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Crime, Drama 151 min PG
Rotten Tomatoes74%Metacritic58IMDb
The greatest adventure of escape!
A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape.
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Contemplative, overwhelming, meticulous and bleak.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
**A classic film with a remarkable story and great actors.** This is a work that almost everyone remembers if the theme is films about the prison environment. It's a classic that takes us to a universe of pain, suffering, deprivation and fight against oppression, solidly based on a somewhat autobiographical book by Henri Charriere, called Papillon, a Frenchman who was imprisoned for decades in the penal colony of French Guiana and wrote a book that should be a memoir, but is so full of inventions that it deserves to be considered fiction inspired by real bases. Of course, the issue doesn't matter much to the film: let's forget the man and focus on the character, his alter-ego. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and released in 1973, it was filmed in Spain and Hawaii. And taking into account that the real prison was abandoned, a faithful setting was created in Jamaica, with some shots filmed in the real location appearing in the end credits. An interesting note: needing a tropical filming location, the production thought it was a good idea to go to a poor country, famous for its soft drugs, in the 1970s. It is, therefore, not surprising that works in Jamaica were marred by robberies
Read the whole review on TMDBSteve McQueen is superb as unlucky safe-cracker Henri "Papillon" Charrière, an innocent man convicted of murder and sentenced to imprisonment in the French penal colony at French Guiana. Once there, he learns quickly to appreciate the sheer brutality of a prison where any semblance of decency and humanity has been long abandoned. He allies himself with "Dega" (Dustin Hoffman), the rather wealthy, calculating, forger who fully expects his release papers to arrive any day! McQueen agrees to keep an eye on Hoffman meantime, in return for enough funds to enable him to try to escape too. Over the course of their incarceration, they become unlikely friends combatting the harsh, at times lethal, prison regime and trying to keep safe from their equally savage colleagues - each with an axe, of some sort, to grind. I'm not Hoffman's biggest fan, he tends to mimic rather than act - but I'd say that this is McQueen's finest, grittiest, performance - and the sense of pain, deprivation and hope he elicits are captivating to watch. There are some pictures at the end of the facility as it looked in the early 1970s - evocative of just how cruel these places were.
Read the whole review on TMDB_**The living hell of a penal colony in equatorial South America during the 30s**_ Henri Charrière’s account of his experiences from 1933-1945 involving the penal colony of Cayenne in French Guiana, South America, are chronicled, including solitary confinement, escape attempts, dwelling with Goajira Indians (in northeastern Columbia) and living on Devil's Island. Steve McQueen plays Henri, nicknamed Papillon (aka ‘Butterfly’ due to his chest tattoo), while Dustin Hoffman plays his friend Louis Dega. "Papillon" (1973) is a realistic ‘prison film’ and probably more accurate than Charrière’s account based on his memory, which was told to a professional writer some three decades after the events. Keep in mind that Charrière had a reputation for being a great storyteller and the authenticity of a lot of the 560-page book has been seriously challenged. The movie only offers the gist of the real-life account and no doubt got it more accurate. Whilst cinephiles generally praise the movie other respectable people criticize it, suggesting that the viewer hopes Papillon will escape so that the film will end (lol). I suspect this is mainly due to the long solitary confinement sequences in the
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