Do you agree ? "Despite its status as a classic, The Shawshank Redemption is not quite a great film", argues Robbie Collin

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2018)

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 Â£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.
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How could an old-fashioned prison break compete? King described his original story as having been written "in the grainy old Warner Bros/Jimmy Cagney mould", and in the film version, Roger Deakins' honey and pitch-toned cinematography certainly amplifies the antique mood. The Shawshank Redemption simply wasn't a conversation-starter: it didn't break rules, or start a revolution, or crown a movement, or change the business. It was just a good story, well-told, and that was pretty much all you could say about it.
And yet when it comes to the actual business of what happens to a film's reputation after its theatrical debut - that mystical process the studios call 'word-of-mouth' - good stories, well-told count for a lot. The audiences who went to see Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction at the cinema spent 1995 catching up with The Shawshank Redemption on video, and then recommending it to their friends, who rented it the following week.
Could that be a crucial part of the film's appeal? Few of us can remember ever being sold The Shawshank Redemption: we mostly discovered it under our own steam, which makes our relationship with Darabont's film feel more precious and personal than, say, Forrest Gump, the release of which was a media event measurable on the Richter scale.
Almost 20 years on, one major point of contention still rankles: that schmaltzy Hollywood ending, resisted by Darabont but insisted on by the production company, Castle Rock Entertainment. The director wanted to fade to black after Red climbs onto the bus, with that sensational final line left hanging: "I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope."
Up to this point, the entire story has been pushed along by hope, and to remove it at the last moment, even by fulfilling it, is to steal the wind from the film's sails. The Shawshank Redemption is almost a great film, but not quite; its status as a classic, though, seems assured.
ROBBIE COLLIN'S