If David Lean had directed Robert Bresson's austere prison-break film A Man Escaped, the results might have looked something like this. Papillon is made in the old epic mode of film-making that began sometime in the early 50s and was dying off by the seventies, when this film was made. For about its first hour I enjoyed the movie as a throwback to that vanished style, with the beautiful clarity of its widescreen photography and the attention to detail in its sets, costumes, and props. Franklin Schaffner's style, particularly in his meticulous widescreen compositions, is best described as monumental- he even he seems to prefer a monument's somber color range of , with lots of grays, whites and blues. He was heavily criticized at the time for handling what I really a fairly simple prison-break story in such grandiose fashion, but in his defense I think Schaffner is trying to show that one man's determination to reach freedom is an epic theme. As the film begins French prisoners are being taken away from their homeland to French Guiana. Papillon (Steve McQueen), a safecracker convicted of killing a pimp (a crime that he insists he is innocent of), befriends Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman), who, though a notorious safecracker, has no chance of survival on his own; Papillon provides protection for him, first on the sea journey to the colony, and then in the fetid swamps where they're put to work. The film's meticulous recreations of the story's setting and locations really pay off here in conveying the characters' harsh environment, a nightmare world in which convicts are brutalized for the slightest infraction, are forced by guards to kill crocodiles, and are hunted by professional "manhunters" through the jungles if they attempt to escape. Steve McQueen was not much of an actor in the sense of someone who slips into a character's skin, but in the right role his presence could tell you everything you need to know about a character. One of the basic characteristics of McQueen's characters is that they refuse to be hemmed in by any form of authority, and here he holds the movie together because you know that Papillon will stop at nothing to escape. If the movie had continued in the vein of its first hour it might now be remembered as a great adventure film. It starts to go downhill, however, after Papillon is condemned to solitary confinement. The sequence that follows is like a grim variation on McQueen's similar scenes in The Great Escape, and really it's much too grim for a Steve McQueen movie. There's plenty of brutality in the earlier scenes, but there it's in an adventure movie format that the movie can support, and there's plenty of detail and spectacle to balance out the central story's narrow focus. In the solitary confinement scenes, however, all you have to look at is Steve McQueen locked into a tiny prison cell, and the hollowness of the movie's self-seriousness is exposed. These scenes are also the most similar to A Man Escaped, which only shows up the inherent flaws of Papillon, a film with infinitely more resources than Bresson had and far fewer ideas about what to do with them. Papillon never recovers from what this sequence, even the film returns to familiar escape-movie ground more suited to Schaffner's talents and McQueen's personality. Papillon's escape from the island is well executed technically, but by treating it like the "Greatest Story Ever Told," Schaffner saps these scenes of any sense of exhilaration. Even worse, Papillon's success in escaping depends on way too many contrived details for it ever to be taken as seriously as the director intends. It's almost like a fairytale, with Papillon running into people every step of the way who are improbably willing to help him. Old time epics, for all of their proud claims of accuracy in even the minutest details, sometimes founder on the little details. The American accents of Papillon's cast produces a disassociated feel, as if Americans had replaced all of the French characters and were carrying on in their place. Another lapse is the puzzlingly sloppy makeup job on the leader of a leper colony that Papillon encounters, which in a daytime scene can be seen to only cover part of his face. The screenplay's decision to have Papillon be recaptured after he seems to have been home free for a while is a bold decision, particularly since his betrayer is a nun (!), but it also means that the last half hour is completely perfunctory, since we know that he will escape again, successfully this time, at the end of the movie, leaving us with nothing to watch except Steve McQueen trying to out-act Dustin Hoffman, not exactly his forte as a performer. It's in the last shot, however, where the movie really shoots itself in the foot; as Papillon drifts away from the island on a raft, supposedly alone in the middle of the ocean, I could see, very clearly, a frogman under the raft. At the end of what was obviously a very expensive movie to make, this gaffe isn't just embarrassing, it's mind-boggling that the filmmakers would effectively throw all of their effort in a few seconds. In terms of escape movies, Papillon straddles the line between a serious art-house film like A Man Escaped and a 1960s Hollywood guys-on-a-mission action flick like The Great Escape, but the film is too solemn and narrowly focused to capture the exuberance of the latter, and too much of a movie star-fuelled spectacle to capture the real seriousness of the former. By the movie's end, what began as a compelling adventure movie can be summed up in three words: beautiful but boring.
