Master Full.....

Rating: 8/10 (9 August 2017)

The satirist William Donaldson, writing in his Dictionary of National Celebrity, defined Stephen Fry as 'a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like'. It's an ungenerous quip, but loaded with just enough truth to really sting – and by the same token, The Shawshank Redemption could be described as the all-time favourite film of people who haven't seen very many. Frank Darabont's uplifting prison drama has been perched at the top of the Internet Movie Database's top 250 chart, which is voted for by the website's users, since 2008 – one place above The Godfather, and 58 above Vertigo, the Greatest Film of All Time as triangulated by Sight & Sound magazine in their international poll of critics last year. Those same critics showed little love for Darabont's creation: against Vertigo's 191 votes, The Shawshank Redemption received just one. Why should that be? Darabont's film is a handsome, well-acted tale of physical imprisonment and spiritual escape – hardly box-ticking Hollywood product. It was the Hungarian-born director's feature debut, adapted as a labour of love from the Stephen King short story Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and was well-reviewed on its release in 1994. Received wisdom has it that the film was a box-office flop, but that narrative doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny: after a slow start it recouped its budget in the US and took £2.3 million in the UK – hardly a record-setter, but by no means disastrous. It was also nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Morgan Freeman's rich-roasted turn as Ellis Redding, the veteran inmate of Shawshank State Prison who takes Tim Robbins's Andy Dufresne under his wing. Perhaps the reason we think of The Shawshank Redemption as unappreciated in its time is that in 1994, cinema culture was dominated by two very new-fangled films: Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump, which digitally airbrushed Tom Hanks into 40 years of US history, and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, the snappy, scrappy herald of new American independent cinema.