A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-two — ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ

I wish I knew you actually painted this portrait of Patrick McGoohan’s sadistic, unnamed warned, attributed in the 1979 film Escape From Alcatraz to the character of Doc as played by Roberts Blossom.

Maximum Fun? More like maximum security! Maximum Fun podcast network founder and San Francisco native Jesse Thorn joins us this week to tunnel through the crumbling walls of Escape From Alcatraz, the 1979 Clint Eastwood-starring dramatization of the real 1962 prison break, featuring Patty McG as…The Warden. Stunt casting doesn’t get any stuntier, though Glen and I differ on exactly how much The Artist Formerly Known Only as Number Six contributes to the 115-minute picture in his roughly 10 minutes of screen time.

Also, am I the only person on this dang podcast who respects Eastwood as an artist? Sure, I hated his film Richard Jewell, and I said in my 2019 review that the then-89-year-old’s make-a-movie-every-year working tempo may have contributed to the declining quality of his ouvre. But you can’t just dismiss the guy who made Unforgiven and A Perfect World and Bird and so many others, outside of the westerns and cop thrillers and middling airport novel adaptations that his name conjures up.

I never saw The Mule, but I heard he has not one but two threesomes in that movie, which my parents saw at the cheap seniors-only early-afternoon weekday show. That’s reason enough for me to choose anything else from his 45-film, 50-year feature film directing resume next time I feel like clearing up one of my Eastwood blind spots.