Until Jack Nicholson’s kooky Colonel Nathan Jessep made fun of Tom Cruise’s faggoty white uniform over lunch in A Few Good Men, I’d never heard of America’s Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Oh, for those carefree days of yesteryore.
Today, of course, most of us are sick-to-death of (and mostly just sickened by) references to all the terrible, terrible shit that’s gone down at Gitmo since America went torture-happy in 2002 and turned the base into a slightly less awful Abu Ghraib, where (according to our terrible, terrible 43rd president) the Geneva Conventions, legality, common sense and human decency no longer applied.
As of this writing, our hopefully much, much better 44th president has, according to Reuters, ordered a 120-day halt to all pending Guantánamo Bay prosecutions “to give the new administration time to evaluate the cases and decide what forum best suits any future prosecution.”
In the meantime, your pals here at the Screengrab would like to commemorate President Obama’s pledge to shut down one of the worst prisons in our nation's history with a salute to THE BEST PRISON MOVIES OF ALL TIME!
THE ROAD TO GUANTÁNAMO (2006)
Time will tell if Barack Obama truly represents the hope and change upon which he campaigned, but it was a good sign when his first act upon assuming office was to begin the process of shutting down the prison camp maintained during the Bush administration at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Meant to detain enemy combatants and terror suspects captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Guantánamo did almost nothing to fight al-Q’aeda, instead becoming a symbol of the degraded state of civil rights during the War on Terror. Michael Winterbottom’s powerfully effective documentary The Road to Guantánamo tells, through a clever mixture of documentary interviews and dramatic reenactments, the story of young British Muslims who visited Pakistan for a friend’s wedding; through foolhardiness or naivety, they ended up taking a detour into Afghanistan, and before they knew what was happening, they were captured, turned over to U.S. forces, and ended up in the world’s most infamous prison camp. Eventually released without charge two years later, their story is especially harrowing not only because a true prison tale is always scarier than an invented one, but also because it’s illustrative of how little it takes to destroy someone’s life in an atmosphere of paranoia and political fear.
COOL HAND LUKE (1967)
Given the timing of its release, Cool Hand Luke will probably always have the aura of a counterculture artifact, although in many ways it's your basic meat-and-potatoes prison flick. The conflict between our anti-hero Luke and the establishment – that is, the Bosses who keep him and his fellow prisoners in line – is certainly emblematic of the cultural divide of the Sixties, but it's also a well-worn standby of the genre. What makes Luke memorable, in addition to Newman's iconic performance, is the sweat-soaked Southern atmosphere and the rogues gallery of rugged character actors lined up on the chain gang, including George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Ralph Waite, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker and Wayne Rogers. Sure, they may seem a little too comfortable playing grabass in their underwear, but prison does strange things to a man. The horrors of the work farm, from the backbreaking labor to solitary confinement in "the hole," are so far out of proportion to Luke's crime of cutting the heads off parking meters out of boredom, we'd root for him even if he wasn't a lovable rogue who settles the great question once and for all: can a man eat 50 eggs?
O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? (2000)
Pigeonholing the Coen Brothers' perpetually underrated Americana romp as a prison movie would be just as ludicrous as studying The Big Lebowski for bowling tips, but the plot is indeed set into motion by a good old fashioned escape from a chain gang, and those big bold prison stripes really bring out the best in George Clooney. Although the Coens draw some of their imagery from classic prison flicks like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (their sunglasses-wearing pursuer appears to have stepped straight out of the latter picture), none of these influences have ever delved so deeply into the importance of the proper hair care product. Indeed, O Brother was the first prison movie that dared to depict the potential danger of the escaped fugitive being transformed into a toad by bewitching sirens. For speaking such hard truths, O Brother deserves a better reputation than it currently enjoys.
GRAND ILLUSION (1937)
Jean Renoir’s WWI opus about French and English pilots captured by the Germans is a film of startling depth and grace, a testament to the power of movies to reveal elusive truths about humanity, and a hell of a good time, to boot. I realize that critical opinion of this movie is such that the last statement is akin to affirming the wetness of water, but sometimes we have to acknowledge the waters in which we swim before we dive. It is hard to describe The Grand Illusion as a prison flick, even though most of the action takes place in various prisons. The movie is about class and prejudice and war and love and honor and this list could seriously go on for a while. At the height of his powers, Renoir was an artist of amazing scope, and his little prison flick manages to illuminate the contradictions at the heart of human psychology while judging no character for behaving as they have been taught to behave. The movie is a veritable who's-who of great European (and even American) cinema. It stars Jean Gabin, one of Renoir's favorite leading men, as Lieutenant Maréchal, the central figure of the movie. Renoir himself was an aviator during WWI, and the uniform Gabin wears was Renoir's during the first World War. Pierre Fresnay plays Captain de Boeldieu, the aristocratic aviator shot down alongside Maréchal. The director Erich von Stroheim plays Captain von Rauffenstein, the aristocratic German officer who shot them down and later acts as their warden. Marcel Dalio, credited at IMDB with 177 film appearances, plays Lieutenant Rosenthal, a Jewish French officer. The gorgeous Dita Parlo also appears, along with her L'Atalante co-star Jean Dasté. But the cast is only a component of the greatness; far more important is Renoir's sweeping vision of humanity, both in confinement and in freedom.
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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs