“We don’t make good citizens, but we make good prisoners.” 

Based on the unbelievable true story of the 1962 escape of three men from the maximum security prison on Alcatraz Island, Chicago-born director Don Siegel’s fifth and final collaboration with Clint Eastwood — both in peak form, despite a behind the scenes battle over the rights to the film ending their friendship — is a gorgeous, spare and exhilarating nail-biter with all the fat trimmed. Shot on location (the prison closed in 1963), the film is absorbed completely in the process of escape, shutting the audience so firmly behind the cold stone walls, that every chip into them with a homemade knife feels like a breath of freedom. Co-starring Patrick McGoohan at his most chilling as the prison warden, Paul Benjamin as a stoic inmate serving two life sentences, with cameos by a young Fred Ward and Danny Glover (in his film debut), and metallic score by Jerry Fielding that could have been composed by the prison itself