Escape from Alcatraz

Escape from Alcatraz (1979) is Don Siegel's prison thriller, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Clint Eastwood plays bank robber Frank Morris, shipped to the island fortress in San Francisco Bay.

Everyone treats Alcatraz as a cage with no way out: freezing currents, sharks, and walls nobody has ever beaten. Morris, quiet and sharp, studies it all instead — a crack in the concrete, the guards' rounds, the air moving through the ventilation shafts. With the Anglin brothers and a neighbor down the cellblock, he spends months scraping at a vent grille with a spoon, molding dummy heads from soap and hair, and stitching a raft out of stolen raincoats. The warden (Patrick McGoohan) keeps insisting escape is impossible, which only sharpens the men's resolve.

The script grew out of what actually happened on the night of June 11, 1962, when three inmates vanished from their cells and were never accounted for. Siegel shoots almost without a score, leaning on silence and gray light, while Eastwood holds the lead on the smallest of gestures. Stream Escape from Alcatraz (1979) online on iFILM.