The Shawshank Redemption Movie Trailer

The Shawshank Redemption in a Nutshell

A successful banker named Andy Dufresne finds himself falsely imprisoned for the murder of his adulterous wife and her lover. After a rough two years of dealing with life on the inside, he finally finds his place as the tax and money consultant for the guards, which makes him untouchable. The crooked warden forces Andy to launder dirty money he had illegally obtained by shady business practices involving using prisoners as slave labor to under bid road work. After 20 years of his double life sentence, the innocent Andy Dufresne disappears from Shawshank Prison with a bunch of the warden’s dirty money, but how did he do it? Could there be a Shawshank Redemption?

The Shawshank Redemption Movie Review Breakdown

Tagline: Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.
Who is in it? Morgan Freeman, Tim Robbins, Bob Gunton, William Sadler, Clancy Brown
Genre: Crime – Drama
Was it dramatic? Yes
Would this movie be for every crime-drama fan? For sure.
Should you see it? I cant say Yes enough.
Run Time: 142 minutes
Rating: R
.
.

Download:

The Verdict

Do you ever find yourself flipping through channels on TV and come across a movie you simply HAVE to watch every time? For me that movie is The Shawshank Redemption, and I must have seen it over a hundred times. When this movie came out I was 10, and for obvious reasons I couldn’t watch it in theaters due to its R rating, but my parents went and saw it and really loved it. My mom used to be my eyes in and ears for movies I couldn’t watch. If the movie was exceptionally great she would tell me what happened in the movie in vivid detail, and I could envision the movie that way. In a lot of ways, I review movies today the way she explained them to me then. Eventually this movie made it to network television and I could watch the edited version to my heart’s content, and sure enough I loved it. Apparently I’m not alone in my adoration either… This is the number 1 rated movie on IMDB.com with an average of 9.2/10 on the user ratings out of 597,021 votes which is hard to ignore. On the ‘audience’ ratings on Rotten Tomatoes it receives an average rating of 4.5 out of a possible 5 points from a total of 769,577 people’s votes. Enough talking about other sties’ movie reviews lets lay down our own.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

We start out in the 1947 court hearing of Andy Dufresne. He is accused of murder and in spite of proclaiming his innocence, the prosecution succeeds and Andy is sentenced to serve two life sentences for the murder of his adulterous wife and the man she was sleeping with. Andy struggles with life on the inside and has a hard time fighting off a gang of gay men that keeping trying to rape him. Eventually Andy gains protection from the gay men known as ‘the sisters’ by saving the leader of the guards a bunch of money. Andy finds his place as the prison librarian, and does the taxes of all the guards and eventually the warden as well. The warden comes up with a plan to use prisoners to do labor jobs outside of the prison for next to nothing. Using this brand of cheap slave labor he can under bid any other contractor and gains a lot of money from that and also from bribes from other contractors.

The crooked warden uses Andy to launder the dirty money and he does so by creating a person out of thin air named Randall Stevens and makes him the guilty party. If anyone decided to follow the dirty money trail they would be chasing a figment of Andy’s imagination and wouldn’t catch on that it has anything to do with Andy, the warden, or Shawshank Prison. Eventually a new prisoner named Tommy arrives and quickly makes friends with Andy and his clique. One day when Red (Andy’s best friend and narrator of the film) and Tommy are working they get on the subject of Andy’s imprisonment. When Red says Andy’s story, Tommy appears shaken and quickly tells the story of another inmate he had been cellmates with in another prison named Elmo Blatch. Elmo had told Tommy about killing a woman and some golf pro she had been sleeping with, and went on to say that they pinned it on some hot shot banker, which confirms Andy’s innocence.

Lord! It’s a miracle! Man up and vanished like a fart in the wind!

Andy goes to the warden with the story but he refuses to pay it any attention, because he needs Andy to funnel his dirty money. Having Andy free would be a major risk because of his intimate knowledge of the warden’s shady operations. Andy gets upset and the warden throws him in solitary confinement for a month. The warden goes to Tommy and after he confirms the story, he has Tommy shot in the back by the head guard and made it look like a break out attempt. When Andy’s month was up the warden shows up and tells him about Tommy’s attempted escape and death and Andy says that he is done running his scams. The warden replies by giving him ANOTHER month to think it over. When he finally gets out, he tells Red to go to a specific location and dig something up. Soon after, during morning roll call Andy turns up missing. Upon investigating they find that Andy had been slowly tunneling through his wall and had crawled through a half a mile of sewage piping to freedom. Andy had taken all of the things he needed to become Randall Stevens and he used that identity to secure $370,000 of the warden’s dirty money. He used that money to live in Mexico. Shortly after that Red was released on parole. Red made good on his promise and went to the specific spot Andy had said and received some cash and instructions. Red then breaks his parole and goes to live with Andy in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. The End.

 

Official Nutshell-Movies Explanation

The Shawshank Redemption (1994): A falsely imprisoned man tunnels out of prison with a bunch of the warden’s dirty money. Ends up in mexico.

Fun Facts

• The role of Tommy Williams was intended for Brad Pitt.
• The exteriors were filmed at the defunct Mansfield State Reformatory in Ohio. The prison was in such poor condition, renovations had to be made prior to filming. However, most of the interiors were shot on a sound stage, because they determined it would be cheaper to build duplicates of the interiors rather than renovating the interiors of Mansfield.
• The American Humane Association monitored the filming of scenes involving Brooks’ crow. During the scene where he fed it a maggot, the AHA objected on the grounds that it was cruel to the maggot, and required that they use a maggot that had died from natural causes. One was found, and the scene was filmed.
• In Stephen King’s original story, Red was written as a white Irishman. In the movie, they left the line, “Maybe it’s ’cause I’m Irish”, in as a joke, even after they had cast Morgan Freeman as Red.
• The Rita Hayworth movie the prisoners are watching is Gilda (1946).
• The mugshots of a young-looking Morgan Freeman that are attached to his parole papers are actually pictures of Morgan’s younger son, Alfonso Freeman. Alfonso also had a cameo in the movie as a con shouting “Fresh fish! Fresh fish today! We’re reeling ‘em in!”
• On the wall in Andy Dufresne’s cell is a picture of Albert Einstein. Tim Robbins, who portrayed Andy Dufresne also played in the fictional movie about Einstein, I.Q. (1994).
• Andy Dufresne’s Prison ID Number is 37927.
• Although a very modest hit in theaters, it became one of the highest grossing video rentals of all time
• The prisoners are drinking Stroh’s beer on the roof.
• After the film gained popularity, Ted Turner sold the television rights to TNT, his own network, for much lower than normal for such a big film. Because it is so inexpensive to show, the film is broadcast on TNT extremely often.
• The man sitting behind Gil Bellows (Tommy Williams) on the bus is Dennis Baker, a former warden of the Mansfield State Penitentiary, where the primary filming took place.
• At the end of the movie, there is a dedication to Allen Greene. He was Frank Darabont’s agent and also a close personal friend. He died just before the completion of the movie due to AIDS complications.
• The role of Andy Dufresne was originally offered to Tom Hanks, who couldn’t accept due to scheduling conflicts with Forrest Gump (1994). Hanks did, however, work on Frank Darabont’s next film, The Green Mile (1999) another Stephen King adaptation.
• Kevin Costner turned down the role of Andy Dufresne, a decision he strongly regretted later on.
• Tim Robbins thought of the idea of his character, Andy Dufresne, turning up the volume of the record player in the scene where he plays the Opera music over the PA.
• The opera song that Andy Dufresne plays over the loud speakers is “Canzonetta sull’aria” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”.
• Director Frank Darabont decided not to have the deleted scenes on the DVD release of the film because he’s embarrassed of them and doesn’t want them to be able to be seen publicly.
• Rob Reiner loved Frank Darabont’s script so much that he offered $2.5 million for the rights to the script so he could direct it. Darabont seriously considered Reiner’s offer but ultimately decided that it was his “chance to do something really great” by directing the movie himself. Reiner wanted Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise to play Red and Andy respectively.
• This movie was released in Taiwan as “1995: Fantastic” (it was released in Taiwan in 1995). Many viewers thought it would be an action movie.
• Stephen King sold the film rights for his novella for a dollar.
• The ambulance that took Boggs away had to be pushed as its engine had died.
• The character Andy Dufresne had a cameo appearance in ‘Apt Pupil‘, another Stephen King novelette. Andy handled the investments for Dussander, the Nazi in hiding.

The Shawshank Redemption is one of the best movies ever made!