Twenty years ago this week, The Shawshank Redemption hit multiplexes. It’s a period prison drama with stately, old-fashioned rhythms, starring Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, wrongfully convicted of killing his wife, her lover and serving two life terms, and Morgan Freeman as fellow lifer “Red” Redding, who narrates the film. But the 90s were an era of booyah action movies starring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. In Shawshank, the story of a decades-long quest for redemption and freedom, the closest things to action sequences involve fighting off buggery or defiantly blasting a Mozart duettino. Reviews were mostly favorable, but the film bombed, failing to earn even $1 million on its opening weekend and eventually eking out $16 million (about $25 million today) at the American box office during its initial release, not nearly enough—and even less so after marketing costs and exhibitors’ cuts—to recoup its $25 million budget.
That was then. Today The Shawshank Redemption tops the IMDb’s Top 250 cinema-favorites list with more than a million votes, having passed the previous champ, The Godfather, in 2008. (While The Godfather—trailing by 300,000 votes—has maintained its runner-up position, Citizen Kane, the perennial greatest movie ever in critics’ polls, whispers “Rosebud” from No. 66.) Readers of the British movie magazine Empire voted The Shawshank Redemption* No. 4 in a 2008 list of “the 500 Greatest Films of All Time,” and in 2011 the film won a BBC Radio favorite-film poll.
Morgan Freeman relies on less empirical evidence. “About everywhere you go, people say, ‘The Shawshank Redemption—greatest movie I ever saw,’ ” he told me. “Just comes out of them.” Not that he’s a disinterested observer, but Tim Robbins backs his co-star: “I swear to God, all over the world—all over the world—wherever I go, there are people who say, ‘That movie changed my life.’ ” Even the world’s most famous former prisoner connected with the movie, according to Robbins: “When I met [Nelson Mandela], he talked about loving Shawshank.”
How did a period prison film running 142 minutes—a life sentence for most audiences—become a global phenomenon capable of rankling a world superpower and stirring a Nobel Peace Prize winner? To borrow a quote from Shawshank, “Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes, really. Pressure and time.”
Cumnock Media Class
