Watch Canon City For Free

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Canon City (1948)A simple loud warning up front--the first twenty minutes or so is a horrible, stiff, documentary kind of lead-in to the movie proper. When the dramatic action gets going, it becomes fully a movie with suspense, character, speed, and even at times complexity. In fact, you could even fast forward to where you see the buy in the jail cell doing a model of a ship. The stuff before that is not needed. It tells us what we already know about prison, though it seems to use real inmates in brief interviews, as if to set up the later jailbreak as something more tangible and believable. It isn't giving anything away to say that some inmates escape--that's the whole hook of the movie--and then what happens to each group or individual in their attempts to get out of Canon City is what drives the movie in a series of somewhat independent vignettes. The encounters with regular town people in their homes is a little contrived but also has the edge of fear to it, and suspense. It works pretty well, the cops gradually closing in on this or that escapee.The end result is still almost a public relations piece about the prison system, about ordinary Americans who rise up and do heroic things, and about the different kinds of attitudes of the inmates, who are people after all. I actually liked the second half of the movie, even it it wasn't completely original or brilliant. The acting is meant to be believable in a vernacular kind of way, and it is. Give it a look, especially if you like prison flicks.

This movie proudly bears the label of a semi-documentary and comes complete with the usual Foreword about all the incidents being portrayed exactly as they happened, and all photographed on their actual locations, using real warders, guards and convicts, etc.Personally, I doubt that the movie was shot in its entirety inside the actual prison — there's even a credit for 2nd unit direction and photography. But be this as it may, the studio material is certainly extremely well integrated with the location footage. Credit for this achievement is mostly due to John Alton, whose masterful photography makes Canon City must watching for connoisseurs. True, Alton's work here is less tantalizing than usual as he was required to match up his shots with Strenge's rather dull location work. Nonetheless, there are still more than a few indications (the profile silhouette on Brady's face) of genius behind the camera.Crane Wilbur's screenplay is less praiseworthy, but typical of that writer's detached, tabloid newspaper-style approach. He loves the sort of narrated rhetoric employed by contemporary newsreel commentators (Reed Hadley does a good job here with the actual narration), but fortunately his dialogue is less flowery and more realistic.Generally Wilbur's direction rates as rather dull, but here his handling is even occasionally inventive, although his experiments are not always successful (as for example in the oddly oblique use of the first-person camera right at the beginning, with the on-screen characters swapping words with the disembodied narrator).In all, however, the film emerges as a reasonably engrossing prison melodrama, convincingly acted (except oddly by the non-professionals), compellingly photographed, and tautly written. Despite its foregone conclusion, the storyline does build up a moderate amount of excitement and tension.

A fine prison break movie from Crane Wilbur by way of Eagle-Lion Pictures, Canon City is a very good, tense film, based on a true incident, about a group of men who break of of the eponymous state prison, where the movie was also filmed. There is particular emphasis on two escapees, a reluctant one who is basically a decent guy, and a more aggressive one, who isn't. As portrayed by Scott Brady and Jeff Corey these characters come to life and compel our interest, and in Brady's case sympathy.As photographed by the masterful John Alton, the picture is a pleasure to watch, as Mr. Alton was a master of light and shadow, and is obviously in his element with this dark story. He brightens things up in the end with a snowstorm, which enables the picture to end on a grace note, and even a feeling of optimism, not wholly justified by the events we have just witnessed.

Legendary noir cinematographer John Alton (Raw Deal, T-Men, The Big Combo and the still-in-print textbook "Painting with Light") shot this fairly routine semi-documentary prison-break film based on a real incident in Canon (pronounced "canyon") City, Colorado. We even get to meet the warden and some of the inmates (one of whom had been in stir since 1897!). Happily, actors arrive to recreate the break, which occurs similtaneously with a Rocky Mountain blizzard. Alton's snow is so Christmassy and photogenic it distances us from the grim business afoot, which has prisoners posing as guards who invade various local homesteads; they hadn't reckoned on one tough old hammer-wielding grandmaw. This is a minor but watchable period piece, once you get over the patriarchal voice-over, so full of moral certitude you could retch. But then that was SOP in midcentury.