THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (Directed by Frank Darabont. Starring Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, William Sadler, Clancy Brown, Gil Bellows, James Whitmore)

After The Hudsucker Proxy, The Shawshank Redemption: try saying that on a few drinks. Maybe that’s why both critically praised films flopped at the US box office. It’s a big night out, you’re on a date, you’ve had a bite to eat, you’ve drunk a little wine, you arrive at the Multiplex box office: “Can we have two tickets for the shawshyshaw . . . the sawshy . . . two tishets for the shankshaw . . . shit, gimme a couple for The Lion King, fuckit!”

Tim Robbins’ recent film titles seem to share some qualities with the actor – kind of gawky and awkward, with intellectual pretensions. Neither conventionally handsome nor pumped iron macho, director’s seem to see in him the characteristics of an old time movie star, his roles drawing comparisons with the likes of James Stewart, Jack Lemmon and Burt Lancaster. It is the quiet stoicism and inner strength of the latter that he evokes in Shawshank, a movie that recalls something of the spirit of Lancaster’s The Birdman Of Alcatraz (indeed, it even includes its own birdman) and the moral melodrama of ’30s and ’40s Warner Bros prison films.

Sent to Shawshank prison in 1946 for the brutal murder of his wife and her lover, Robbins’ ivy league banker Andy Dufresne seems ill-prepared for the harsh regime of incarceration but slowly reveals that he has the character not only to survive but maintain hope, dignity and humanity. It is a layered and intelligent performance from Robbins, who is more than matched by Morgan Freeman’s watchful, cautious but immensely likeable Red, the working class prison fixer who can supply everything from cigarettes to Rita Hayworth. Well, a poster of her anyway. The story covers two decades, although virtually the only mark of the passage of time within the suspended animation of prison society is the changing posters on Andy’s cell wall, the glamorous Hayworth giving way to the buxom Marilyn Monroe, who is replaced in turn by the athletic Raquel Welch.

These pictures (and a brief shot of Andy’s wife in the act of sexual betrayal) represent the only women in the film but they serve much the same function as the usual love interest in male bonding movies: to remind us that the stars are heterosexual, goddamit. Robbins and Freeman may be cooped up together for twenty years, and talk of each other in glowing, poetic terms, but we are left in no doubt that there is nothing unseemly going on after lights out. Yet while the period fixtures and thoughtful script evoke notions of classic Hollywood prison drama, in a nod to modern perceptions (if not exactly tastes) there are also several violent (if physically discreet) scenes of anal rape. It may be fun to imagine buggery in what might have been a James Cagney movie, but it is questionable whether this is anything more than an arbitrary nod towards realism. The rapes are perpetrated by a group referred to as “the sisters”, but Red carefully explains to Andy that they are not homosexuals but ‘bull queers’, a distinction presumably included to satisfy the ’90s laws of political correctness.

Similarly, no reference is made to the fact that Morgan Freeman is – how shall I put this? – an actor of non-white skin colour. In fact, let’s face it, he’s black. Yet although the film is set in an era of segregation, overt racism and virtually non-existent civil rights, nobody in the largely white prison population seems to notice. As with The Unforgiven, the Oscar winning actor has taken a part written for a white person (in fact, his nickname, Red, is supposed to refer to his Irish colouring, information which is delivered as a deadpan joke and never mentioned again). While it would be churlish to begrudge a supremely talented actor giving such a winning performance, it does not seem too much to expect the scriptwriter to at least have made some changes to accommodate the casting. The effect is to emphasise the fairy-tale aspects of the drama, at the expense of the film’s conviction and integrity. From its hard-hitting opening, and judging by its sober, restrained pacing, the intention at first appears to be to convey an accurate picture of a life of confinement, but it soon begins to take on the trappings of metaphor, becoming a struggle between the human spirit and imposing authority.

Not only is there an unconvincing absence of homophobia or racism in Shawshank prison, but, as in almost every liberal prison drama, the governor and staff behave a hell of a lot worse than their model prisoners. The word redemption in the title seems curiously inappropriate: we are never given any sense that the prisoners have to redeem themselves, since they all claim to be innocent, and on screen they are victims of the system’s endless cruelty and corruption. If you wanted to work out a way to reform the prison system by watching prison movies, the solution would be fairly obvious: lock up the staff and set the inmates free.

Director Frank Darabont has worked as a screenwriter on a selection of horror projects, including Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Fly II, the remake of the Blob and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and directed a short horror film based on a Stephen King story A Woman in the Room. Curiously, his feature debut is also drawn from the work of Stephen King, but if the original short novel was a diversion from his usual genre for the writer, the director has diverted even further by expanding King’s lean, twisting narrative into a long (nearly two and half hours), meditative rumination. He has been rewarded with six Oscar nominations, although that vastly over-estimates the quality of the film, and perhaps says more about the nature of the Academy Awards committee and the weaknesses of much modern American mainstream cinema. If he had stuck to his source material, The Shawshank Redemption could have been a pacy, gripping if somewhat trite prison drama. By expanding it, he has produced a thoughtful, beautifully played, sometimes moving melodrama that is only averagely entertaining, and bears about as much relation to reality as one of Stephen King’s more gruesome tales.