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The Shawshank Redemption

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                      The Shawshank Redemption
     Directed by   Frank Darabont
     Produced by   Niki Marvin
     Written by    Frank Darabont (screenplay)
                   Stephen King (original novella)
      Starring     Tim Robbins
                   Morgan Freeman
                   Bob Gunton
                   Clancy Brown
                   William Sadler
                   Gil Bellows
                   James Whitmore
      Music by     Thomas Newman
   Cinematography  Roger Deakins
     Editing by    Richard Francis-Bruce
   Distributed by  Columbia Pictures (later Warner Bros. Pictures)
   Release date(s) September 10, 1994
    Running time   142 minutes
      Language     English
       Budget      $25,000,000
                            IMDb profile

   The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 movie, written and directed by Frank
   Darabont, based on the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank
   Redemption. The film stars Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne and Morgan
   Freeman as Ellis "Red" Redding.

   The plot of Shawshank revolves around Andy Dufresne's life in prison
   after being convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover. Despite
   a poor box office reception (partially due to competition from the
   commercial success of films such as Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and
   Speed), Shawshank received favourable reviews from critics and enjoyed
   a remarkable life on cable television, home video, and DVD. It is
   consistently ranked amongst the finest movies of all time.

   Darabont secured the film adaptation rights in 1987 from Stephen King
   after impressing the author with his short film adaptation of "The
   Woman in the Room" in 1983. This is one of the more famous Dollar Deals
   made by King with aspiring filmmakers.

Plot

   Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

   The movie spans over 20 years, and begins with Andy Dufresne ( Tim
   Robbins) on trial for the murder of his wife and her lover, a crime of
   which he claims to be innocent in spite of what seems like overwhelming
   evidence. He is sentenced to serve two consecutive life sentences at
   Shawshank, a fictitious prison in Maine.

   The action shifts to the prison where Red ( Morgan Freeman) attempts to
   persuade a parole board that he has been rehabilitated by his time in
   prison, but he fails as he has at every previous hearing. Andy arrives
   in a busload of new prisoners, and the other inmates gather around the
   bus as it arrives, cheering in glee to make the new arrivals
   uncomfortable. A group of inmates place bets on which new prisoner will
   be the first to break down that night, and Red bets on Andy Dufresne.

   Warden Sam Norton ( Bob Gunton) gathers the new arrivals and tells them
   only one rule ("No blasphemy."), and then stands idly by as the captain
   of the guard, Byron Hadley ( Clancy Brown), abuses a new arrival who
   asked a trivial question. The inmates are marched naked to their cells,
   and one new arrival breaks down and is publicly beaten for it. It is
   found out the next day that the arrival died in Intensive Care, because
   no one was around to take care of him.

   In Shawshank Andy keeps to himself until he wants to acquire some
   contraband. He befriends Red, who has connections to obtain contraband,
   and several other prisoners including Brooks Hatlen, played by James
   Whitmore. In his first few years in prison, Andy endures repeated
   beatings, gang rapings, and gang rape attempts by a group of aggressive
   inmates known as the sisters, led by Bogs ( Mark Rolston).

   Red arranges for himself, Dufresne, and others to have their names
   chosen for work tarring the roof of a prison building. As they work,
   Dufresne overhears Captain Hadley complaining about his taxes; he has
   received a large amount of money and is afraid that the IRS will take
   it away from him. When Dufresne steps away from his crew, Hadley
   threatens to throw him off the roof. Dufresne, however, merely
   recommends that Hadley trust the money to his wife, because the IRS
   cannot do anything about a gift to a spouse. Andy volunteers to help
   Hadley with his taxes, in exchange for three beers for each man
   working; Hadley complies, and the prisoners get their beer on their
   second to last day on the job.

   Andy's former life as a banker and his knowledge of accounting and
   income taxes eventually come to the attention of every guard in the
   prison, and, finally, the Warden. His financial knowledge earns him
   freedom from mistreatment by other prisoners, but he also becomes
   deeply involved in Norton's illegal money-laundering operations.

   The Warden keeps a safe behind an embroidered plaque by his wife,
   reading "Thy Judgement cometh, and that right soon." When working for
   the Warden, Andy creates a false identity - a ' phantom', as he puts it
   - so the Warden can hide the money laundered. All information about the
   scandal is kept behind the Warden's safe.

   Time passes. Brooks's parole is approved, but he doesn't want to leave
   prison and threatens to kill another inmate in order to stay at
   Shawshank; however, Andy persuades him to let the other man go. The old
   man is eventually released from prison, but after spending over 50
   years behind bars, the elderly convict finds that the normal world is
   no place for him, and, in a letter to his friends at the prison,
   declares that he's tired of being afraid all the time; "I've decided
   not to stay," Brooks closes. Having carved the phrase "Brooks was
   here," into the wall in the half-way house, he hangs himself.

   Andy has made repeated letters once a week to a nearby library to get
   books sent to the prison; finally, they receive hundreds of books and
   several records just so they could get him to stop writing. While
   getting the books organized, Andy comes across an opera record and
   begins to play it. He locks all doors into the room and turns on the
   intercom and all settings available; the music fills the entire prison,
   including the prisonyard, workshops, and the Warden's Office. When the
   Warden shouts at Andy to turn off the record player, Andy cranks up the
   volume to its maximum setting. Hadley then busts the door's window,
   unlocks the door, and apprehends Dufresne; Andy is then sent to
   solitary confinement.

   A young prisoner, Tommy ( Gil Bellows), enters Shawshank in the 1960s,
   and Andy helps him try to get a G.E.D. Tommy tells Andy that he has met
   the man that actually killed his wife and her lover; this could be used
   to free him, or at least get him a new trial. It is only at this point
   that it is made totally explicit that Andy is in fact innocent of the
   murders, as he has maintained. Andy approaches the warden for help, but
   the warden is unwilling to lose Andy's financial assistance with his
   illicit schemes or risk being exposed and sends Andy to solitary
   confinement for a month, which is longer than the prisoners seem to
   know of. While Andy is in solitary, Tommy passes his G.E.D. with a C+,
   but the warden has him killed before he can pass on any information.
   The Warden then gives Andy another month in solitary.

   After his release from solitary confinement, Andy's disposition is
   visibly changed; he is now more sullen than before. He tells Red that,
   if he ever makes parole, to go to a field in Maine and look for a rock
   made of volcanic glass in a granite stone wall. After this, he orders a
   length of rope, stirring worry among his friends that he will kill
   himself. That night, he works with the Warden's illegal financing, and
   is ordered to clean a suit and shine a pair of dress shoes.

   The following day, Andy doesn't come out of his cell for morning roll
   call. When an officer goes to check, Andy has disappeared. The Warden
   has no knowledge of this absence until he finds Andy's ragged shoes in
   place of the dress shoes; as soon as he finds them, the siren sounds,
   signaling Dufresne's escape. While questioning Red, the Warden
   blasphemes, breaking his very own rule, and begins throwing Andy's
   whittled stones around the room. However, when he throws one at a
   poster of Racquel Welch on the wall, it passes through, rather than
   bouncing off of the stone wall. The Warden rips the poster away,
   revealing a hole in the wall just large enough for a man to fit
   through.

   At this point, how Andy escapes is revealed; from his first night with
   the rock hammer, Andy has chipped away at the wall. When the hole began
   to get suspicious, Andy put up the poster of Rita Hayworth to hide it.
   The night of his escape, Dufresne secretly replaced the Warden's
   records of finances with something else, placing the duplicates in the
   Warden's safe. He wore the suit underneath his clothes as he came back
   to his cell, and switched his own shoes out. He wore them into his
   cell, but no one bothered to look at his feet. After placing the
   records, the suit, and a chess set into a watertight plastic bag, Andy
   crawled through the hole and found himself in the prison plumbing
   system. He broke his way into the sewage pipe, timing his strikes with
   thunder outside so as not to be heard. Then, he crawled for
   five-hundred yards down the sewage pipe into a nearby run-off stream.
   All the authorities found were a bar of soap, his old clothes, and the
   rock hammer, nearly worn away.

   After his escape, he assumed the identity of the phantom - wearing the
   Warden's suit - and took $370,000 out of the Warden's accounts. He also
   forwarded the stolen paperwork and information on Tommy's murder to the
   local newspaper, which quickly printed a news story on the front page
   and notified authorities.

   The Warden reads the story and quickly opens the safe. Inside - rather
   than his real records - is Dufresne's bible. A note from Andy is
   scrawled in the cover; "You were right; salvation lay within." Further
   in, fittingly beginning in the book of Exodus, pages are cut in the
   shape of a rock hammer, where Andy had hidden it. The Warden watches as
   police arrest Hadley, but he has other plans. As the police come up to
   arrest him, he loads a revolver and stands ready to fight. However, at
   the last minute, he puts the gun to his own neck and shoots himself.

   At Red's latest parole, the entire board has been replaced. Rather than
   eagerly asking for parole, Red remarks that he doesn't care what
   happens to him. When asked if he has been rehabilitated, he says
   rehabilitated "is a bullshit word". His parole is approved, and he is
   sent to a halfway house, to the same room where Brooks had died. After
   working as a grocery store employee, he remembers what Andy had asked
   for him to do. Red goes to the field in Maine, digs under the volcanic
   glass rock and finds a box, hidden by Andy, that contains enough money
   for him to leave Maine and join Andy in Mexico.

   Before leaving for Mexico, Red carves into the wall next to Brooks'
   final message, "So was Red." The final shot shows Red meeting Andy once
   again on the Pacific shoreline.

Cast and crew

   Image:Shawshank1.png
   Morgan Freeman as Red and Tim Robbins as Andy

Cast

     * Tim Robbins: Andy Dufresne
     * Morgan Freeman: Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding
     * Bob Gunton: Warden Samuel Norton
     * William Sadler: Heywood
     * Clancy Brown: Captain Byron Hadley
     * Gil Bellows: Tommy Williams
     * Mark Rolston: Bogs Diamond
     * James Whitmore: Brooks Hatlen
     * Jeffrey DeMunn: District Attorney (1946)
     * Bill Bolender: Elmo Blatch
     * Dion Anderson: Head Bull Haig

Crew

     * Director: Frank Darabont
     * Producer: Niki Marvin
     * Screenwriter: Frank Darabont
     * Art Director: Peter Lansdown Smith
     * Casting: Deborah Aquila
     * Cinematographer: Roger Deakins
     * Composer: Thomas Newman, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
     * Costume Designer: Elizabeth McBride
     * Editor: Richard Francis-Bruce
     * Production Designer: Terence Marsh
     * Set Decorator: Michael Seirton
     * Story: Stephen King

Interpretations

Integrity

   Roger Ebert suggests that the integrity of Andy Dufresne is an
   important theme in the story line,^ especially in prison, where
   integrity is lacking. Andy is an individual of integrity (here
   referring to adherence to a code of morality) among a host of criminals
   with little integrity.^

Christian interpretations

   Some critics have interpreted the film as a Christian parable, and
   indeed some Christian reviewers have referred to it as a film "true to
   Christian principles."^

   In the director's commentary track on the tenth anniversary DVD,
   Darabont denies any intent to create such a parable and calls such
   interpretations of the film "fantastic."

Critical Reaction

   In 1999, film critic Roger Ebert listed Shawshank on his "Great Movies"
   list,^ and in reader polls by the film magazine Empire, the film ranked
   5th in 2004 and 1st in 2006 on the lists for greatest movie of all
   time. The film has also repeatedly been voted by the registered users
   of the Internet Movie Database as one of the greatest movies ever made.
   According to the database's list of "Top 250 Movies of All Time",^ it
   is one of only two movies with a 9.1 average rating (the other being
   The Godfather), and it has the most votes of any of the movies on the
   list. At times, it was the highest rated film on IMDB and the Yahoo
   movies database.^

   In the 1994 Academy Awards the movie was nominated for seven awards (
   Best Picture, Best Actor– Morgan Freeman, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best
   Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Sound) but,
   in the shadow of 1995's big winner Forrest Gump, failed to win a single
   one.

Trivia

     * The novel appears in Stephen King's Different Seasons, which also
       contains The Body, which was made into the film Stand By Me, and
       Apt Pupil, which was also made into a film by the same name. Rita
       Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption appears under the Spring section
       of the book under the heading "Hope springs eternal," which is also
       the name of a documentary on the special edition DVD. Darabont also
       went on to direct The Green Mile, based on another work by Stephen
       King.
     * Shawshank was filmed in and around the city of Mansfield, Ohio,
       located in north-central Ohio. The prison featured in the film is
       the old, abandoned Ohio State Reformatory immediately north of
       downtown Mansfield. The Reformatory buildings have been used in
       several other films, including Harry and Walter Go to New York, Air
       Force One and Tango and Cash. Most of the prison yard has now been
       demolished to make room for expansion of the adjacent Mansfield
       Correctional Facility, but the Reformatory's Gothic-style ("Castle
       Dracula") Administration Building remains standing and, due to its
       prominent use in films, has become a tourist attraction. Several
       scenes were also shot in Portland, ME. The real warden of the
       Mansfield Correctional Facility had a cameo appearance in Shawshank
       as the prisoner seated directly behind Tommy on his bus ride to
       prison.
     * The young photo of Red on his parole forms is of Morgan Freeman's
       son, Alfonso, who also is seen in the yard when Andy's load of
       prisoners is first dropped off, shouting enthusiastically "Fresh
       Fish! Fresh Fish" whilst reeling in an imaginary line. Alfonso
       later played a parody of his father's character, Red, in a short
       spoof titled The Sharktank Redemption, available on the second disc
       of the 10th anniversary DVD.
     * To escape, Andy crawls through five hundred yards of a sewage pipe
       that lead to a small river outside of the prison. Red describes
       five hundred yards as the equal of five football fields and 'just
       shy of half a mile.' While five hundred yards does equal five
       football fields, it is not even one-third of a mile.

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