an elderly couple, and the wife, Mabel Paige, tries to knock him down using a hammer. Brady ('He Walked By Night') in his first big role, is depicted as a stand-up guy who made a mistake once. He prevents a fellow inmate from raping a teenage girl, and later on allows a family to take their son to hospital for an appendix surgery. It's a bit too good to be true but I didn't mind it too much. Even the moralizing end of the movie isn't too overdone.The movie was directed by Crane Wilbur, who directed/wrote a couple of prison movies around this time including 'Outside The Wall'. He does pretty well here, aided by a lot of location shooting in and around the prison. The cinematography by noir legend John Alton is decent and occasionally even inspired, but this is far from his best work. There are way better prison noirs out there, and this one's just noir-ish really, but it's entertaining and the intro offers a bit of a glimpse into 40s prison life. 6/10

Canon City (1948)A simple loud warning up front--the first twenty minutes or so is a horrible, stiff, documentary kind of lead-in to the movie proper. When the dramatic action gets going, it becomes fully a movie with suspense, character, speed, and even at times complexity. In fact, you could even fast forward to where you see the buy in the jail cell doing a model of a ship. The stuff before that is not needed. It tells us what we already know about prison, though it seems to use real inmates in brief interviews, as if to set up the later jailbreak as something more tangible and believable. It isn't giving anything away to say that some inmates escape--that's the whole hook of the movie--and then what happens to each group or individual in their attempts to get out of Canon City is what drives the movie in a series of somewhat independent vignettes. The encounters with regular town people in their homes is a little contrived but also has the edge of fear to it, and suspense. It works pretty well, the cops gradually closing in on this or that escapee.The end result is still almost a public relations piece about the prison system, about ordinary Americans who rise up and do heroic things, and about the different kinds of attitudes of the inmates, who are people after all. I actually liked the second half of the movie, even it it wasn't completely original or brilliant. The acting is meant to be believable in a vernacular kind of way, and it is. Give it a look, especially if you like prison flicks.

Noirish docu-drama based on 1947 Colorado State Prison break.The movie's best parts are the location shots in and around the Colorado State Pen. We get at least a flavor of prison routines and the small town atmosphere. At the same time, the chase sequence at the Royal Gorge provides a scenic, if fictionalized, passage. Then too, ace photographer Alton's studio recreation of the actual winter-time blizzard lends good noirish atmosphere. There's also some tension around convict Schwartzmiller's home invasion; otherwise, the movie's a pretty routine slice of thick ear.To me, the screenplay surrounding the break and its aftermath seems muddled. Scenes follow in no particular developmental order. Characters are glimpsed and then dropped. It may be that writer Wilbur felt constrained by the film's factual basis and hurry-up schedule. After all, the movie wrap-up came only four months (January-May) after the breakout itself. (Contrast this rather disjointed narrative with the streamlined smoothness of the fictional, albeit thematically similar, Crashout {1955}.)As a youngster growing up a few miles from Canon City, I still have a recollection of the hubbub surrounding the breakout. The name Sherbondi suddenly became a household alarm, though I'm not sure he was the sympathetic character of the screenplay. Guns abruptly sprouted across the Arkansas (river) Valley like deer season. Speaking of those memorable few days, I'm glad the movie re-creates the blizzard that certainly hampered the getaway. That rural part of the state seldom made Denver news, let alone national headlines. So it was a pretty big deal for us living there. (In passing--- Warden Roy Best, featured in the movie, later suffered big professional damage when his liberal use of a whipping post for unruly prisoners got statewide exposure.) Choppy narrative and personal recollections aside, the film remains an interesting example of noirish docu-drama, which the results here strongly resemble.

Directed by veteran film-maker Crane Wilbur this rousing prison story is based on actual events that occurred at the Canon City penitentiary in Colorado in 1947.Newcomer Scott Brady is excellent as a convict who,caught up in events, must join in with eleven other escapees.As the fast-paced film-noir unfolds,each event is chronicled by that wonderful narrator Reed Hadley in semi-documentary fashion.A fine cast of character actors round out the cast; Jeff Corey as the ruthless convict leader,Stanley Clements,Robert Bice,and ( against type) Whit Bissell as a nervous killer.Actress Mabel Paige is particularly good as a very brave housewife.This film is another great example of Eagle-Lion pictures during that corporation's short run.