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Movie Reviews
Women in Prison
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"Papillon" (1973) |
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| Two great American actors at the top of their game... despite the silly hats. |
The personalities behind this one are almost as interesting as the movie, which isn't bad itself. Franklin Schaffner is an intriguing director. He made the schlock masterpiece Planet of the Apes in 1968, and was also at the helm for the stunning, but flawed Patton (1970). His work with "Papillon" was, in many ways his last hurray. After that he directed the Boys From Brazil (1977), which could legitimately land on anyone's ten worst list for any given year, and then sort of faded away. But from 1968 to 1973, he was a big picture director, and not just a technician, but apparently a filmmaker with some stories to tell. After all, even Planet of the Apes, which becomes increasingly ridiculous upon repeated viewing sort of had pretensions to addressing broader themes, and Patton was a powerful character study of a larger-than-life individual, only flawed by the filmmaker's inability or unwillingness to make fundamental judgments about the film's subject. "Papillon" is, in this sense, similar to Patton. It is an intriguing character study, but in the end we're left wanting for more of an assessment. Is Papillon mad? Why is he so driven to escape? How do we reconcile his kindness towards some of the characters with his willingness to kill and maim others without much remorse? What makes the guy tick?
You probably know all about the two leads. Dustin Hoffman was already a big star by the time this movie was made. His roles in The Graduate (1967) and Midnight Cowboy (1969) had defined his position as a seminal actor of his generation. His role in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) hinted at his ability to break out of the talky roles he'd been cast in thus far (in the last 20 minutes). For Hoffman, "Papillon" was simply an evolutionary role, but he brings an palpable emotional power to all his scenes. The star of the movie however is Steve McQueen. McQueen was the action star of his generation, but that label gives the wrong connotations in this day and age when the phrase conjures up visions of lazy, overfed mediocrities who appear on screen just long enough to spew canned dialogue between special effects sequences. McQueen had a real physical presence, and not simply through bulging biceps (a la Schwarzenegger), and yet he was a real actor, who could carry a scene, and give depth to a character. An indication of how things have changed is that back in the 1970s, many people considered Clint Eastwood to be the quintessential one-dimensional, shallow action star, whereas now he is recognized as one of the elder statesmen of Hollywood and quite an accomplished actor. Now, I am not trying to suggest that the worst actor of the 1970s is better than the best actors today, of course; Eastwood was always more talented than he received credit for, and he's also grown as an actor. But I do think that our action movies in the late-1990s and beyond have become such empty exercises in special effects one-upmanship that serious actors are either largely marginalized into low budget, small distribution movies (Sean Penn), forced into compartmentalizing their careers into jobs for money and jobs for art (Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis are examples here), or in some cases simply give up serious acting in favor of their blockbuster paychecks (Nicolas Cage).
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| The latest prison fashions. |
Then we have the screenwriters. The movie is adapted from Henri Charrière's autobiography. Charrière was a prisoner on Devil's Island in the 1930s and 1940s before escaping. The screenwriter was Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. It doesn't really fit in here, but at some point I'll probably discuss the issue of the Hollywood Ten in some detail. Suffice it to say that my sense is that the situation is/was more complex than many people would like to suggest. The Hollywood Ten story is not just about big, bad McCarthyites oppressing poor, free-thinking artists... but as I say, this isn't the time and place for this discussion.
Well, in any case, "Papillon" is an interesting movie simply for the presence of the enigmatic Schaffner in the director's chair, and Hoffman and McQueen on screen. The plot itself is actually quite straightforward. McQueen plays Henri "Papillon" Charrière. Papillon means butterfly in French, and the character has a tattoo of a blue butterfly in his chest. I did sort of wonder whether the name or the tattoo had come first, but no one ever asks him, so it remains a mystery. Papillon is a low-grade career criminal, a safecracker wrongly accused on murdering a pimp. Hoffman plays Louis Dega, a forger, responsible for the collapse of an entire series of defense bonds in 1920s France. I believe Dega is a fictional character, but Papillon was a real person, and indeed as I mentioned earlier the movie is based on Henri Charrière's autobiography.
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| Dega and Papillon cut a deal. |
We first meet Papillon and Dega in France, as they prepare to board a ship that will take them to the penal colony in French Guiana. Both Dega and Papillon are smuggling on (or more precisely in) their persons, the items they believe will allow them to survive the experience... Papillon a knife, and Dega money. Papillon overhears some cutthroats making plans to... well, cut Dega's throat and take his money. Papillon offers protection on the journey over. At first Dega demurs, suspecting a shakedown scheme, but when a man gets killed in the cell, and Papillon seems more interested in minding his own business than harassing him, Dega changes his mind. Just in time, I might add, because soon Dega is almost attacked, and only Papillon's timely intervention saves his life.
On the ship, Papillon and Dega make friends with Julot (Don Gordon), a con returning to French Guiana for the second time. He fills the two new guys in on the situation they'll face once they arrive. Already we see Papillon and Dega have different ideas about how to survive their sentence. Papillon pumps Julot for information in order to escape. Dega, by contrast, listens in a detached manner. He is pretty confident that his money will buy him preferential treatment in prison, while his wife and lawyer will be able to buy his freedom within a short time at home. Julot lays out the problems with escape. The country is desolate, and the work camps in set back in the jungle. The other alternative is imprisonment on Devil's Island, an offshore prison guarded by high cliffs and ferocious tides. Papillon's unflagging obsession for much of the rest of the movie is to secure a boat that will allow him to sail to freedom.
Papillon and Dega survive the journey at sea. My suspicion is that conditions on board the prison ship were much more harrowing than the movie suggests... I mean, think about it. It is hard to imagine a worse fate than being crowded below decks with a bunch thugs for a trans-Atlantic cross. Ugh.
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| The prisoners assemble in the shadow of a guillotine. |
Once in French Guiana, we get the usual "welcome to prison" speech, complete with boasts about the impossibility of escape, and dire warnings about the punishment for those who try. The warden also shows off the ultimate deterrent, a well-maintained guillotine sitting in the center of the prison yard. And he goes on to demonstrate its functioning by beheading a prisoner who apparently used up his last chances. Needless to say, this sets a grim tone for the new prisoners.
Still, Dega and Papillon are initially optimistic about their ability to play the system. Dega's reputation precedes him, and this actually makes it easy for him to find the right person to bribe. Unfortunately, just as Dega seems ready to land himself and Papillon cushy administrative jobs in the prison offices, the warden catches up with him. Having been bankrupted on defense bonds, the warden is happy to inflict his small measure of revenge by sending Dega and Papillon to a work camp instead.
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| Clearing trees to build a strip mall and townhouses. |
The work camp is set deep in a jungle. The penal system in French Guiana was notorious for its high mortality rate, and it isn't difficult to see why. The prisoners are engaged in hard labor, with poor rations, in a malarial swamp. Frankly, the surprising thing isn't up to forty percent of prisoners died every year, but rather that over sixty percent lived. It isn't obvious what the prisoners are working on. There are dozens of men stumbling through thigh-high mud, dragging huge trees away, but given the conditions it is difficult to imagine either building anything in the jungle or even making much of a profit on the waterlogged timber they might extract. Actually, that reminds me... when we see scenes of prisoners at hard labor breaking rocks, what is the purpose of that? Is that where gravel comes from? Is there actually some sort of commercial rationale? I mean, how much does gravel sell for?
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| Papillon runs for his life after he attacks an abusive guard. |
Anyway, deep in the swamp Dega and Papillon's friendship grows slowly. Papillon takes the intellectual, but physically slight Dega under his wing. I guess he is motived partly by pity, but also by gratitude over Dega's initial willingness to try to secure Papillon a cushy job, and also, I guess, by the notion that Dega and his money might come in useful later on. Dega in the meantime realizes he won't survive long at hard labor, so he tells Papillon that he would also like to escape now. While at the work camp, Dega and Papillon also meet Clusiot (Woodrow Parfrey), another con who dreams of escape, but who also seems to have a knack for surviving in the jungle. One day a butterfly trader arrives at the work camp. He is searching for rare butterflies whose wings are used to make a special ink used in American currency. Papillon manages to talk to him, and offers him money in exchange for a boat. The trader agrees to provide a boat in one week's time, but before they can close the deal, Papillon gets into a fight with a guard who is beating up Dega. Papillon scalds the guard with boiling water and disappears into the jungle. He manages to track down the butterfly trader, but as he steps into the clearing, he is captured by two former convicts turned bounty hunters. For his attempted escape and attack on the guard, Papillon is sentences to two years solitary confinement.
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| Papillon paces in his cell. |
Papillon's solitary confinement takes up the next 25 minutes of movie time. Locked into a tiny cell, Papillon's only contact with humans is once a day when a guard delivers a pot of water and a bowl of gruel. Once a month he sticks his head through an opening in the door to be deloused. The rations are thin, and part of the purpose of solitary is to "break" the inmates, mentally and physically. But Dega is thinking of Papillon, and arranges to have a half coconut delivered to his cell daily. For a while, this is a Godsend, but soon the guards discover Papillon's illegal supplement. They try to find out the name of his benefactor, but Papillon refuses to betray Dega, and as punishment is put on half-rations and placed into a darkened cell for 6 months. Still Papillon refuses to betray Dega, which is an immensely brave, and potentially suicidal, act of defiance. But in many ways it is hard to understand. I mean, Papillon really barely knows Dega, and his acquaintance with Dega was one of the reasons he ended up in the work camp rather than somewhere else. Plus, he never asked Dega for the coconut. And, of course, from all we've seen of Papillon, it seems as if he is something of a thug. Even if he was wrongly accused of murder, he's enough of a tough guy to bring a knife on-board the ship, and he knows how to use it well enough to sell his services. Plus, of course, he was vicious enough to heave a pot of boiling water at a guard. My sense is that although Papillon does come to be fond of Dega, the real reason for his defiance is personal. Turning in Dega would not be so bad because it betrays someone else, but because it would involve Papillon giving in to his captors.
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| Papillon is emaciated and aged after his time in solitary. Here he's questioned by the guards. |
Papillon's time in solitary is depicted brutally. We see him slowly wither away physically as he is reduced to eating insects to supplement his meager diet. He becomes gaunt, his skin sallow. I imagine it was mostly makeup at work, but McQueen looks like he lost a lot of weight during the filming to make these scenes credible. It is quite a powerful performance. But in the end, Papillon survives. He is brought back to the administrative compound of the main prison and reunited with Dega in a touching, subdued, and beautifully acted scene. Hoffman manages to convey the depth of his emotion without saying a word. The way he looks at Papillon is a wonderful mixture of admiration, appreciation, and devotion. There is nothing sexual about it, but in that moment Dega clearly loves Papillon.
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| Dega sees Papillon again for the first time in two years. |
Dega has managed to get himself an administrative job (by paying for the warden's new house), and he's able to look out for Papillon for a while.But despite his suffering in solitary, Papillon is still desperate to escape. In the prison infirmary, Papillon meets Maturette (Robert Deman), a young gay prison who acts as a sort of nurse to the sick prisoners. When Dega comes to visit, Papillon tells him that he wants a boat, and since Dega is so grateful that Papillon didn't turn him in while in solitary, he gets it for him. Hearing that Papillon is back and planning to escape, Clusiot also manages to get into the infirmary by faking an injury. The problem for Papillon is getting out of the infirmary so he can make a run for the boat which is outside the prison. Maturette comes in handy now because one of the prison trustees has a thing for him. So far Maturette has been able to fend him off, but now Papillon offers Maturette money to seduce the trustee to cover their escape. Maturette indignantly refuses the money, but agrees to help Papillon if Papillon will let him come along in the escape. When Papillon relents the escape is on.
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| Clusiot, Maturette, and Papillon overpower a guard. |
One night, when most of the guards are attending a concert, Papillon, Clusiot, and Maturette set their plan in motion. They lure the trustee inside the locked infirmary and beat him unconscious. Then dressed in his clothes, they manage to overpower the guards. While this is going on, Dega is using his position as a waiter for the evening the keep the remaining guards distracted. Papillon and Maturette manage to get over the compound wall, but Clusiot gets caught by a guard and knocked unconscious by rifle butt to the head. As the guard raises his rifle to take aim at Papillon still sitting astride the wall, Dega suddenly intervenes and knocks the guard unconscious. Having committed himself, Dega joins Papillon in the escape, but as he jumps over the wall, he lands hard and cracks his ankle.
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| A mysterious savior. |
Things get worse later when the three escapees finally arrive at the boat and find it is rotten. Actually, they get lucky here because not only were they sold a rotten boat, but the seller also ratted them out to a couple of bounty hunters. But the prisoners are saved by the intervention of a mysterious man, some sort of hunter with blue tattoos on his face. They mysterious stranger has killed the bounty hunters, and now offers to get them to a nearby leper colony where his says they may be able to buy a real boat. We never really find out who this masked man is, and I guess that simply reflects the fact that Henri Charrière never found out in real life.
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| Mmmm, mmmm, there's nothing like a good cigar. |
The scene at the leper colony is one of the most famous from the movie. Papillon goes in alone to negotiate. Naturally it is bleak scene. The lepers are grotesquely disfigured, and more than a little bitter and suspicious about outsiders. At a crucial moment, when the lepers are still considering whether to simply murder Papillon, the head man offers Papillon a cigar, straight out of his sore covered mouth. Papillon takes it in his mouth, and takes several deep puffs. Luckily, the man has "dry leprosy" which is apparently not contagious, but Papillon's act of courage wins the lepers over. They agree to sell him a boat. And indeed, as Papillon is about to leave, they give him a wad of money for the trip.
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| Not quite smooth sailing. |
The boat journey starts off pleasantly, but soon Papillon, Dega, and Maturette are hit by a brutal storm. Dega's broken ankle becomes gangrenous, and Maturette is forced to perform some field surgery on the wound. Then, just as the men make landfall at the end of this harrowing journey, they are immediately set upon by a group of soldiers. Thinking fast Papillon heaves an ax at one of the soldiers and takes off into the jungle, gunshots ringing out behind him. In the jungle, he meets up with another prisoner -- the man the soldiers were accompanying when they stumbled onto Papillon's landing site. This man leads Papillon through the jungle, and gives him coca leaves to chew when his energy flags. The soldiers, however, want to recapture their man, so they hire local Indian hunters to track them down. Papillon's new friend soon finds himself impaled in a booby trap, and as Papillon steps into a clearly, he gets hit with several darts from a blow gun. His twists and falls unconscious into a stream.
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| Papillon gets to play with the chief's daughter, but he has to tattoo the old man in return.... which, all in all, seems like a fair trade to me. |
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He walks up in an idyllic, a small sea-side Indian village. Children playing, women walking around topless, food, grass huts, and sunshine. Before long, he is paired off with one of the village maidens. When I first saw this movie, I sort of thought that this was all a dream or fantasy sequence, and that soon we'd cut to a shot of Papillon in solitary with his eyes closed. But no, instead, one day, Papillon is brought to the village elder, and by gesture is asked to tattoo a butterfly on the elder's chest like he has on his own. Papillon complies, but when he wakes up the next morning, he is all alone. All of the villagers are gone, although they do leave him a pouch with several pearls they've gathered from the oysters they harvest from the sea. Papillon sort of wanders around a little, but the next scene we get is him in a crowded bus, with a mustache and reasonably new suit of clothes. The bus stops at a checkpoint, and Papillon panics. He jumps out of the bus, and gives a pearl the a nun who is soliciting contributions from the stopped travelers. He then climbs onto her wagon. She understands what he wants, and with a nod commands the driver to go on.
They go back to her convent, and Papillon meets the suspicious Mother Superior. Papillon asks to stay, but she's concerned that the will rob the convent if she agrees. Naively Papillon gives her his remaining pearls and suggests she hold them as a sort of security deposit. She agrees and gives him a room. But the next morning when she knocks on his door to wake him up, she's not alone; instead, she's brought the local militia out the arrest him. She smugly says to him: "If you are sinful, you've made amends by feeding half the poor in Santa Marto. If you are truly not sinful, you have nothing to fear; God will watch over you." The militia grab Papillon and break his foot to keep him from running. Doesn't seem like a very Christian thing to do. Shouldn't convents be sanctuaries of sorts?
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| Apparently the Mother Superior doesn't buy into all the Christian compassion stuff. |
Five years pass before we see Papillon again. He emerges from solitary looking haggard, but fitter than after his earlier two year term. Presumably, he was on full rations this time. As he is waiting to be released from solitary, the guards bring out Maturette on a stretcher, just in time for him to die before Papillon's eyes. The timing seems too convenient, and in any case the scene seems forced. It is not as if Papillon forced Maturette to come along, so he isn't culpable for his fate, and they were never shown as particularly close. I'm not sure what the point was.
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| Papillon watched the tides from a rocky perch on Devil's Island... |
This time, Papillon is sent to Devil's Island rather than being returned to either the administrative compound or work camps. Devil's Island is an isolated, wind-swept rock of the coast guarded mostly by imposing cliffs and vicious tides. In the movie, it looks a little like a tropical version of Cornwall. The guards on the island have a "live and let live" philosophy. Since escape is impossible, they leave the prisoners alone as much as possible. Papillon is assigned to an empty hut on the island. He soon meets up with Dega. Dega is now resigned to life in prison. His wife has run off with the attorney who was supposedly working for his freedom. Dega has carved out a reasonable life. He has a large vegetable garden and several pigs. His hut is clean and livable.
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| ...meanwhile, Dega tends to his pigs. |
It is prison, of course, but it is a far cry from the horrors of the work camps. Still Papillon is desperate to escape. His motivation seems to be pure rebellion, the simple unwillingness to accept his fate. Without any labor assignment, he has plenty of time to plot and scheme. Finally, he manages to observe the waves and tides closely enough to predict when a sufficient large wave is about to break, a wave whose backwash will carry him back out to sea if he times it properly. He tries to convince Dega to join him; but Dega is sure Papillon will be dashed against the rocks. In the end, that is a risk Papillon is willing to take, and in a memorable scene he plunges into the sea from one of the cliffs. His gamble works out, and the movie ends as we watch him float away. Presumably the guards simply wrote him off as a suicide.
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| Papillon jumps into the sea... escape or bust |
Oddly enough for a two-and-a-half hour movie, the ending seems rushed. From the time, Papillon makes land after his boat trip with Dega and Maturette, everything sort of happens in a hurry... the time with the Indians, his experience at the convent, his five years in solitary, and finally his escape from Devil's Island. Plus, even after 151 minutes, Papillon is still something of a mystery. We never really get a clear picture of the man. What was he like before prison? Why is he so determined the escape? The movie feels like an epic, but we don't get either the expected scope in terms of plot or in terms of character development. It is a testament to the acting skills of Hoffman and McQueen that we come to care about the characters as much as a we do despite the fact that we're told relatively little about them except in bits and pieces.
Still, it is somewhat unsatisfying. The movie clearly admires Papillon, but should we? Although he's innocent of the murder he was accused of, he's a career criminal. His constant desire to escape shows him unrepentant. Is it possible to condemn the legal system without necessarily cheering for the criminal? Yes, the French penal system in Guiana was brutal, but does surviving it make Papillon a hero? I'm not sure it does, but ultimately, I just don't know enough about Papillon the man to make a judgment because the movie does not tell me enough. Now, one response is to say that since the movie is based on a true story (more or less), it does not have to provide interpretations. It just is what it is. I guess I don't buy that in this case. After all, the very act of making a movie often involves certain normative commitments about the characters, and this one is overtly sympathetic toward Papillon. He isn't just presented naked before the world, for the audience to judge on its own -- compare this movie to Falling Down (1993) in which Michael Douglas' D-Fens is presented almost without commentary, a pure character study in a sense (although even here a lot of critics didn't get it and accused the director, Joel Schumacher, of racism as a result).
Most prison movies can get away without answering these sorts of question. In Escape From Alcatraz (1979), Clint Eastwood also plays a career criminal in a prison break movie. But that movie is a straightforward adventure. It does not, through its pacing, cinematography, scoring, and length claim to be more than that. So we can root for Clint without asking too many questions. But "Papillon" lays claim to a higher standard, and so we must judge it by that higher standard, much in the same way we have to consider Dead Man Walking (1995) in more depth than Ernest Goes to Jail (1990).
In any case, this is a very good movie, well acted and often beautifully shot. Certainly near the top of the prison movies genre, but by the same token it is a smaller movie than its tone suggests.
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(3.5 out of 5)