Birdman of Alcatraz

Also from 1962, John Frankenheimer's Birdman of Alcatraz is based on the true story of Robert Stroud, a violent convict who became one of the world's authorities on the diseases of birds. It stands among the better dramas about prison, which have long held a fascination for viewers. I suppose it's a vicarious way of learning about a place we'd never want to be.

Burt Lancaster stars as Stroud. He was also a prisoner in another great prison drama, Brute Force. The film starts with Stroud, a convicted murderer, being transferred to Leavenworth in 1912, as he is incorrigibly violent. The warden of Leavenworth, Karl Malden, vows that Lancaster will find the straight and narrow.

But Lancaster is uninterested in playing by any rules. He is antisocial, and his only good relationship is with his mother (Thelma Ritter). After killing a guard, he is spared the hangman's noose when Ritter appeals directly to President Wilson for a commutation. She wins, but Lancaster ends up with a life sentence to be spent in isolation.

One day, alone in the exercise yard during a storm, he finds a broken branch with a nest in it. A lone baby sparrow is tucked into it. Lancaster, begrudgingly, saves the bird and brings it back to health. Before long he has trained the bird, and the new warden allows him to keep it. This spurs an interest in birds throughout the cell block, as other inmates buy canaries. Lancaster's next door neighbor (Telly Savalas), a tough mug, gets soft when his canary lays eggs. "You're a godfather," Lancaster tells him when the egg hatches.

Soon Lancaster has a cell full of birds. When they get sick, he researches his own cure for the illness, and ends up writing a book about bird pathology that becomes the standard. When the Federal Bureau of Prisons is started, and pets are banned from federal prisons, Lancaster teams with a bird enthusiast (Betty Field) to stir up public opinion, even marrying her.

Malden, who never forgot that Lancaster killed his friend the guard, finally gets his revenge by having the prisoner transferred to Alcatraz, where he will have no birds (the title is a misnomer--he was really the Birdman of Leavenworth).

This is a fine film about the redemption of a man's soul, even if it isn't quite accurate. By all accounts, Stroud was not the cuddly figure that Lancaster portrays in the second half of the film. The film is stacked toward a sympathetic view of him, but one can see the point of prison officials, as he ends up with two adjacent cells full of birds and equipment. This also ties into to the thread running through the film that Malden, who wants to turn prisoners into models of his own making, is wrong about rehabilitation. Lancaster tells him that he doesn't know what the word means, and that the American penal system, which seeks to remove the individuality of a man, is wrongheaded.

Stroud never did get released, but was transferred to a minimum-security prison for ill convicts just before he died. He was alive when the film was released. We are supposed to be convinced that it was injustice to keep him locked up, even if he did kill two men, because he was so brilliant, but I'm not sure I agree with that--he should have been released if he was no longer a threat to the general public.

Lancaster, Ritter, and Savalas were nominated for Oscars. This is an interesting film about a stranger than fiction story, but I'm not sure it works as call for social change.