"Is The Shawshank Redemption the best film ever?"

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Is The Shawshank Redemption the best film ever?

Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption, has words for the millions of people who believe his 1994 prison drama is the greatest film of all time. “I think that’s a little crackers, to be honest, especially when you think of the other films on the list.” He means films such as The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Lolita, Vertigo and foreign-language contenders like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

But, hey, pointy-headed film critics can have their high­falutin’ crushes. There’s no getting round the fact that The Shawshank Redemption, which stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, is consistently being voted the best film ever in all sorts of readers’ polls. It currently sits atop the 250 best movies of all time on the world’s most popular cinema website, imdb.com, as it has done for most of the past decade. Darabont, who is both slightly bemused by and immensely proud of its astonishingly deep resonance with audiences, points to a framed cover of Empire, the popular British movie magazine, on the wall behind the desk in his office. Empire’s readers have also voted Shawshank their favourite film of all time.

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Devotees quote its life-affirming mantras: “You can get busy living or get busy dying”; “Fear can keep you a prisoner. Hope can set you free”.

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What makes Shawshank’s remarkable staying power even more intriguing is that it barely made a splash when it was released in September 1994. Small-town reviewers liked it, but sophisticated big-city critics were snooty. Kenneth Turan, of the Los Angeles Times, in a review that still makes Darabont wince — “downright hateful”, he calls it — said that the film “makes us feel we’re doing harder time than the folks inside”. The Washington Post observed: “The story becomes incarcerated in its own labyrinthine sentimentality.”

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