Canon City (1948)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Absolutely the worst movie.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Filmed With The Naked Fury Of Fact! So screams the poster for this semi-documentary styled pic. Barely a year previously a dozen prisoners escaped from the Colorado State Penitentiary, Canon City, this is the story of that break and subsequent hunt for the escapees.Written and directed by Crane Wilbur, it stars Scott Brady, Jeff Corey and Whit Bissell. Cinematography is by John Alton and Reed Hadley provides the stentorian narration. Plot is exactly what it says on the cover, men escape prison and as a blizzard rages outside they encounter various members of the public whilst trying to escape capture. The various convict character splinters, as we follow the principal escapees, makes for suspenseful scenes as they impose themselves on the homes of good honest folk. The moral dilemma heartbeat comes via Brady's Jim Sherbondy, a man who was reluctant to escape but ultimately got caught up in the whirlpool. The characterisations are standard for this type of picture, but well performed all the same, with Corey particularly striking as a weasel type. The various women in the story are well written, proving to be of strong will and minds, while Alton and Wilbur enhance the fatalistic mood with low lights and close ups.A decent pic from the pantheon of prison noir, but not a patch on the likes of Brute Force and Riot In Cell Block 11. 6/10

Canon City (1948)A simple loud warning up front--the first twenty minutes or so is a horrible, stiff, documentary kind of lead-in to the movie proper. When the dramatic action gets going, it becomes fully a movie with suspense, character, speed, and even at times complexity. In fact, you could even fast forward to where you see the buy in the jail cell doing a model of a ship. The stuff before that is not needed. It tells us what we already know about prison, though it seems to use real inmates in brief interviews, as if to set up the later jailbreak as something more tangible and believable. It isn't giving anything away to say that some inmates escape--that's the whole hook of the movie--and then what happens to each group or individual in their attempts to get out of Canon City is what drives the movie in a series of somewhat independent vignettes. The encounters with regular town people in their homes is a little contrived but also has the edge of fear to it, and suspense. It works pretty well, the cops gradually closing in on this or that escapee.The end result is still almost a public relations piece about the prison system, about ordinary Americans who rise up and do heroic things, and about the different kinds of attitudes of the inmates, who are people after all. I actually liked the second half of the movie, even it it wasn't completely original or brilliant. The acting is meant to be believable in a vernacular kind of way, and it is. Give it a look, especially if you like prison flicks.

I've lived in Canon City, Colorado for the last five years or so, and the experience of watching the film is a unique, slightly surreal one for me. Not only does the film take place in my tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, it takes place in MY NEIGHBORHOOD! The prison is a mere two blocks from my house, the movie theater three blocks, the Elk's Club where the prison guards eat in the film is right next door to the restaurant where I work. Seeing these familiar landmarks (as well as the fantastic shot of Main Street, which has aged little) gives me a small rush, and makes me inclined to declare CANON CITY an under-appreciated cult classic. Without the haze of nostalgia, I realize that the film, while certainly competent, is one of a series of mostly-forgotten B-pictures, focused on mostly by film nerds like me. I was actually quite impressed with the cinematography and lighting, which was surprisingly sophisticated and compelling, and the film rarely drags, but it just feels kinda same-y. Still, how cool is it that I'm still seeing movies in that old theater that's showing Abbott and Costello in 1948?

A fine prison break movie from Crane Wilbur by way of Eagle-Lion Pictures, Canon City is a very good, tense film, based on a true incident, about a group of men who break of of the eponymous state prison, where the movie was also filmed. There is particular emphasis on two escapees, a reluctant one who is basically a decent guy, and a more aggressive one, who isn't. As portrayed by Scott Brady and Jeff Corey these characters come to life and compel our interest, and in Brady's case sympathy.As photographed by the masterful John Alton, the picture is a pleasure to watch, as Mr. Alton was a master of light and shadow, and is obviously in his element with this dark story. He brightens things up in the end with a snowstorm, which enables the picture to end on a grace note, and even a feeling of optimism, not wholly justified by the events we have just witnessed.