Director Frank Darabont is no stranger to awards. The Shawshank Redemption, a 1994 prison drama based on another King novel, merited seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Edgecomb, living in a nursing home six decades after working as the head guard on Death Row at Cold Mountain Penitentiary in Louisiana, relates his experience of watching over killers and before you can say incontinence the scene cuts to 1935. Edgecomb, surprise, thinks Coffey has a simple, naive nature and, cut from the Oscar-winning cloth of conscience, Hanks starts to ask questions about Coffey and gradually believes him innocent.
Hanks plays Hanks.
And he needs to be. The inmates are a rotten bunch. But Hanks has to fight his own guards too. Darabont also took a gamble with the high fantastics. The stark, raw theater of impending death that fizzles like electric current through the Penitentiary is what lingers in the memory after walking out of the cinema.