Prison films

"[Scrawled in a Bible he hollowed out to make space for the rock hammer he used to tunnel through his cell wall, and placed in the Warden's safe the night before his escape] "Dear Warden; You were right. Salvation lay within. Andy""

"[in a letter] Dear Red, If you're reading this, you've gotten out. And if you've come this far, maybe you're willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don't you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. I'll keep an eye out for you and the chessboard ready. Remember, Red: hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well. Your friend, Andy."

"There must be a con like me in every prison in America. I'm the guy who can get it for you: cigarettes, a bag of reefer, if that's your thing, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your kid's high school graduation, damn near anything within reason. Yes sir, I'm a regular Sears and Roebuck."

"The first night's the toughest, no doubt about it. They march you in naked as the day you were born, skin burning and half blind from that delousing shit they throw on you, and when they put you in that cell, when those bars slam home, that's when you know it's for real. A whole life blown away in the blink of an eye. Nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it. Most new fish come close to madness the first night. Somebody always breaks down crying. Happens every time. The only question is, who's it gonna be? It's as good a thing to bet on as any, I guess. I had my money on Andy Dufresne. I remember my first night. Seems like a long time ago."

"These prison walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them. That's institutionalized. They send you here for life, that's exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyways."

"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't wanna know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free."

"In 1966 Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty."

"Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes, really. Pressure, and time. That and a big damn poster. Like I said, in prison, a man will do almost anything to keep his mind occupied. Turns out Andy's favorite hobby was totin' his wall out into the exercise yard, a handful at a time. I guess after Tommy was killed, Andy decided he'd been here just about long enough."

"Andy did like he was told; buffed those shoes to a high mirror shine. The guards simply didn't notice. Neither did I... I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a man's shoes? Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit-smelling foulness I can't even imagine- or maybe I just don't want to. Five hundred yards... that's the length of five football fields; just shy of half a mile."

"Andy Dufresne, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side. Andy Dufresne, headed for the Pacific. Those of us who knew him best talk about him often. I swear, the stuff he pulled... Sometimes it makes me sad, though, Andy being gone. I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright and when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice, but still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty now that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend."

"I like to think the last thing that went through his head, other than that bullet, was how the hell that Andy Dufrense ever got the best of him."

"There's harsh truth to face. No way I'm gonna make it on the outside. All I do in remorse is to think a way to break my parole, so they may send me back. Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. All I want is to be back where things make sense, where I won't have to be afraid all the time. Only one thing stops me. A promise I made to Andy."

"I find I'm so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope!"

"I believe in two things: discipline and the Bible. Here you'll receive both. Put your trust in the Lord; your ass belongs to me. Welcome to Shawshank."

"If you wanna indulge in this fantasy, that's your business. Don't make it mine. This meeting is over."

"Nothing stops. Nothing, or you will do the hardest time there is. No more protection from the guards. I'll pull you out of that one-bunk Hilton and cast you down with the Sodomites. You'll think you've been fucked by a train. And the library? Gone. Sealed off brick-by-brick. We'll have us a little book barbecue in the yard. They'll see the flames for miles. We'll dance around it like wild Injuns. You understand me? Catching my drift? Or am I being obtuse? [to Hadley] Give him another month to think about it."

"I want him found. NOT TOMORROW, NOT AFTER BREAKFAST! NOW!"

"This is a conspiracy. That's what it is. One... BIG... DAMN CONSPIRACY! AND EVERYONE'S IN ON IT! Including her!"

"[in a letter to Red after being released on parole] Dear fellas, I can't believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they're everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry. The parole board got me into this halfway house called "The Brewer" and a job bagging groceries at the Foodway. It's hard work and I try to keep up, but my hands hurt most of the time. I don't think the store manager likes me very much. Sometimes after work, I go to the park and feed the birds. I keep thinking Jake might just show up and say hello, but he never does. I hope wherever he is, he's doin' okay and makin' new friends. I have trouble sleepin' at night. I have bad dreams like I'm falling. I wake up scared. Sometimes it takes me a while to remember where I am. Maybe I should get me a gun and rob the Foodway so they'd send me home. I could shoot the manager while I was at it, sort of like a bonus. I guess I'm too old for that sort of nonsense any more. I don't like it here. I'm tired of being afraid all the time. I've decided not to stay. I doubt they'll kick up any fuss. Not for an old crook like me. P.S: Tell Heywood I'm sorry I put a knife to his throat. No hard feelings. Brooks."

"His Judgement Cometh and that Right Soon.…"

"Tim Robbins - Andy Dufresne"

"Morgan Freeman - Ellis Boyd"

"Bob Gunton - Warden Samuel Norton"

"William Sadler - Heywood"

"Clancy Brown - Captain Byron T. Hadley"

"Gil Bellows - Tommy Williams"

"Mark Rolston - Bogs Diamond"

"James Whitmore - Brooks Hatlen"

"They somehow managed to get every freak and creep in the universe on this one plane, and then somehow managed to let them take it over, and then they somehow managed to stick us right smack in the middle."

"Put the bunny back in the box."

"[on Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom] This one's done it all. Kidnapping, robbery, murder, extortion. His name is Cyrus Grissom, AKA "Cyrus the Virus." Thirty-nine years old, 25 of them spent in our institutions. But he's bettered himself inside. Earned two degrees, including his juris doctorate. He's also killed 11 fellow inmates, incited three riots, and escaped twice. Likes to brag that he's killed more men than cancer. Cyrus is a poster child for the criminally insane. He's a true product of the system."

"[His first spoken words in the movie; regarding Billy Bedlam] He's a font of misplaced rage. Name your cliche: Mother held him too much or not enough, last picked at kickball, late night sneaky uncle, whatever. Now, he gets so angry, moments of levity actually cause him pain, gives him headaches. Happiness, for that gentleman, hurts."

"[as the convicts dance to "Sweet Home Alabama"] Define irony: a bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash."

"One wrong flight can ruin your whole day."

"Get Ready to Fly."

"Buckle Up!"

"They were deadly on the ground. Now they have wings."

"Welcome to Con Air."

"Nicolas Cage - Cameron Poe"

"John Cusack - Vince Larkin"

"John Malkovich - Cyrus "Cyrus the Virus" Grissom"

"Steve Buscemi - Garland "The Marietta Mangler" Greene"

"Ving Rhames - Nathan "Diamond Dog" Jones"

"Mykelti Williamson - Mike "Baby O" O'Dell"

"Dave Chappelle - Joe "Pinball" Parker"

"Colm Meaney - Duncan Malloy"

"Rachel Ticotin as Officer Sally Bishop"

"Monica Potter -Tricia Poe"

"M. C. Gainey -Earl "Swamp Thing" Williams"

"John Roselius -Deputy Marshal Skip Devers."

"Renoly Santiago -Ramon "Sally-Can't Dance" Martinez"

"Danny Trejo -John "Johnny 23" Baca"

"Jesse Borrego -Francisco Cindino"

"Nick Chinlund -William "Billy Bedlam" Bedford"

"Angela Featherstone -Ginny."

"Jose Zuniga -DEA Agent Willie Sims"

"Hey! I got a bet, I come in this game right now, same score, but we play black guys against the white guys. [Black guys laugh] "Name your price, cracker" No money, no money, for these courts and not just today, for good. If you win, we will walk away, but if we win, no bitching, no fighting, right here in front of everybody, you pack up your shit and get your black asses outta here."

"Alright, listen up. We need to open our eyes. There's over 2 million illegal immigrants bedding down in this state tonight! The state spent $3 billion last year, on services for those people who have no right to be here in the first place! $3 billion! $400 million just to lock up a bunch of illegal immigrant criminals, who only got into this country because the fuckin' INS decided, "It's not worth the effort to screen for convicted felons!" Who gives a shit? Our government doesn't give a shit. Our border policy's a joke. So, is anybody surprised that south of the border, they're laughing at us? Laughing at our laws? Every night, thousands of these parasites stream across the border like some fucking piñata exploded. [The skinheads laugh] Don't laugh! [The skinheads immediately quiet down] There's nothin' funny goin' on here! This is about your life and mine; it's about decent, hardworking Americans falling through the cracks and getting the shaft because their government cares more about the constitutional rights of a bunch of people who aren't even citizens of this country! On the Statue of Liberty, it says "give me your tired, your hungry, your poor..." Well, it's Americans who are tired and hungry and poor, and I say until you take care of that, close the fucking book! 'Cause we're losing, we're losing our right to pursue our destiny, we're losing our freedom, so that a bunch of fucking foreigners can come in here and exploit our country! And this isn't something that's going on far away, this isn't something that's happening places we can't do anything about it, it's happening right here, right in our neighborhood, right in that building behind you. Archie Miller ran that grocery store since we were kids here. Dave worked there, Mike worked there. He went under and now some fuckin' Korean owns it who fired these guys and is making a killing 'cause he hired 40 fuckin' border jumpers. I see this shit going on and I don't see anyone doing anything about it, and it fuckin' pisses me off! So look around you, this isn't our fuckin' neighborhood, it's a battlefield! We're on a battlefield tonight. Make a decision: are we gonna stand by the sidelines, quietly standing while our country gets raped? "(Skinheads:) Fuck no!" Are we gonna ante up and do something about it? "(Skinheads:) FUCK YEAH!" You're goddamn right we are!"

"[Charges at and grabs the supermarket owner by pinning him to a wall] Don't you know it's against the law to hire fucking border jumpers, you nip bastard?!"

"Look at the statistics, for Christ's sake! One in every three black males is in some phase of the correctional system. Is that a coincidence or do these people have, you know, like a racial commitment to crime?"

"We're so hung up on this notion that we have some obligation to help the struggling black man, you know. Cut him some slack until he can overcome these historical injustices. It's crap. I mean, Christ, Lincoln freed the slaves, like, what? 130 years ago. How long does it take to get your act together?"

"Oh, it doesn't? You don't think I see what you're trying to do here? You think I'm gonna sit here and smile while some fuckin' kike tries to fuck my mother? It's never gonna happen Murray! Fuckin' forget it! Not on my watch, not while I'm still in this family. I will fuckin' cut your Shylock nose off and stick it up your ass before I let that happen. Coming here and poison my family's dinner with your Jewish, nigger-lovin', hippie bullshit. Fuck you! Fuck you! Yeah, walk out, asshole, fuckin' Kabbalah reading motherfucker. Get the fuck out of my house. [Showing his tattoo of a swastika] DO YOU SEE THIS!? THAT MEANS NOT WELCOME!"

"I came in here to tell you one thing, I am out! OUT! And Danny's out too! And if you come near my family again, I'm gonna fucking kill you!"

"I believe in death, destruction, chaos, filth, and greed. [Trying to make fun of Seth while Seth is trying to video tape him]"

"I hate the fact that it's cool to be black these days, I hate this hip-hop fucking influence in white fucking suburbia and I hate Tabitha Soren and all her Zionist MTV fucking pigs telling us we should get along. Save the rhetorical bullshit Hillary Rodham Clinton, 'cause it ain't gonna fucking happen."

"[Writing the beginning of the essay] People look at me and see my brother."

"So I guess this is where I tell you what I learned - my conclusion, right? Well, my conclusion is: Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time. It's just not worth it. Derek says it's always good to end a paper with a quote. He says someone else has already said it best. So if you can't top it, steal from them and go out strong. So I picked a guy I thought you'd like. 'We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.' [Quoting Abraham Lincoln]"

"Doris Vinyard: You think you're the only one doin' time, Derek? You think you're here all alone? You think I'm not in here with you?"

"Murray: Derek, what are you trying to prove?!"

"Lamont: [In the prison laundry] Don't fuck with me, a'ight? I'm the most dangerous man in this prison. You know why? 'Cause I control the underwear."

"Lamont: Okay, I know your kind, right...bad ass peckerwood with an attitude. Well, let me tell you something: you better watch your ass, 'cause in the joint, you the nigger, not me."

"Seth: My eyes have seen the glory of the trampling at the zoo We have washed ourselves in niggers' blood and all the mongrels too We're taking down the ZOG machine, Jew by Jew by Jew The white man marches on! ~ white supremacist lyrics for "Battle Hymn of the Republic.""

"Bob Sweeney: [Arguing with Danny Vinyard about his "Mein Kampf" paper] I think the street would kill you. Your rhetoric and your propaganda aren't gonna save you out there."

"Some Legacies Must End."

"Violence as a way of life."

"United by hate, divided by truth"

"See reality in your eyes when hate makes you blind"

"Edward Norton - Derek Vinyard"

"Edward Furlong - Danny Vinyard"

"Beverly D'Angelo - Doris Vinyard"

"Avery Brooks - Dr. Bob Sweeney"

"Jennifer Lien - Davina Vinyard"

"Ethan Suplee - Seth Ryan"

"Stacy Keach - Cameron Alexander"

"Fairuza Balk - Stacey"

"Elliott Gould - Murray"

"Guy Torry - Lamont"

"William Russ - Dennis Vinyard"

"Oh come on! Stop beatin' it! Get out there yourself! Stop feedin' off me! Get out of here! I can't breathe! Give me some air!"

"That's my darlin' Luke. He grin like a baby, but he bites like a 'gator."

"We got a couple men here doing 20 spots. We got one that's got all of it. We got all kinds, and you gonna fit in real good. Of course, unless you get rabbit in your blood and you decide to take off for home. You give the bonus system time and a set of leg chains to keep you slowed down just a little bit, for your own good. You'll learn the rules. Now, it's all up to you. Now I can be a good guy, or I can be one real mean son-of-a-bitch. It's all up to you."

"You run one time, you got yourself a set of chains. You run twice, you got yourself two sets. You ain't gonna need no third set 'cause you're gonna get your mind right. And I mean RIGHT. [To the other inmates] Take a good look at Luke. Cool Hand Luke?"

"The man...and the motion picture that simply do not conform."

"On The Chain-Gang They'd Seen Every Kind Of Man - But Luke Became A Legend"

"What we have here is 'failure to communicate'."

"He was a cool customer. . .until the law made it hot for him!"

"Paul Newman - Lucas "Luke" Jackson"

"George Kennedy - Dragline"

"J.D. Cannon - Society Red"

"Strother Martin - Captain"

"Jo Van Fleet - Arletta"

"Clifton James - Carr"

"Morgan Woodward - Boss Godfrey"

"Luke Askew - Boss Paul"

"Robert Donner - Boss Shorty"

"Joy Harmon - The Girl (Lucille)"

"John McLiam - Boss Kean"

"Andre Trottier - Boss Popler"

"Lou Antonio - Koko"

"Robert Drivas - Loudmouth Steve"

"Marc Cavell - Rabbitt"

"Richard Davalos - Blind Dick"

"Warren Finnerty - Tattoo"

"Dennis Hopper - Babalugats"

"Wayne Rogers - Gambler"

"Harry Dean Stanton - Tramp"

"Ralph Waite - Alibi"

"Anthony Zerbe - Dog Boy"

"Buck Kartalian - Dynamite"

"Joe Don Baker - Fixer"

"I guess sometimes the past just catches up with you, whether you want it to or not. Usually, death row was called "the last mile"; we called ours "the Green Mile" — the floor was the color of faded limes. We had the electric chair — "Old Sparky," we called it. Oh, I've lived a lot of years, Ellie, but 1935 — that takes the prize. That year, I had the worst urinary infection of my life, and that was also the year of John Coffey and the two dead girls."

"What happens on the Mile, stays on the Mile. Always has."

"Goddamn it, Percy, get the hell off my block! [Percy leaves]"

"[about Percy] The man is mean and careless and stupid, and that's a bad combination in a place like this. Sooner or later, he's gonna get somebody hurt, or worse."

"[as Brutal grabs onto Percy's ears] A big man is ripping your ears off, Percy, I'd do as he says."

"[grabs Percy, who is trying to turn away from the botched execution he caused] You watch, you son of a bitch!"

"I've done some things in my life I'm not proud of, but this is the first time I've ever felt in real danger of hell."

"Elaine — you'll die, too. And my curse is knowing that I'll be there to see it. It's my atonement, you see — it's my punishment for lettin' John Coffey ride the lightning. For killing a miracle of God. You'll be gone like all the others, and I'll have to stay. Oh, I'll die eventually; of that, I'm sure. I have no illusions of immortality. But I will have wished for death long before Death finds me. In truth, I wish for it already."

"We each owe a death — there are no exceptions. But, oh God, sometimes the Green Mile seems so long."

"Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again."

"I think about all of us. Walking our own Green Mile, each in our own time."

"On the day of my judgement, when I stand before God, and he asks me why... did I... did I kill one of his true... miracles... what am I going to say? That it was my job? It was my job..."

"John Coffey, just like the drink, only not spelled the same."

"I tried to take it back, but it was too late. (crying)"

"You be still, now ... you be so quiet and so still."

"Why, they's angels. Angels, just like up in heaven."

"I'm tired, boss. Tired of bein' on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I'm tired of never having me a buddy to be with, to tell me where we's going to or coming from, or why. Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There's too much of it — it's like pieces of glass in my head, all the time. Can you understand?"

"He killed them with their love. That's how it is every day, all over the world."

"(singing quietly) Heaven … I'm in heaven … heaven …"

"Barbecue! Me and you! Stinky-pinky, Pew-Pew-Pew! Weren't Billy, Jilly, Hilly, or Pa! It was a French-fried Cajun named Delacroix! WOO!"

"All I wanted me was a little corn bread, you motherfuckers! All I wanted me was a little corn bread!"

"You can come in here on your legs, but you'll go out on your backs. Billy the Kid gonna guarantee ya that."

"Dead man walking, we got a dead man walking here."

"Adios, Chief. Drop us a card from Hell. Let us know if it's hot enough."

"Miracles happen in the most unexpected places."

"Paul Edgecomb didn't believe in miracles. Until the day he met one."

"Miracles do happen."

"Tom Hanks — Paul Edgecomb"

"David Morse — Brutus "Brutal" Howell"

"Bonnie Hunt — Jan Edgecomb"

"Michael Clarke Duncan — John Coffey"

"James Cromwell — Warden Hal Moores"

"Doug Hutchison — Percy Wetmore"

"Sam Rockwell — "Wild Bill" Wharton"

"Michael Jeter — Eduard "Del" Delacroix"

"Barry Pepper — Dean Stanton"

"Jeffrey DeMunn — Harry Terwilliger"

"Patricia Clarkson — Melinda Moores"

"Harry Dean Stanton — Toot-Toot"

"Dabbs Greer — Old Paul Edgecomb"

"Eve Brent — Elaine Connelly"

"Hate put me in prison. Love's gonna bust me out."

"25 cent? Must not be much of a book."

"Denzel Washington — Rubin "Hurricane" Carter"

"Vicellous Reon Shannon — Lesra Martin"

"Deborah Kara Unger — Lisa Peters"

"Liev Schreiber — Sam Chaiton"

"John Hannah — Terry Swinton"

"Dan Hedaya — Det. Sgt. Della Pesca Paterson"

"Debbi Morgan — Mae Thelma Carter"

"When I say I don't remember that day, I'm not lying. Wish I did, but I just don't. Sometimes the most important stuff goes away. Goes away so bad, it's like it was never there to begin with. It's funny the stuff that sticks in your head. I could tell you forward and backward about one day when I was five, and my dad bought me a stupid ice cream cone. I could tell you the flavor of the ice cream. It was pink bubblegum. Even stuff about the girl who scooped it out. Her hair was fire red. All that stuff is there like it was happening right now, but I don't remember that day."

"This one is something a friend of mine said to me. "You have to believe that life is more than the sum of its parts, kiddo." I remember it right now to the "kiddo" part. But when I think about what she said, the same thing always comes into my head. What if you can't put the pieces together in the first place?"

"I know what they want from me. They want a reason. Something to tie up with a little bow and bury in the backyard. Bury it down so deep it's like it never happened. They want me to say how I'm so sorry, and it was my mom's fault. Or maybe it was my dad's fault. Or it happened because of TV or movies or some junk like that. Or maybe I blame some girl."

"You want a why. Well, maybe there isn't one. Maybe...maybe this is just something that happened."

"I think there are two ways you can see the world. You either see the sadness that's behind everything or you choose to keep it all out. Your heart can't break if you don't let the world touch it."

"And that's when I figured out that tears couldn't make somebody who was dead, alive again. There's another thing to learn about tears: they can't make somebody who doesn't love you anymore love you again. It's the same with prayers. I wonder how much of their lives people waste crying and praying to God. If you ask me, the devil makes more sense than God does. I can at least see why people would want him around. It's good to have somebody to blame for the bad stuff they do. Maybe God's there because people get scared of all the bad stuff they do. They figure that God and the Devil are always playing this game of tug-of-war with them. And they never know which side they're gonna wind up on. I guess that tug-of-war idea explains how sometimes, even when people try to do something good, it still turns out bad."

"It covers my eyes. It's all I can see. Say there's some kids playing baseball. All I see is the one kid they won't let play because he tells corny jokes and no one thinks they're funny. Or I see a boy and a girl in love and kissing, you know. I just see that they're gonna be one of those sad old couples one day who just cheats on each other and can't even look each other in the eye. And I feel it. I feel all of their sadness. I feel it probably worse than that sad old couple or that corny kid will ever feel it."

"The worst part is knowing that there is goodness in people. Mostly it stays deep down and buried. Maybe we don't have god because we're scared of the bad stuff. Maybe we're really scared of the good stuff. Because if there is no god, then that means it's inside of us and we can be good all the time if we wanted. So when we do bad things maybe it's because we want to, or because we have to. Or maybe we just need the bad stuff to remind us what the good stuff is in the first place."

"Albert T. Fitzgerald: I recall when our lives were unusual and electric. When we burned with something close to fire. But now we sway to a different rhythm. Lives lived without meaning or even directed hope. The passage of time measured only by loss. Loss of a job, loss of a minivan...a son."

"Mrs. Calderon: You have to believe that life is more than the sum of its parts, kiddo."

"Pearl Madison: Just because what you did was wrong doesnt mean that giving up on your life is right."

"Pearl Madison: Love is when you can't get somebody out of your mind. When they are your first thought in the morning and your last thought at night. Maybe it's not in your heart but it is in your head."

"Bengel: You ever think the whole thing doesn't make sense? I mean, they take all this stuff away from you; freedom, girls and sunshine - because it's supposed to make it so when you get back on the outs you never wanna screw up again. All that really does is get you to thinking that you're... just so small. You know? Like you're this... this small thing that doesn't matter for anything. And by the time you do get out - you don't even feel like a human person anymore."

"Ryan Gosling - Leland P. Fitzgerald"

"Don Cheadle - Pearl Madison"

"Chris Klein - Allen Harris"

"Jena Malone - Becky Pollard"

"Lena Olin - Marybeth Fitzgerald"

"Kevin Spacey - Albert T. Fitzgerald"

"Sherilyn Fenn - Angela Calderon"

"Michelle Williams - Julie Pollard"

"Martin Donovan - Harry Pollard"

"Ann Magnuson - Karen Pollard"

"Michael Welch - Ryan Pollard"

"Matt Malloy - Charlie"

"Kerry Washington - Ayesha"

"Michael Peña - Guillermo"

"Wesley Jonathan - Bengel"

"Troy Winbush - Dave"

"Ron Canada - Elden"

"Clyde Kusatsu - Judge"

"[after subduing a group of terrorists] I'm Lt. Frank Drebin, Police Squad! And don't ever let me catch you guys in America!"

"My name is Sgt. Frank Drebin, Detective Lieutenant Police Squad."

"It's true what they say: Cops and women don't mix. It's like eating a spoonful of Drano. Sure, it'll clean you out, but it'll leave you hollow inside."

"Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin"

"Priscilla Presley as Jane Spencer"

"Ricardo Montalbán as Vincent Ludwig"

"George Kennedy as Capt. Ed Hocken"

"O. J. Simpson as Det. Nordberg"

"[Visiting his wife's grave] I miss you so much... [places flowers] There's something I've gotta do, Barb. Something I couldn't do while you were here. I tried. You know I tried everything, and I still don't have their attention. Let's hope this elevates their thinking. But whatever happens... Please don't think any less of me. [Places his Medal of Honor on the tombstone and kisses it]"

"[addressing Marines] We'll be branded as traitors. The gravest capital crime, punishable by death. Couple of hundred years ago, a few guys named Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were branded traitors by the British - and now they're called patriots. In time so shall we."

"Get ready to rock!"

"Alcatraz. Only one man has ever broken out. Now five million lives depend on two men breaking in."

"America is Rocking!"

"Cocked, locked, and Ready to Rock!"

"Honey, you wanna know who really killed J.F.K.?"

"Sean Connery - Captain John Patrick Mason, Special Air Service (Rtd.)"

"Nicolas Cage - FBI Special Agent Dr. Stanley Goodspeed"

"Ed Harris - Brigadier General Francis X. "Frank" Hummel, USMC Force Recon"

"John Spencer - FBI Director James Womack"

"David Morse - Major Tom Baxter, USMC Force Recon"

"William Forsythe - FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Ernest Paxton"

"Michael Biehn - Commander Anderson, USN SEAL"

"Vanessa Marcil - Carla Pestalozzi"

"John C. McGinley - Captain Hendrix, USMC Force Recon"

"Gregory Sporleder - Captain Frye, USMC Force Recon"

"Tony Todd - Captain Darrow, USMC Force Recon"

"Bokeem Woodbine - Gunnery Sergeant Crisp, USMC Force Recon"

"Jim Maniaci - Private Scarpetti, USMC Force Recon"

"Greg Collins - Private Gamble, USMC Force Recon"

"Brendan Kelly - Private Cox, USMC Force Recon"

"Steve Harris - Private McCoy, USMC Force Recon"

"Danny Nucci - Lieutenant Shephard, USN SEAL"

"Claire Forlani - Jade Angelou"

"The definition of rehabilitate: To restore to a state of physical, mental, and moral health through treatment and training."

"When you try to win, sometimes you lose sight of the goal."

"Unlike many men who lived long after, Henri Young did not die in vain. In the end he was not afraid. He lived and he died in triumph. If only we could all do that."

"Charles Dickens once said that solitary confinement was inhumane. Seven months later, the Supreme Court agreed. As a a result of the facts brought out in the trail of The People vs. Young, the dungeons of Alcatraz were closed forever. Associate warden Glenn was brought up on charges of mistreatment. He was found guilty. He would never work in the penal system again. I remained in private practice. I also became a baseball fan. You did it, Henri!"

"Action: I won. Reaction: you can't never take that away from me."

"I got nothin'. I got nobody. I don't need a lawyer, I need a friend."

"Some men are broken by the laws that they break, unable to resist the forces that are pulling them down. Other men live by the rules that society sets down. You're not one of them."

"Judge Clawson: I do not need you to tell me what is, or is not okay. In this courtroom, I am the one who decides what is, or is not okay. Okay?"

"Blanche, Hooker: Honey, you're gonna have to get it up first. It's like trying to stick an oyster into a slot machine."

"They locked him up. They crushed his spirit. But they couldn't hide the truth."

"One was condemned. The other was determined. Two men whose friendship gave them the will to take on the system."

"The trial that brought down Alcatraz."

""I accuse Alcatraz of crimes against humanity." – The lawyer "I was a weapon, but I ain't no killer." – The accused "I am not on trial here." – The warden"

"One broke his silence. The other broke the system."

"Kevin Bacon – Henri Young"

"Christian Slater – James Stamphill"

"Gary Oldman – Milton Glenn"

"Embeth Davidtz – Mary McCasslin"

"William H. Macy – D.A. William McNeil"

"Stephen Tobolowsky – Mr. Henkin"

"Brad Dourif – Byron Stamphill"

"R. Lee Ermey – Judge Clawson"

"Mia Kirshner – Adult Rosetta Young"

"Ben Slack – Jerry Hoolihan"

"Stefan Gierasch – Warden James Humson"

"Kyra Sedgwick – Blanche, Hooker"

"But Doc, she was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and, uh, she told me she was eighteen and she was, uh, very willing, you know what I mean...I practically had to take to sewin' my pants shut. But, uh between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of ya, I don't think it's crazy at all now and I don't think you do either...No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what's bein' crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it."

"I'm here to cooperate with ya a hundred percent. A hundred percent. I'll be just right down the line with ya, you watch. 'Cause I think we ought to get to the bottom of R. P. McMurphy."

"You wanna bet? One week. I bet in one week, I can put a bug so far up her ass she won't know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch."

"[to Billy] You're just a young kid. What are you doin' here? You oughta be out in a convertible, why – bird-doggin' chicks and bangin' beaver! What are ya doin' here, for Christ's sake? What's funny about that? Jesus, I mean, you guys do nothin' but complain about how you can't stand it in this place here and then you haven't got the guts just to walk out!"

"How about it? You creeps, you lunatics, mental defectives. Let's hear it for Bull Goose Randle back in action...You ding-a-lings. The Mental Defective League, in formation."

"[after his electric shock therapy] They, uh, was givin' me 10,000 watts a day, you know, and I'm hot to trot. The next woman takes me on's gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars!"

"Jesus, I must be crazy to be in a loony-bin like this."

"But I tried, didn't I? Goddammit, at least I did that."

"If Mr. McMurphy doesn't want to take his medication orally, I'm sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way."

"Mr. Cheswick, you sit down!"

"Chief Bromden: Mac, they said you escaped. I knew you wouldn't leave without me. I was waiting for you. Now we can make it, Mac. I feel big as a damn mountain. Mac? [sees the lobotomy scars on McMurphy] Oh, no. [brings McMurphy close to him, hugging the comatose man] I'm not going without you, Mac. I wouldn't leave you this way. You're coming with me. [laying him down gently and preparing to kill him with mercy] Let's go."

"Charlie Cheswick: I want my cigarettes! Miss Ratched!"

"Charlie Cheswick: Rules?! PISS ON YOUR FUCKING RULES, MISS RATCHED!!"

"Jack Nicholson—Randle Patrick McMurphy"

"Louise Fletcher—Nurse Mildred Ratched"

"Will Sampson—Chief Bromden"

"Brad Dourif—Billy Bibbit"

"William Redfield—Harding"

"Michael Berryman—Ellis"

"Danny DeVito—Martini"

"Christopher Lloyd—Taber"

"Peter Brocco—Colonel Matterson"

"Dean R. Brooks—Dr. John Spivey"

"Alonzo Brown—Miller"

"Scatman Crothers—Orderly Turkle"

"Sydney Lassick—Charlie Cheswick"

"Dwight Marfield—Ellsworth, Dancing Patient"

"Phil Roth—Woolsey"

"Mimi Sarkisian—Nurse Pilbow"

"Mews Small—Candy"

"[Explaining why he threw the England-Germany game] It's funny, but when you're in that football world, you just don't realise what it means to people. You only find out how disappointed they are, when you let them down. I was 16 when I signed pro forms. Thought I was the business. Didn't take long for standards to start slipping. Cars, booze, bad tips for slow horses... You think you can handle it, then bang, very soon it's handling you. Before I was picking up trophies, I was 425 grand down to men nasty enough... well, even they would have put the wind up Mr Sykes. But they did give me two choices - a wheelchair for life, or a deliberate penalty against the Germans. It's not as if I've prospered. Look where I've ended up."

"[Talking to the squad before the game] Oh right lads, you wanna be nothing, prisoners...numbers...that's fine. But you win out there today and you'll have something to remember forever, talk about it over and over, because up and down the country there are cons that are pig sick of not being here in your shoes...just to have one crack at those bastards next door! Run your guts out, and you'll have somethin' in 'ere. [points towards heart] They can never touch, no parole boards, judges or nutcase governors... NOW... ask yourselves one question...ARE YOU READY? [team replies glumly] ...YEAH, ARE WE? [team replies whole heartedly]...YEAH! THEN, COME ON!"

"Stick that in your trophy cabinet. [gives the game ball to the governor]"

"Most of the guys in here have nothing. Never had to start with. But you, you had everything they ever dreamed of. And you threw it all away."

"[After Danny asks him why he hasn't gone insane] Only does your nut in if you don't think you should be here. Look at me. Sweet old geezer, eh? A bit bumbly, full of jail-block wisdom, cornerstone of the nick, put in with the foundations, right? [scoffs] Right. I didn't get to be the oldest lag for breaking windows. Villains spend their lives shitting themselves that other criminals are going to see to them. So they get their retaliation in first, and twice as nasty. A bloke was coming after me. So I, er... I went around to his digs and lobbed a grenade in the window. Left over after the war, you know, army surplus. I didn't know, but he had his little nipper and his bird in there with him. [his eyes filling with tears] The house went up like Guy Fawkes' Night. No-one came out. He'd barricaded the door with furniture in case I came around. By the time they got in, the screaming had stopped. [crying] Thirteen months old, learning to walk, apparently. Nothing I can do is ever going to make up for that, is it?"

"Not Your Usual Suspects"

"It's Not Just About Football, It's About Pride Inside!"

"Vinnie Jones - Danny Meehan"

"David Kelly - Doc"

"Jason Statham - Monk"

"Jamie Sives - Chiv"

"Danny Dyer - Billy the Limpet"

"Stephen Martin Walters - Nitro"

"Rocky Marshall - Cigs"

"Adam Fogerty - Mouse"

"David Hemmings as Governor"

"Ralph Brown - Burton"

"Vas Blackwood - Massive"

"Robbie Gee - Trojan"

"Geoff Bell - Ratchett"

"John Forgeham - Sykes"

"Sally Phillips - Tracey"

"Andrew Grainger as Kat"

"Jason Flemyng as Bob Likely"

"Martin Wimbush as Z"

"David Reid - Barman"

"David Cropman - Second Barman"

"Omid Djalili - Raj"

"J. J. Connolly - Barry The Bookie"

"Stephen Bent - Referee"

"Paul Lavin - Losing 3-0"

"Ryan Giggs - a warden (cameo at minute 77:00)"

"I've never been inside a restaurant that doesn't have a drive-thru window before."

"[To Nash's lawyer as he's being taken to the chair] You pal, you're not getting anymore of my business!"

"[Finds Rimshot in the trashcan] What kind of person would throw away a perfectly good dog?"

"Real men are not intimidated by physical threats against their personal selves, and, ironically, neither am I."

"Look, I'm not this guy Nash!"

"This guy is better off in jail."

"Is everyone who works here a moron?"

"Here, I'll help you up!"

"Don't worry about that diet, tubby. Once I set this fuse, you'll lose all that weight."

"This is pathetic."

"(Thinking Nash is Ernest) You are slime Ernest P. Worrell!"

"Pull on it! Pull on it, Chuck!"

"Ernest, we're late for work!"

"We're sorry, Ernest, Bobby didn't know the mace can was loaded."

"This guy is in love! L-U-V! Ernest is in love. Ernest and Charlotte sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Ernest pushing a baby carriage!"

"Nash, I said the let the hostages go!"

"Now, Nash, you'll never get away with this!"

"I will be damned if I'm going to let those idiots from Weyland-Yutani take it back to Earth. They just might succeed, and that would be it for the rest of mankind. Maybe for all life on the planet. I don't see why these things wouldn't be able to reproduce in any animal of a size larger than, say, a cat."

"We give you thanks, O' Lord. Your wrath has come and the time is near for us to be judged. The apocalypse is upon us! Let us be ready! Let your mercy be just! Amen!"

"[explaining his prison barcode tattoo, to Ripley] After my student years, despite the fact that I had become secretly addicted to morphine, I was considered to be most promising. A man with a future. Then during my first residency, I did a thirty-six hour stretch on an ER. So I went out and I got more than a little drunk. Then I got called back. Boiler had blown on a fuel plant, and there were thirty casualties... and eleven of them died. Not as a result of the accident, but because I prescribed the wrong dosage of painkiller. And I got seven years in prison and my licence reduced to a 3C. [pause] At least I got off the morphine."

"The Bitch Is Back"

"This time it's hiding in the most terrifying place of all..."

"Our worst fears have come true. It's back!"

"Three times the suspense. Three times the danger. Three times the terror."

"In the original Alien, Weaver played a young lieutenant on an industrial spaceship, who sheds her naivete to display a bold brain and steely core that leaves her the only survivor of the crew`s first encounter with the alien. Waking up after spending 57 years in hypersleep, adrift in an escape pod, the Ripley of the Aliens sequel is made of even tougher stuff. Cynical, smart and very fit, she manages to make most of the men on board seem like posturing wimps, but still displays a tenderly fierce maternal impulse toward Newt, a little girl orphaned by the alien. In the second film, we left her with sort of everything ahead of her. She`d found this daughter and she had, perhaps, a fellow, maybe. And I think there was, at least on my part, an expectation that maybe she`d be able to lead a normal life. But, life not being fair, she doesn`t get to pursue that dream, says Weaver."

"The maternal storyline hits a dead end in Alien 3, which, Weaver says approvingly, is much closer to the spirit and flavor of the first film. She credits director David Fincher with that. Well, he`s amazing. He`s completely uncompromising, she says, while admitting that, I was sort of the last person to jump on the Fincher bandwagon. I was just a little wary because I wanted very much to break new ground with Ripley. You know, you never know with these sorts of geniuses where their attention is going to go, she says, carefully. But, Fincher, particularly, I think, blew us all away by being such a committed actors` director and so patient. And I think we did break new ground with Ripley. I feel very complete about her. I think she`s more vulnerable. I think she is truly alone. It`s very interesting to play a character who is truly alone, especially a woman, because women are always seen in relation to men or to other woman. It was a very-not to put our audience off-but it was a very existential situation in many ways."

"In Alien 3, Weaver landed in a movie with a history as acidically sticky as anything excreted by the alien itself. In the five-odd years since its conception, the film devoured some seven writers and three directors and so trampled its shooting schedule and estimated $50 million budget that Twentieth Century Fox halted production a year ago. Less than a month before its scheduled release, in fact, the movie`s actual ending remained in doubt. Audience reaction, in sneak previews, Weaver says, was ambivalent. For emotional reasons, we felt we needed to give the audience one more thing to enhance the ending. The missing ingredient turned out to be six more seconds, drawn from the original script and shot at a price estimated at $500,000. The original ending is still there, says Weaver, but now, There`s like a period on it. There was never any doubt, however, about Ripley`s fate, according to Weaver. This is Ripley`s last one, she says firmly. There`s only so much bad luck that a person can have. For her to continue to wake up and confront the alien and resolve the situation, then go back to sleep and wake up to yet another situation-to me, it`s a burden on the whole science-fiction premise of the alien."

"I hated what they did... I couldn't stand 'Alien 3' - how they could just go in there and kill off all these great characters we introduced in Aliens, and the correlation between mother and daughter? It stunk."

"I saw the rough cut of the film, uncut, and there were some scenes in there that were pretty gross. There was an autopsy scene on the girl [Newt] and I like certain gore in the films. I do it [professionally], and it made me sick. It really grossed me out and I remember people got up and left, walked out of the theatre and I was just thinking, 'This will never be in the film. They can't show this stuff.' It was just too much I thought. And when the film came out, it wasn't in the film."

"Look, it wasn't a nightmare, despite what you may have read or heard elsewhere. But it certainly wasn't an easy shoot. What was on the screen was quite removed from what was in the script. But, with that said, I don't regret that I was a part of it. I mean, I knew going into 'Alien 3' that this was a big franchise picture – and there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen on these things."

"Nevertheless, at least one thing was evident as shooting on Alien 3 got underway – this was not going to be the sort of special effects laden supernova that Aliens had been. “I was pleased with that actually,” admits Dance. “I didn’t go back and watch the other two films before Alien 3 – however, I did see Alien when it first came out and I remembered it fondly. On the other hand, I didn’t think Aliens was very good. To me, it was not a very good story – it was just a lot of people firing guns all over the place. What got me excited about the third film was that they toned that down. But what ended up on the screen was a different animal than what was on the page.”"

"The film was critically panned upon its release, but has since gained a cult following. “I think Alien 3 was a better film than Aliens, to be frank,” says Dance. According to the actor, Vincent Ward’s initial script for the film was “really spooky” and centered on a religious cult in a penal colony, but since the character of Ripley was relatively minor, “changes were made to the script.” And the problems didn’t stop there. “Fincher had the studio on his back the whole time phoning him at all hours of the day and night—not taking into account the time change,” says Dance. “But I remember walking on this huge set at Pinewood Studios and Fincher comes up and fires off his shot list for the day. Here’s this guy young enough to be my son who knew all the crew’s jobs, all the shots he wanted, and where he was going to make the cuts in the film, and I thought, ‘My God, this guy is going to go far.’”"

"[N]ow comes "Alien 3 " - as unnecessary a sequel to a major movie as we've seen in some time. First-time director David Fincher and four writers have created another horror movie, attempting existential overtones as they make the alien in this film Ripley's "Moby Dick.""

"There are a lot of problems with this film, but the worst are its dreary, dark motif; the lack of sympathetic characters; the unpleasantness of the film's premise, which has Ripley eventually discovering she has a queen alien growing inside of her; and a lengthy chase sequence that is so dark, and edited so chaotically that it becomes confusing."

"1992's Alien 3, the film, was a strange installment in a franchise that's struggled to find itself ever since its first two movies, an oddly somber experience that was born of complex studio strife and emerged undeniably comprised. With no guns, just a single alien and a cast of barely developed supporting characters, it represented a poor foundation for a licensed game tie-in. So it was hardly surprising that the games that did come out, bearing the title Alien 3, were only loosely connected to the events of David Fincher's directorial debut."

"Aliens, a great action movie, cheapened the original by replacing one hyper-intelligent, indestructible monster with an army of gormless critters. This third entry has only one creature, but unfortunately it's just as gormless. When Ripley (Weaver) crash-lands on a prison planet full of hard-nut slap-heads, they haven't seen a woman in years. Discovering that there's an alien loose, Ripley asks the warden to break out the guns, and can't believe it when she is told there aren't any. Nor can we. Good acting has salvaged many a poor script in the past, but not here."

"I lost interest [in Alien 3], when I realized that the aliens could at all times outrun and outleap the humans, so all the chase scenes were contrivances."

"One of the best looking bad movies I've ever seen."

"“I thought it was dumb. I thought it was a huge slap in the face to fans,” said Cameron without hesitation. “Look, David is a friend of mine. David is an amazing, amazing filmmaker, unquestionably. But that was kind of his first big gig, and he was getting vectored around by the studio, and he was dropped into the production late, and they had a horrible script, and they were rewriting it on the fly, and it was just a mess. I think it was a big mistake.” “I was disappointed,” added Biehn. “But I actually got into [Aliens] because another actor dropped. So, I got into the movie on a fluke, and then I got cut out of Fincher’s movie. And Fincher’s movie, because he was young and they didn’t have a good script, wasn’t any good. And the fourth one [Alien: Resurrection] wasn’t any good. … So, to me, I’m the leading man in the best Alien movie.” Henn, who at 16 would have aged out of the Newt role by the time Alien 3 was made anyway, had already decided by that point that she wasn’t going to continue acting. She got to experience some of the hoopla, though. “Sigourney actually made sure I was invited to the premiere for it,” she said of Alien 3. “I got to experience it as 16-year old, and I knew who these movie stars were and I was like, ‘Oh, wow!’”"

"SPJ: Ripley tries to extinguish the species a second time in Alien 3, throwing herself into the cauldron to kill the alien incubating inside her. Is this action as morally repugnant as nuking all the aliens from afar? Is it worse?"

"If I go on to make 10 great [movies], this'll probably be looked upon as my first bungled masterpiece."

"I hadn’t directed a movie yet. I was just going off to do that. Once I had gone to Pinewood for two years and had been through a situation where I was a hired gun to make a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate, I had a different view of how writers and directors needed to work."

"I didn't like the script, but I love 'Alien,' so yeah, I signed up, naive, and went off to Pinewood [Studios] to be sodomized ritualistically for two years."

"There's no one problem with a $65-million, f***ed-up, first-time filmmaker. Look, I made a crucial error. I listened to the people who were paying for the movie, and they said, the way to go about this is not to work with your friends. The way to go about this is to work with people who have done this time and time and time again. And basically, that translates into: meet a lot of people who are going to resent you and your age and are not going to want to take instruction from you, and allow them to tell you what you can't do."

"Once I had gone to Pinewood for two years and had been through a situation where I was a hired gun to make a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate, I had a different view of how writers and directors needed to work. I kind of resented his anti-auteurist take. I felt that what the script really needed to talk about was the notion of enforced collaboration: You may not like the fact that you’re going to be beholden to so many different disciplines and skill sets in the making of a movie, but if you’re not acknowledging it, you’re missing the side of the barn. A script is the egg, and it needs a donor to create the cellular split that moves it into the realm of something playable in three dimensions and recordable in two dimensions and presentable to other people."

"So out went my carefully constructed motivations for all the principal prisoners, my preserving the life of Newt (her killing in the film is an obscenity) and much else. Embittered by this experience, that's why I turned down Alien Resurrection."

"Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the unluckiest woman in the universe, is once again in a bind. She`s been awakened prematurely from her hypersleep by the crash of her spaceship on Fiorina 161, a distant prison work colony. It seems she isn`t the only survivor her crash, however; when the residents of the colony begin turning up shredded, and it`s up to Ripley to play the role of aliencatcher again. Alien3 tries to get back to what made Alien great-suspense, dimly lighted glimpses of the alien, and the suggestion, rather than exposition, of gore-but is saddled by one overpowering burden. How much can you so with this storyline? The alien shows up, it kills people, Ripley hunts it down, end of movie. By the third time around, it`s just worn out. Great performances from an interesting cast (including Charles S. Dutton of TV`s Roc), convincing industrial sets, and visually exciting Alien effects can`t salvage Alien3 from its all-encompassing tiredness. (STAR) 1/2"

"After directing a string of popular music videos, David Fincher was commissioned by Fox to direct Alien³ but left the project before editing commenced because of studio interference. If Alien³ is not his film, neither is the studio’s “extended cut” (Fincher didn’t want anything to do with the project). Unlike the director’s cut of Aliens, this extended edition of Fincher’s first film does more harm than good. Impregnated with an alien queen, Ripley lands on Fury 161, a prison planet occupied by horny religious criminals. The scenario is the same (more doubting Thomases and labyrinthine tunnels) except the returns are less exciting or scary; an amalgam of power shots (some reminiscent of Fincher’s clips for Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” and Madonna’s “Express Yourself”), the film’s overall effect is noticeably suffocating. Charles Dutton’s preacher man, Dillon, conducts an impromptu funeral service and the extended cut intercuts his prayer with scenes from Fincher’s intended alien-birthing sequence (from canine to bovine). This creepy interplay brings to mind the final moments of Apocalypse Now but doesn’t really spill over into the rest of the film. Not only is Ripley personality-free (is the character jaded or is Weaver simply bored?), so is the alien. If the material appears to strain to offer the new alien attacks a ridiculous religious context, that’s because the filmmakers never really evoke a sense of godlessness on the planet community to begin with."

"No sooner is Ripley speeding away from the napalm-laced carnage of Aliens than she finds herself crashing into a prison planet full of Brits. Relentlessly dark and filled with unsympathetic characters, Alien³ is not loved by many. But director David Fincher seems lucky to have come away with any kind of movie, as is revealed on a surprisingly frank DVD from Fox. As with the other DVDs in the Alien Quadrilogy, you can choose between watching the theatrical release or a new special edition. David Fincher declined to put together another cut of the film, but has approved this new half-hour longer version. All the subplots removed by the studio are now here to see, including a different dogburster scene, the convicts capturing the alien and a slightly different ending. Trouble is, the production was in such disarray that this new longer take on the movie doesn't sort much out from the incoherent nature of the original."

"David Fincher has not done any new interviews for this release so other people fill in, including director Renny Harlin - who pops up in the Development featurette. Fans will be interested to hear what Harlin's vision was, the story options discussed, and why he was not keen on setting it in a prison. Still, that's nothing compared to the original idea of writer Vincent Ward to set the movie on a wooden planet populated by monks. Thanks to extensive image galleries and an in-depth featurette, you can explore what was certainly a bold, if somewhat strange, idea. While there is undoubtedly some fascinating gossip still to be told about the fraught production of Alien³, at least Fox has allowed frank comments to be aired. There's a great shot of an alien (man in suit) sitting with his head in his hands that seems to sum up the whole experience. Major changes to the script were regular occurrences, no end ever seemed in sight on the shoot, and it was finally shut down and taken to LA so the studio could try and fathom something out of it all."

"One idea would have seen Xenomorphs arriving on Earth and destroying New York City, which is as close to the film the teaser suggests as any of the unmade Alien 3 scripts. Between 1987 and 1990, more than ten screenwriters had a bash at scripting the film, including William Gibson, Eric Red, David Twohy, and John Fasano. Drafts differed on whether Weaver’s Ripley would be in the script or not, whether Biehn’s Hicks had a bigger role or not, and whether the film would be about a “Marxist space empire”, a prison planet, or a satellite full of monks. The latter idea came from director Vincent Ward, who was signed up to direct the project. However, Fox executives didn’t like his vision for Alien 3, with Jon Landau dismissing it as “more on the artsy-fartsy side than the big commercial one” than the studio wanted. In the end, Giler and Hill wound up writing the screenplay, inspired by various bits and bobs from different incarnations, with co-credit going to script doctor Larry Ferguson."

"Once again, Weaver is shocked to discover the alien loose—this time in a desolate prison colony. You'd think she'd get over those surprises by now. Once again, she has to rally a group of macho men (rapists and murderers) to take on the beast; and, once again, it doesn't take a college degree to guess who'll be left facing whom."

"Ironically, "Alien " is not a bad movie. In fact—here's the rub—it's too interesting to make an exciting summer flick. At the core is a promising tale written by Australian filmmaker Vincent Ward, who made "The Navigator: An Odyssey Across Time," an often brilliant, time-hopping saga about medieval men journeying into the 20th century. His "Alien " is woven out of the same classic sci-fi yarn. The prison is a Middle Ages-type institution, with gaunt-faced, monastic characters in robes walking through dark, twisting corridors bearing candles."

"This movie—peopled with English performers, including Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Paul McGann and Danny Webb—seems more like a "Star Trek" episode than an "Alien" picture. It's also hard to get a handle on how big or small the alien is, the usual sign of low-budget horror filmmaking. Sometimes it seems small as a child; other times, it looms eight feet high."

"First of all, it is difficult to empathize with (or care about) any of the characters in this film. And there is very little in the way of character development, that might help this problem. I've heard that this film was heavily cut before its theatrical release, and that there is a much longer director's cut, which is ultimately more satisfying in this respect. I wish Fox had used it here. Another problem with Alien 3 is its poorly conceived and written script. To start off with, we're asked to accept the idea that the alien queen managed to lay a few eggs unnoticed in the scant minutes she was on board the Sulaco. Then we're asked to believe that a single face hugger could cause enough damage to require evacuating the crew in an EEV, and then we're asked to believe that the EEV just happened to eject near a populated (albeit sparsely) planet. To make matters worse, all of the survivors of the previous film are immediately killed off (problems with budget or contract negotiations perhaps?), including Ripley's surrogate daughter Newt. Which leads to the script's other major problem - it's just a major downer. After the sheer horror of the first film, and particularly coming off of the edge-of-your-seat thrills of Aliens, this film seemed far too subdued and somewhat less than frightening. It just wasn't at all what I was expecting. Which is not to say that the film doesn't have some merits. I did find the quasi-religious undertones of Fury's inhabitants compelling. And the concept of the alien creature taking on some of the physical characteristics of its host (in this case a dog) was intriguing. But again, the film stumbles over another major shortcoming, which is that the creature effects are just, well... bad. More often than not, the creature effects were accomplished by using a marionette-type puppet that was shot in front of a blue screen, and optically added to each shot with the actors. In other cases, its just a mechanical prop... and it shows. The first time we ever see the creature (in chapter 9), it just looks silly. The best thing about the creatures in the first two films, was that we barely saw them. They were far more frightening. Here we're seeing way too much."

"Alien 3" was already chasing a release date when Fincher boarded the project, taking over from outgoing director Renny Harlin rather late in the process, so he only had five weeks of prep time. According to Film Stories, the movie was originally scheduled to have a 12-month turnaround, from the start of production in January 1991 to a theatrical release in December 1991. The Christmas deadline was soon extended, but even before the story was finalized, an infamously misleading teaser trailer announced, "In 1992, we will discover, on Earth, everyone can hear you scream." As anyone who's seen the film can attest, Earth was not, in fact, the setting. They began shooting without a completed script, partly because "Alien 3" had already undergone numerous rewrites and no one could seem to get it perfectly tailored. William Gibson, author of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning cyberpunk novel, "Neuromancer" (which influenced "The Matrix"), wrote a draft that kept Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the Oscar-nominated heroine of the first two movies, in a coma. It instead centered on the space Marine, Hicks, and the robot, Bishop, played by Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen, whose characters were left alive at the end of "Aliens."

"Eric Red ("The Hitcher," "Near Dark") whipped up the next version of the script for "Alien 3" in under two months, and it was set on Earth (hence that teaser about screaming there), but it was quickly discarded. Then there was David Twohy's prison planet version, developed alongside Vincent Ward and John Fasano's legendary wooden planet version, where the setting was a kind of monastery in space. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill and script doctor Larry Ferguson eventually fused elements of these last two versions into what became the working draft of "Alien 3," with Fincher and his own uncredited script doctor, Rex Pickett, doing further rewrites. All told, there were reportedly ten different writers on the film. While other classic movies like "The Wizard of Oz" have juggled that many writers in the past, "Alien 3" could not be termed anything other than a cult classic at best."

"The third movie in the Alien series was a hot ticket at the time. The Bond films were halted and locked in a bitter legal battle that eventually took six years to resolve. So Alien had suddenly become one of the world's biggest franchises and was camped, almost insultingly to the impotent, sleeping Bond, on Pinewood's giant 007 Stage."

"It's left to Paul McGann, playing Golic, to spell things out in a way that only McGann can. I've met him a few times by this point, going back to the 1986 production of The Monocled Mutineer, a two-part TV series on First World War deserter Percy Toplis. He's established himself, at 31, as one of our biggest stars, with Withnail And I and a sharp TV series called Dealers. He's a Scouse jack-the-lad who calls a spade a shovel – particularly when it's used for shovelling manure. "There are more producers around here than actors," he tells me. "I wondered who the hell they were at first. It's like having an extra fucking audience for every scene. You can't get a clear picture of who wants what, it gets changed as we go along. I don't know what they're doing here. Rewriting some of the script? Getting in the way? Fuck knows. But movies are in a mess. I am in the only fucking film which is shooting in England. The situation is getting dire with this recession going on. We're going to be down to one cameraman and one sound crew in this country if we aren't careful.""

"Putting it into the mildest terms, Alien 3 was an omnishambles. Armed with a trailer and a release date, 20th Century Fox didn’t know what the movie was going to be about, but knew it was going to come out in 1992. A film that had already seen several writers and directors come and go, with just as many concepts making their way through the revolving door, the resulting story came partially from re-writes done by David Fincher himself. In the end, no one would know just how the experience would turn out, as a pretty impressive, yet misleading, teaser promised quite a bit: Through his trial by fire on Alien 3, David Fincher emerged as a directorial phoenix, and went on to make Seven as his next feature film. Understanding that writers and directors literally need to be on the same page, the lessons learned from his own career and also from reading his father’s script, Fincher understood that no person is an island in the movie business. If only the Fox executives that trashed his version of Alien 3 could have learned that back in 1991, maybe we'd be talking about the "absolute classic" Alien 3, rather than the very expertly crafted euphemism that David Fincher used to describe what was essentially, a living hell."

"On the face of it, Alien 3 should have been a pretty great movie. The first two films from the franchise were spectacular; it had a director at its helm that would go on to be one of the best of the modern era, it was written by the legendary Walter Hill, and it was packed to the brim with stellar acting talent. But in the end it was just downright turgid."

"If it hadn’t been for the American science fiction horror movie Alien 3, one of the brightest lights in Hong Kong’s scientific community could well have spent his days staring into a microscope and performing autopsies. “The night before the [job] interview, I went to see Alien 3 – which opens with a postmortem. I thought, ‘Do I really want to start my days with a postmortem?’ So, in the end I became a chemical pathologist – we look at blood rather than dead bodies,” says Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, the Li Ka Shing professor of medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). It seems, then, that we have American film director David Fincher to thank in part for Lo’s many contributions to health – from the development of non-invasive prenatal testing to new screening tests for cancer."

"Alien 3 has a certain reputation with different groups—to David Fincher, it was a nightmare first production for the enfant terrible director, one he has since refused to be associated with because the studio will not restore his child autopsy scene, which even the biggest Gone Girl fan in the world would admit is a bit much. For movie dorks, it’s a movie you like to argue is better than whoever is tolerating listening to you remembers. For most people, it’s the one where Sigourney Weaver got head shaved. For losers, it’s the one where Newt dies off-camera and they get angry. I remember Alien 3 as the first rated R movie that had a very large toy push, meaning I was being sold ephemera related to a product I technically wasn’t supposed to see. For cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, Alien 3 was how he got his WGA card. He says as much in this books—an adaptation of a screenplay that wasn't used—introduction. Gibson’s association with Hollywood has largely been uninteresting. Adaptations of his work that have made it to screen amount to 90s-doing-80s footnotes like Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel (though he allegedly wrote most of Kathryn Bigelow’s excellent Strange Days without screen credit). For Alien 3, Gibson turned two drafts over to Walter Hill and David Giler that had little to do with the final product. That's a good thing. Gibson’s script has long been available on the internet. It’s not enough of an oddity to be interesting. It’s okay. The comic is ultimately okay too."

"Alien 3 was a very silly movie to work on. It had already been going for four months by the time I started, and they hadn’t even begun thinking about making the Alien. The script wasn’t even finished by that point, and I don’t think there was a director either. All there was was a bunch of models of the characters that were going to die – the Alien didn’t get made until five or six months later. In fact, the Alien was the last thing to be considered out of all the effects. On my first day, they weren’t even sure what the Alien was going to look like – there were all kinds of different drafts of the script, and at one point it was a glass planet so they were talking about having a glass Alien, and then it was going to be all wood and they were talking about having a wooden Alien because it was supposed to adapt to its surroundings. They had done the facehugger which you see at the beginning of the film, because that was the thing they were least worried about. There was another super-facehugger, a clear one, that took us about three months to make, on and off; that was kicked out just after we’d finished it. We also built a huge ox that the Alien burst out of, but David Fincher didn’t like that. Eventually they went back to America and reshot it anyway; now it’s a dog. It was a colossal waste of money."

"The original Alien had these kind of pipes sticking out the back that took it away from just being a man in a rubber suit, but creature designers Alec (Gillis) and Tom (Woodruff) hated them, so we left them off. The very first day we took our Alien on set, Fincher said, "Where are the stove pipe things on the back?", so he had us make some foam ones and glue them on. We made them overnight and they were strapped on with string – this is on a multi-million dollar movie – and when we got on set with them he just said, ‘Take them off’. It was extraordinary."

"The way it worked was that we’d start making something for the film and it would be written out, so we’d stop making it. Then it would be back in again, so we’d start making it again – the same thing happened with the sets. [Special effects supervisor] George Gibbs reportedly built this huge set for the ending of the film on the 007 stage at Pinewood, and they changed one aspect of the script so he had to tear it down and start again. We also spent a huge amount of time and money making an Alien suit and some other guys did the same, making an alien puppet, and the two things just don’t match up, they don’t look like the same Alien. Again, that was because it got to the stage where it just had to be done, so consequently they don’t look like each other in the final movie."

"I suppose you can’t really blame him, you’ve got to blame the people who want to make a film without having a script to start with. You’ve got to blame Sigourney Weaver to a certain extent, too, for having too many fingers in the pie. From what I was told she had a lot to do with the script: she was the one who didn’t want there to be any guns in the film, she was the one who decided to have the love scene. There was no reason for it other than she decided Ripley had to get into bed with someone."

"IT'S apparent during the opening credits of "Alien 3" that this is going to be a movie for the generation that finds the computer friendly. Those of us born before 1975 can't possibly comprehend all of the introductory information that goes clicking across the on-screen television monitor, spelling out time, place and imminent crises with the relentlessness of a speed-reading exam. The information is also so understated that only someone who speaks computer language realizes that life, as we know it, is about to crash. Yet again. What the computer generation knows, and the rest of us don't, is that this information isn't really necessary or especially relevant. Logic is out. Visceral sensation is the point. Unlike "Alien" (1979) and "Aliens" (1986), the new film, directed by David Fincher, puts no great emphasis on futuristic technology. "Alien 3" belongs to that branch of fantasy comics, best exemplified by the "Road Warrior" movies, in which the iron and space ages meet for dizzy results."

"Fiorina 161 is a planet, but we never see much of it. Clearly, though, it is a place where the sun doesn't shine. The outside temperature hovers in the neighborhood of 40 degrees below zero. Formerly a maximum-security prison, Fiorina 161 has been decommissioned and is now home to 25 of society's worst rejects, former prisoners who have elected to remain on the planet to live lives of edgy atonement. They are members of what is called "an apocalyptic millennarian fundamentalist Christian sect." Whatever they are, they obey their own commandments."

"The production is dourly handsome, with great, chunky, dimly lighted sets that suggest dungeons out of the Middle Ages. They are actually so dark that sometimes it's not easy to know who is doing what to whom. Blood looks black, which may not be all bad. The alien is seen in glimpses, but it's seen often enough so that it seems to be nothing worse than a large, dark sticky lobster claw with a terrible disposition."

"Mr. Fincher, who has directed music videos for Madonna, Billy Idol and others, doesn't waste time trying to make things plausible. His direction of "Alien 3" suggests that he grew up reading instructions on how to program VCR's. He knows that most explanations, like directions, are incomprehensible, and thus irrelevant."

"David Fincher’s Alien³ may be the only film ever made to peak with its logo. As the 20th Century Fox fanfare crescendos over the studio’s familiar logo, the music holds on the minor chord before the usual last note, replacing jubilant bombast with a dissonant groan of strings. The alteration produces an immediate sense of discomfort and unease, setting the tone for something ominous and fearsome. It’s an ingenious shot across the bow from Fincher, ushering in a feature career dotted with immaculately ordered, carefully scored works of blockbuster entertainment that veered from audience-pleasing major keys to their grim underbellies. The perversion of the Fox theme epitomizes a succinct grasp of horror that only occasionally surfaces in the film proper."

"Too often, Alien³ shows its seams, whether in its thematic arc or the design of the xenomorph, and at not even two hours it still feels weighed down by unnecessary exposition and padded suspense scenes. But blame for much of this cannot fall at one person’s feet, as the film was notoriously the product of years of production hell that saw the studio soliciting wildly different drafts from writers including (but not limited to) cyberpunk author William Gibson, writer-director Vincent Ward, and producer/filmmaker Walter Hill. Eventually, ideas from each version found their way into a Frankenstein monster of a shooting script, one further plagued by endless on-set rewrites that left Fincher so exasperated that even Fox’s officially released behind-the-scenes footage shows the director railing against the pressures of the studio’s poorly planned project."

"Considerable criticism, from both audiences and former cast and crew members on the series, was directed at the decision to callously kill off Lt. Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Newt (Carrie Henn) in the opening credits. Regarded on its own terms, though, their deaths fit well within the series’s bleak tone. Structured in staccato clips inserted between the credits, the scene shows off the sense of visual economy that Fincher picked up while making music videos. It plays out in ominous glimpses of a hatched alien egg, a facehugger stretching toward Newt’s cryogenic pod, a crack of glass, and seepage of blood into cloth. In seconds, all of the good feelings left over from the end of Aliens are brutally cast aside, robbing Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) of the ad hoc family she’d only just rallied together. It’s a promisingly nihilistic beginning, and Ripley’s dismay upon learning of her friends’ deaths is compounded by the revelation that she’s crash-landed near a Weyland-Yutani prison, a refinery work camp whose inmates are all men with double-Y chromosomes, a defect that enhances their aggression and leaves them more likely to rape and murder. The early scenes, of Ripley interacting with men actively afraid of her presence and what it might encourage in them, mark the film’s thematic high point, balancing Ripley’s fears of a possible xenomorph outbreak against the equally immediate worries about the rippling aftershocks of her presence on the inmates’ vows of celibacy, made in a mass religious conversion among the prisoners that occurred long before she arrived. Frequently, the men use their religion as pretense for distrust of the woman, if not outright abuse. Ripley has always had to deal with unfriendly elements, but they usually came isolated in the form of company men (or androids); here is an entire facility’s worth of people with an innate antagonism against her, one that stymies her attempts to lead them against the alien threat that breaks out shortly after her arrival."

"In what’s become something of a recurring theme of the franchise since its first two entries, Alien³ arguably peaks before the alien itself takes center stage. The looming, Brutalist-style prison setting evinces a sense of decay well before the camera explores its dripping, darkened corridors and vents. The private-owned prison, more work camp than carceral institution, has a wide-open feel that paradoxically enhances the feeling of being trapped, a testament to the assurances of its builders that those who worked there would know they had nowhere, ultimately, to run. When the alien finally does begin to roam the prison, however, the environment too quickly loses its character, its labyrinthine structure and dangerous areas (a ventilation shaft with a giant fan telegraphs a gruesome human purée well before it happens) betray their usefulness to the story. No longer does the facility have its own story to tell; instead, it looks as if it were built around the alien sequences."

"The alien itself is a disappointment, as the filmmakers’ intriguing idea of having a xenomorph infect and thus absorb the DNA of a quadrupedal animal is squandered on a garish puppet creation that moves in jerky, dissonant steps that completely divorce the creature from the environment. This robs the alien of even a hint of menace, barring a few close-ups that keep the image limited to the xenomorph’s face and teeth. Prefiguring an issue that’s plagued all future Alien movies in the CGI era, the depiction of the xenomorph so casually in full view saps much of the suspense that the first two films wrung out of keeping the monsters hidden or partially glimpsed. Once its definitions are set, the creature loses its amorphous, undefinable shape and size, limiting it to something comprehensible. The lackluster alien undeniably drags down the proceedings, but the film maintains a consistently bleak atmosphere that elevates it above its sloppy sequel and the more self-conscious philosophy of recent prequels by staying truest to the simple hopelessness of the original film."

"Even within arguably the most nihilistic franchise in cinematic history, Alien³ stands out for its consistent tone of despair. It presents a reality where even machines feel fear and agony, as when Ripley reactivates the heavily damaged Bishop droid (Lance Henriksen), its tattered face struggling to focus a sagging, milky eye as it relays Weyland-Yutani’s continued, destructive interest in capturing and weaponizing the xenomorph. Having warned Ripley, he then asks her to be shut off, saying he feels pain in his current form and fears being rebuilt into something less special and perfect than what he was. Ripley’s death drive, always present but overwhelmed when she discovers an alien embryo inside of her, is so intense that it blunts the confrontational behavior of the men around her, even Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), the prison’s religious leader whose initial hostility toward Ripley fades when he recognizes the purity of her martyrdom. The deflating alien antics of the film’s back half sap some of the power from Ripley’s ultimate sacrifice, but her final act, taking pro-choice symbolism to self-immolating extremes, is one of the most powerful images in the entire Alien franchise."

"For all its inherent structural problems, Alien³ remains a worthy intended conclusion to the series, finding its true resolution in Ripley’s resolve to break the endless cycle of her torment. Initially panned upon release, Fincher’s film now has its supporters thanks in part to a 2003 recut that restored footage that’s even more evocative of the filmmaker’s overriding sense of dejected gloom. Yet its most lasting impact may be what it said about the direction that blockbusters would go, perpetuating the franchise’s close bonds to the state of tent-pole releases to their respective eras."

"Alien enjoyed [[w:New Hollywood|New Hollywood freedoms in its use of avant-garde production design and its deliberate, character-driven storytelling while its first sequel operated along the faster, more upbeat and cathartic tone of the mid-1980s. This film, the product of a hastily reconciliation of incomplete ideas, points to a future in which blockbusters would be crafted as if on an assembly line, no longer the product of one vision or even that of a group but of a conglomeration running on autopilot. As producer Jon Landau later said of the film, “We set out to make a release date, not a movie.”"

"Q: Thinking back over your career, you were attached to over Alien 3 for over a year. Can you tell us what happened there?"

"The movie opens with spooky, effective opening credits that completely rip apart everything you loved about Aliens. If Alien is mysterious, and Aliens is hectic, Alien 3 promises at the opening to be depressing as hell, which happens when you kill an innocent little girl in the opening five minutes. Combined with the death of Hicks, Alien 3 destroys the surrogate family unit from Aliens, and now Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the sole survivor of a tragic crash and the only woman on a desolate planet populated by murderers and rapists. Except the prisoners have found religion, and this is where you can see Alien 3‘s split personality emerge. The religious angle from Ward’s script has been retained, but now it’s been shoehorned into a story where a skeleton crew of prisoners (the film has a weak explanation of why a huge facility would be kept running by and for about twenty people) now have Christianity for some reason. The script then tries to dance with this aspect, but it only remains an interesting idea even though there was the possibility that this idea could have been developed on its own merits despite being outside of Ward’s original intent. These men have been able to turn their lives over to God, but they’ve also been devoid of temptation. There’s not much on the planet Fiorina “Fury” 161 worth wanting, and then Ripley comes into their lives, which begs the question of the value of faith without temptation. But then the movie’s ugliness reemerges when some of the prisoners try to rape Ripley. Then Charles S. Dutton rescues Ripley, beats the crap out of her attackers, and the attempted rape is never referenced again."

"To the film’s credit, Alien 3 consciously doesn’t want to be a retread of the first two movies. The xenomorph doesn’t even carry human DNA, and instead comes from a dog, which turns it into a quadruped, even though that ultimately doesn’t make much of a difference. To quote Warden Andrews (Brian Glover), who has my favorite description of the xenomorph ever: “It kills on sight, and is generally unpleasant.” It’s also kind of background in a movie that can’t really be anything because it was torn apart at its fundamental level. They had sets with no story, characters without purpose, and discarded plotlines galore right down to seemingly insignificant scenes like the xenomorph coming out of an ox rather than a dog. The whole thing is a mess, and it’s an infuriating mess not only because it’s stifling Fincher’s talent, but because Alien 3 is littered with potential. It’s an atmospheric film, but it’s not worth breathing the air. Even Ripley is less interesting this time around even though there are plenty of places they could have gone with her character."

"When it came time for Ripley to jump, Fincher wanted to stick by the religious angle that had been so thoroughly reduced throughout the picture: “I said ‘whatever happens she has to be in peace at the end.’ It has to be a sigh rather than gritting teeth and sweat. So we talked about it and went over and shot this blue-screen element. We were shooting that shot four days before the film opened, a completely ridiculous mess. I don’t know if it works.” And it ends with gritted teeth and sweat. I have mixed feelings about the ending. Had Fincher been able to get his vision through, then perhaps that ending would work, but as it stands in the theatrical cut, the moment fits in with the ugliness that permeates the rest of this movie. A peaceful sigh doesn’t fit with a grey-brown palette, attempted rape, and a dead little girl getting her ribcage cracked open. Ripley and the alien had become one, and it cursed her until her final moment."

"That's it: the trilogy is now complete - uneven, incoherent, often unpalatable, but still one of the great achievements in popular cinema. The last part is the worst, no question, but it isn't your average sequel; for these films contained many sequels within themselves, the same old story flicking round time and again, refusing to give up for dead. As each movie came and went, the heart of darkness kept pumping away: The horror. The horror. The horror. This time it starts with the credits. Slipped in between the names we see slashes of wild movement, the now familiar elements of evil: acid, fire, a hiss like a hot iron, something clamping on to Ripley's face. By the time we get to the name of the director, David Fincher, we know what he does best. He cuts fast and surely, like a surgeon in a hurry, delving towards the warm root of the problem. No wonder he shoots an autopsy so well. I'd heard about the scene and was dreading it, but there's nothing to look away from, unless you count the little two-handed saw shaped like a parsley chopper. Somehow it doesn't look sick; blood coils silently into a dish, no more than that, leaving our imaginations to do their worst. And their worst is their best, to judge by the nervous wailing that rose from the auditorium, dotted with giggles and gulps."

"Alien3 is hopeless, scarfed in a rusty gloom that's light years away from the sheen of a good blockbuster; no wonder that American audiences soon learnt to stay away. It reads like a suicide note, a pulp version of Celine: 'I'd rather be nothing', or 'I need you to kill me . . . I'm dead anyway'. All three movies have been dank and dour, of course, and that is their triumph. After years of brushed chrome and spacious command rooms, along came Alien, and soon the lights were going out all over space. It was the first film to suggest that a spaceship was just that, a ship in space - a wet, primitive hulk, cavernous yet cramped, with all manner of malevolence shivering behind its timbers. The new film keeps up the claustrophobia but turns it inwards, too, putting the squeeze on the souls of the inhabitants and wringing the fight out of them."

"The alien is all she has, and all she has to kill; Holmes is nothing without Moriarty, Achilles needs Hector more than he ever did Patroclus. Their whole life resides in these few hours of remorseless wrath. What of soul is left, I wonder, when the killing has to stop? These are grand ways of looking at it, but then the Alien trilogy is grand. Not pretentious and talkative, just laden with images of doom and sexual control, the unstoppably fecund as well as the unbearably blocked. The final part doesn't let us down here, with all its writhing corridors and Satanic furnaces, the odd tongue of flame rasping against Piranesi girders and whale-grey walls. It suffers from poor supporting performances, and a plot that splutters instead of pushing on; but when the chase is on, all is forgiven. Fincher brings on the Steadicam and whips it through tunnels at alien pace, flipping upside down and bulging the walls with wide-angle lenses. You can't tell what the hell is happening, but you know it's hell all right. I can't give the ending away, but I wish I could. Everything is wrapped up a treat - Fincher can't really tell a tale, but he can wheel on the awe with the best of them. I think he must have been watching Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, which I saw again last month. Both films are graced by actresses with shaven heads and staring eyes, at the furthest reach of their powers; both pound along towards fire and sacrifice, and edit our nerves into thin strips. Dreyer made a masterpiece, Fincher made a mess; but he rounds out a modern myth, and in so doing ensures that, like Lieutenant Ripley, we will never sleep easy again."

"The shape-shifting "Alien" trilogy reverts back to the form of the first film in this third close encounter—a muddled effort that offers little more than visual splendor to recommend it. Although certain to open strong thanks to the must-see faithful, look for a quick fade beyond the first couple of box office orbits as word-of-mouth and the dour tone pull "Alien3" down to earth, making it a likely also-ran among this summer's blockbusters. In interviews, star/co-producer Sigourney Weaver has spoken of the producers’ conflict with Fox over crafting a more cerebral film rather than an outright thriller, and that indecisiveness shows."

"In any event, Ripley (Weaver) finds herself stranded on a planet with a bunch of converted convicts who’ve embraced religion, led by Charles S. Dutton of TV’s “Roc.” The colony’s kindly doctor (Charles Dance), with whom Ripley shares another kind of close encounter, suspects something is wrong, but throughout the early part of the story Ripley won’t share her suspicions with him that an Alien has landed on the planet. That reticence is only one of numerous inexplicable aspects of “Alien3,” which again relies on the same faceless “company” as an unseen heavy while toying furtively with the sexual politics of a lone woman trapped on a planet of murderers, rapists and miscreants. In that vein, a significant problem stems from the fact that aside from Ripley and perhaps Dutton and Dance, none of these characters has a defined persona, making the bald convicts all virtually indistinguishable Alien-bait."

"Music video director David Fincher doesn’t reveal much finesse with actors in his bigscreen debut, and the screenplay (by producers Walter Hill and David Giler, plus Larry Ferguson) proves fraught with lapses in reason, motivation and logic. That leaves Weaver to carry the load, but her character is so encumbered with baggage that she can’t really showcase the qualities–particularly evident in the second film–that made the audience empathize with her. Much has been made of her shaved head, but Weaver has more importantly been shorn here, for the most part, of the epic strength that made Ripley such a striking female protagonist in “Aliens.” As for the much-discussed re-shoot of the movie’s ending, one can only judge what’s on screen, which shows that the screams of heavy-handed religious symbolism can be heard even in space."

"The Alien itself remains a technical marvel in its three repugnant forms, more a tribute to H.R. Giger’s original design than anything else. Fincher, turning to musicvideo editing techniques, resorts to rapid-fire glimpses of the beast, relying on a variety of methods ranging from rotoscoping to puppetry. Still, we’ve seen those dripping jaws before, and even impressive shots of the creature rapidly scurrying across ceilings don’t justify the fare to be a passenger on this latest voyage. Other technical aspects are also top of the line, although the production design proves so relentlessly bleak that there’s no relief from the film’s oppressiveness, even when there are lapses in the tension. While the look is an accomplishment, this isn’t the sort of environment that tag-along filmgoers–or even those who bring them–will relish visiting."

"By all accounts, Alien 3 should have been one of the most successful sequels of all time. At the close of 1986’s rip-roaring Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, having defeated her interplanetary acid-blooded adversaries, retreated into a space pod bound for Earth accompanied by her compatriots Bishop, Hicks and Newt. All four characters were (seemingly) put into a very safe cyber-sleep. The next instalment, one assumed, would pick up shortly thereafter – with the fabulous foursome awake, and in fresh surroundings, pitted against a new horde of hot-tempered Xenomorph menace. Unfortunately, it was not to be. With ex-music video helmer David Fincher opting to take the franchise in an unexpectedly dark and dingy direction – with a plot detailing Ripley’s struggle for survival on an inauspicious all-male prison-world – 1992’s would-be summer blockbuster, Alien 3, was not what anyone expected. Highlighting just one solitary space-beast, and a group of gun-less victims, the often-meandering movie could not be further removed from the “gung-ho”, blood-pumping bullet ballet that propelled its immediate predecessor into a pop culture phenomenon."

"Initially, the plan was to concentrate on Michael Biehn’s Hicks character – with Weaver taking a back seat to the action. When this idea was scrapped, later screenplays were commissioned – including an aliens-on-Earth option courtesy of Eric Red (who had penned the popular vampire potboiler Near Dark) to the now-legendary wooden-monastery planet take instigated by Vincent Ward (who obtained a credit for “story” on the final flick). Finally, though, original Alien creators Walter Hill and David Giler were brought in, alongside Highlander scripter Larry Ferguson, to form the film that became Alien 3 – although Fincher and his own pen-man, Rex Pickett, would do a further rejig as shooting was about to commence."

"For some, part of the interest of the Alien franchise comes from the underlying elements of maternal malevolence and gender-subversion, from a male giving birth to the penetrative-parent alien. You can see Alien 3 as extending these intriguing elements, with Ripley forced to dominate a group of males, and in the process masculinising herself (witness that shaved head), before dying in the midst of giving birth to a beast that she, understandably, does not want to introduce to the world. According to Hill, though, giving too much Freudian thought to this tale of torrid parentage is best approached with caution. “You would really need to explain some of that stuff to me,” he chuckles. “Listen, I once made a wise ass remark. It was about 25 years ago and I have never had so many letters in my life. I said something about psychoanalysis – basically that it is astrology for intellectuals, and I got about 200 letters scolding me. Everybody has to make a living, though, and some people have obviously decided they can make living out of writing that stuff on the Alien films. But that is not the business I am in. All I know is that we just wanted to make good scary movies. Maybe some stuff got snuck in there without me realising – who knows?”"

"“I was, and am, surprised that the franchise kept going,” admits Hill. “When we did Alien all we wanted to do was to bring a more sophisticated style of filmmaking to what had always been regarded as a B-picture. I always thought that if you did that you would have a commercially rewarding endeavour. But who knew that approach would lead to the Hollywood you have now, where more serious dramatic films have been squeezed out by that B-movie approach. The fact that our monster movie contributed to the loss of a wider approach to filmmaking is, in a way, quite sad.” Such a pessimistic statement seems entirely fitting for a feature on sci-fi’s most famous feelbad follow-up. Even so, we would wager that few would argue that, in the grand scale of studio sequels, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever again dare to destroy a potent celluloid property like David Fincher did with Alien 3. For that reason alone, we can but admire the decisions – however mad – that led to this most unlikely of threequels."

"The end product was set on an all-male prison planet, with inmates and jailers instead of monks, but it retained a bit of Ward's flavor. Everyone was bald thanks to a lice infestation. The sweaty domes, the faintly monastic single-sex casting of the prisoners, the fearful and hateful descriptions of women, and the invocation of religious language and imagery gave the whole thing a Biblical or medieval feel—and as Ripley overcame her depression and near-paralysis over losing her surrogate daughter Newt and maybe-boyfriend Cpl. Hicks in the crash, her possessed, crusading demeanor had echoes of Saint Joan. As Tafoya points out in his video essay, the direction, photography, writing and production design of "Alien 3" reference a tradition of religious art and tales of spiritual torment, even filming the shorn heroine so that she resembles Falconetti, the star of Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent classic "The Passion of Joan of Arc."

"The sight of a woman testing herself against macho environments was always a fixture in the "Alien" series, with its threats of rape and impregnation, and its mostly male casts swaggering through landscapes of industrial or military machinery, cursing and smoking and muttering about "the bonus situation" or teasing each other as "ladies." But this aspect becomes more pointed, and more poignant, in "Alien 3." The inmates' misogyny is built right into the storyline. The religious elements are teased out through prayers and talk of devils and deliverance via Ripley's Joan of Arc figure. And much of the picture is—when you boil it down to its essence—about a woman who was sleep-raped by a monster trying to abort the spawn before company executives that masterminded the crime can cut it out of her, and use it as the seed for a biological weapons program."

"Because the third film revolves almost entirely around Ripley's desire to protect the integrity of her body—specifically her womb—"Alien 3" feels more purely feminist than the previous two movies, for all their innovative images of a badass heroine fighting bugs whose bodies fused male and female genitalia into a Freudian nightmare. In the first movie, she's fighting to save her crew. In the second, she's fighting to save a little girl, and in so doing, embracing her own latent potential for motherhood; the climactic action scene even brings her face-to-face with another mother, the alien queen, in an egg chamber. These are all engaging, relatable motivations, but they're culturally conservative, because they play on the traditional image of woman as potential victim or maternal protector. In "Alien 3," Ripley is fighting for Ripley, period. She has to. Nobody else will fight for her. She's been betrayed and abandoned by everyone and everything she ever valued. She's shattered by grief, staring numbly out at a universe that barely seems worth saving. She has allies but no protectors—nor, it seems, does she expect any, not after enduring so much suffering en route to this hellhole. The film's unexpectedly powerful final sequence flips the ending of Cameron's "Aliens" on its head. The second movie closed with an image of Ripley in hypersleep alongside her "daughter" Newt, with her potential mate Hicks slumbering nearby: a fairy tale image of a (makeshift) nuclear family, heartwarming in an almost Spielbergian way. The climax of "Alien 3" shows Ripley leaping into a firey pit to destroy the murderous "baby" inside of her. When it tears out of her gut anyway, she grabs it and holds it close to make sure it burns. Her pose evokes a mother cradling a newborn."

"Reviews were generally unkind to the film that eventually made it to theaters, calling it stylish but shallow. Variety described Alien 3 as “a muddled effort that offers little more than visual splendor to recommend it,” while the New York Times complained that the film was too dark and too implausible. The third installment in the franchise “is nothing to scream about,” wrote a critic for the Washington Post."

"Alien 3 is very much a David Fincher film, as distinctly the product of his dark and twisted imagination as Seven (film)|Seven]] or Zodiac or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Just as the icy survivalism of Alien helped set the tone for Ridley Scott’s career, and the guns-blazing ferocity of Aliens helped pave the way for James Cameron’s later work, Alien 3 works as a setup for the rest of David Fincher’s films. It’s nihilistic and misanthropic, bleak and despairing, slickly shot and bathed in ragged industrial gloom. It’s a big-budget movie about human frailty and the inevitability of death in which the characters are never particularly likable or heroic and the protagonist dies at the end. As in Seven], the ending is a shock downer. As in Fight Club, the character relationships are built from a series of existential dialogues. As in Panic Room, the story is driven by the need to use one’s surroundings to survive what is essentially a home invasion. The alien of Alien 3 is, in a way, Fincher’s first serial killer."

"Visually, Alien 3 may be the most distinctive entry in the franchise. Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, whose work on Blade Runner defined a certain decaying urban sci-fi aesthetic, had to quit after a short time on the job. But the final work by British photographer Alex Thomson is stunning in its own way. Backgrounds are textured with steam columns, damp surfaces, and sharp beams of light that give the sets a textured physicality. For much of the film, the camera lingers close to the floor, pointed up, as if to emphasize the close confines of the prison space and the impossibility of escape. Beyond the visuals, Alien 3 also excels as an exercise in imaginative world building. Its lonely prison planet is as richly detailed and lived-in an environment as the industrial corridors of Alien or the abandoned mining colony of Aliens. Its sequestered society, in which a religious contingent effectively runs the prison while a small group of overseers struggles to maintain a facade of control, is as nuanced a cinematic sociology as the corporate power structures that drove the first film, or the military conventions that powered the second. Like its predecessors, Alien 3 is an exploration of human power dynamics in a confined setting and the limits of institutional control. Fincher, in other words, put his own particular stamp on the tropes that animate the Alien franchise: He took the ideas that Scott and Cameron had developed and remade them in his own image. His ideas may be too bleak, too gloomy, too misanthropic for some, but they are clearly his, and in Alien 3 they are presented as forcefully as ever."

"Full of clanging corridors, belching furnaces and ravaging monsters, the cavernous maze-world of “Alien 3" (citywide) is not only seemingly the last stop for the entire “Alien” series—it looks like civilization’s last stop as well. In a way, that’s what this erratic, ambitious super-thriller is about. It’s not just the ultimate duel between Sigourney Weaver’s beleaguered Ripley and the kill-crazy extraterrestrials that have chased her through three hellacious movies, it’s about running into the ultimate cul-de-sac."

"“Alien 3" isn’t a classy, visionary nightmare like Ridley Scott’s 1979 “Alien” and it’s not really a hell-for-leather, super-tech toboggan ride like James Cameron’s 1986 “Aliens.” It has a different mood than either of its predecessors, and a different look: stylish but gloomy, portentously grim. It does succeed in rounding the three movies off, not smashingly but interestingly."

"Fincher has good designers and a great cinematographer—Alex Thomson, who lit “Excalibur” for John Boorman—and he’s obviously trying for something closer to Scott’s “Alien” than Cameron’s. A rock video specialist, he wants eerie Gothic chic instead of a slam-bang, cleanly lit apocalypse; he wants his images to have a shine, a pizazz, a depth. But, although “Alien 3" is stylish—and ambitious—the movie doesn’t have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom."

"The underlying theme of all the “Alien” movies, the distant glossy ancestors of Howard Hawks’ 1951 “The Thing,” is the rot in the technology, bugs-against-machines. In a way, this “Alien” capstone is about the end of everything, a technological and spiritual meltdown—which, considering the social and governmental breakdowns all around us, may be appropriate to 1992. But, however much it tries, the movie can’t escape the bugs in its own machine: the money-driven monsters that keep driving it into infernal cul-de-sacs."

"Sigourney Weaver - Ellen Ripley"

"Charles S. Dutton - Dillon"

"Charles Dance - Jonathan Clemens"

"Brian Glover - Harold Andrews"

"Ralph Brown - Aaron"

"Paul McGann - Golic"

"Danny Webb - Morse"

"Pete Postlethwaite - David"

"Holt McCallany - Junior"

"Peter Guinness - Gregor"

"Clive Mantle - William"

"DeObia Oparei - Arthur"

"Phil Davis - Kevin"

"Niall Buggy - Eric"

"Christopher Fairbank - Murphy"

"Lance Henriksen - Michael Bishop (Bishop II)"

"If you can't get out, get even."

"Adam Sandler as Paul "Wrecking" Crewe"

"Chris Rock as James "Caretaker" Farrell"

"Burt Reynolds as Coach Nate Scarborough"

"Nelly as Earl Megget"

"Michael Irvin as Deacon Moss"

"Bill Goldberg as Joey "Battle" Battaglio"

"Terry Crews as "Cheeseburger" Eddy"

"Bob Sapp as Switowski"

"Nicholas Turturro as Brucie"

"Dalip Singh as Turley"

"Lobo Sebastian as Torres"

"Joey Diaz as Big Tony"

"Rob Schneider as Plunky"

"David Patrick Kelly as Unger"

"Eddie Bunker as Doc "Skitchy" Rivers"

"Steve Reevis as "Baby Face" Bob Rainwater"

"Tracy Morgan as Miss Tucker"

"James Cromwell as Warden Rudolph Hazen"

"William Fichtner as Cpt. Wilhem Knauer"

"Kevin Nash as Sgt. Engleheart"

"Steve Austin as Guard Dunham"

"Brian Bosworth as Guard Garner"

"Michael Papajohn as Guard Papajohn"

"Conrad Goode as Guard Webster"

"Bill Romanowski as Guard Lambert"

"Cloris Leachman as Lynette Grey"

"Allen Covert as Referee"

"Jim Rome as Himself"

"Chris Berman as Himself"

"Lauren Sanchez as Herself"

"Patrick Bristow as Walt"

"Adam Schefter as Himself"

"Peter King as Himself"

"Courteney Cox as Lena (uncredited)"

"Dan Patrick as Police Officer"

"The most important thing to remember is: to protect your quarterback - ME!"

"You know what my problem has been all my life? I've always had my shit together. Always. My problem's been I couldn't lift it."

"Alright men, now here's the play we're gonna use. I don't think the guards know this formation. It's called 'incidental punishment after the ball is blown dead.' Remember, any man you tackle gets an elbow, knee, or kick in the mouth."

"First Down...And Ten Years To Go."

"It's Survival of the Fiercest and Funniest"

"Burt Reynolds - Paul "Wrecking" Crewe"

"Eddie Albert - Warden Hazen"

"Ed Lauter - Captain Knauer"

"Michael Conrad - Nate Scarboro"

"James Hampton - Caretaker"

"Harry Caesar - Granville"

"John Steadman - Pop"

"Charles Tyner - Unger"

"Mike Henry - Rassmeusen"

"Jim Nicholson - Ice Man"

"Bernadette Peters - Warden's Secretary"

"Joe Kapp - Walking Boss"

"Richard Kiel - Samson"

"Robert Tessier - Connie Shokner"

"Ray Nitschke - Bogdanski"

"George A. Jones - Big George"

"[To Elya Yelnats] You must carry Madame Zeroni up the mountain and sing while I drink so I can get strong, too. [Laughing] But if you forget to come back for Madame Zeroni, you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity."

"[To Stanley Yelnats IV] You're no fan of mine"

"[Repeated line] Excuse me?"

"[When Armpit tries to pass off a stove knob as something he found] Are you trying to be funny, or do you just think I'm stupid?"

"[to Mr. Sir after scratching him with her nails that had nail polish made with rattlesnake venom] I liked you better when you smoked."

"It's all because of your no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather!"

"I'm not stupid. I know everyone thinks I am. I just don't like answering stupid questions."

"Sigourney Weaver as The Warden"

"Jon Voight as Mr. Sir"

"Patricia Arquette as Kissin' Kate Barlow"

"Tim Blake Nelson as Dr. Pendanski"

"Dulé Hill as Sam"

"Shia LaBeouf as Stanley Yelnats IV who has all sorts of criminal records."

"Henry Winkler as Stanley’s Father, Stanley Yelnats III who was stuck with the Cable Guy."

"Nathan Davis as Stanley Yelnats II who is about to get executed for his sex crimes."

"Rick Fox as Clyde "Sweet Feet" Livingston"

"Scott Plank as Trout Walker"

"Roma Maffia as Carla Morengo"

"Eartha Kitt as Madame Zeroni"

"Siobhan Fallon Hogan as Stanley’s Mother"

"Khleo Thomas as Hector Zeroni"

"Brenden Jefferson as X-Ray"

"Jake M. Smith as Squid"

"Byron Cotton as Armpit"

"Miguel Castro as Magnet"

"Max Kasch as Zigzag"

"Noah Poletiek as Twitch"

"Dax Shepard as John"

"Will Arnett as Nelson"

"Chi McBride as Barry"

"David Koechner as Shanahan"

"Dylan Baker as Warden"

"Michael Shannon as Lynard"

"David Darlow as Judge Biederman"

"Bob Odenkirk as Duane"

"A. J. Balance as John - 18 years"

"Tim Heidecker as wine tester"

"That's murder they're talking about in there. And if they condone it, how are you gonna turn around and tell these guys why they're locked up?"

"I don't get men like you, you're dangerous men. You start wars and then let other people fight them for you. You come in and say 'do this, do that, think like this, become this kind of person', you put a sign in somebody's hand and say 'follow me, I have all the answers', but all you do is get people killed!"

"You can't reform the system if you're not in it"

"The most wanted man in Wakefield prison is the warden!"

"One man against a cruel system."

"Robert Redford - Henry Brubaker"

"Yaphet Kotto - Richard 'Dickie' Coombes"

"Jane Alexander - Lillian Gray"

"Murray Hamilton - John Deach"

"David Keith - Larry Lee Bullen"

"Morgan Freeman - Walter"

"Matt Clark - Roy Purcell"

"Tim McIntire - Huey Rauch"

"Richard Ward - Abraham Cook"

"M. Emmet Walsh - C.P. Woodward"

"Albert Salmi - Rory Poke"

"Linda Haynes - Carol"

"Everett McGill - Eddie Caldwell"

"Joe Spinell - Floyd Birdwell"

"Val Avery - Wendel"

"(about the plan, mildly amused) Don't ge me wrong. It's a dream vacation. I mean I load up. I go into space. I get inside the maximum-security nuthouse, save the President's daughter if she's not dead already. Get past all the psychos who've just woken up."

"(after giving Emilie a third shot) That'll freeze the nerves in this spot for 24 hours. You want some in your mouth?"

"Come on. It'll be fun."

"(as he's trying to save Emilie's life while the others remind him of time limit) You know the counting thing, not very relaxing."

"(to Emilie) Here'e an apple and a gun. Don't talk to strangers. Shoot them."

"(to Hydell) Do you dream while you're under?"

"(to Snow) Who are you? Who sent you?"

"What the hell are you doing?!"

"I thought you said your were sure."

"(to Snow about Mace) Now you're asking a crazy man where he hid a briefcase that you threw away in a crowded subway train?!"

"(to her father about the prison) Everyone is dead... blow this dump out of the sky!"

"(to Snow) You don't like me, do you?"

"Who was the mystery man on the phone?"

"Mr. President, there's been a massive take-over on MS-One."

"(about Snow) He's the best there is. But he's a loose cannon."

"Tell me what I can do to help you, Snow."

"We could send in one man. One man with one very specific order. To get Emilie Warnock out."

"Nobody smokes anymore, Snow."

"Snow, this is no time to be hanging around!"

"We can send in one man with one very specific order."

"Look at you. Death is looking down your neck, and you're playing your little male come-on games."

"I want the last face you see in this world to be the face of love, so you look at me when they do this thing. I'll be the face of love for you."

"Ain't nobody with money on death row."

"It's quiet. Only three days left. Plenty of time to read my Bible and look for a loophole."

"I just wanna say I think killin' is wrong, no matter who does it, whether it's me or y'all or your government."

"They won't care if you shot the gun. They'll be thinking of the crime. And of you as a monster. It's easy to kill a monster but hard to kill a human being."

"State trooper: I never gave a ticket to a nun before. I gave a ticket to a guy from the IRS one time. Got audited the next year. I'll tell you what, this time I'll let this one slide, but keep your speed down, yeah?"

"Susan Sarandon - Sister Helen Prejean"

"Sean Penn - Matthew Poncelet"

"Margo Martindale - Sister Colleen"

"Robert Prosky - Hilton Barber"

"Lois Smith - Helen's mother"

"Jack Black - Craig Poncelet"

"Celia Weston - Mary Beth Percy"

"Raymond J. Barry - Earl Delacroix"

"R. Lee Ermey - Clyde Percy"

"Michael Cullen - Carl Vitello"

"Scott Wilson - Chaplain Farlely"

"Roberta Maxwell - Lucille Poncelet"

"Peter Sarsgaard - Walter Delacroix"

"It's not the kind of work I want to do...It's too monotonous...No one seems to realize that I've changed, that I'm different now. I've been through hell. Folks here are concerned with my uniform, how I dance. I'm out of step with everybody. I was hoping to come home and start a new life - to be free, and again, I find myself under orders, a drab routine, cramped, mechanically even worse than the Army. And you, all of you, trying your darndest to map out my future, to harness me and lead me around to do what you think is best for me. Doesn't it occur to you that I've grown? That I've learned that life is more important than a medal on my chest or a stupid, insignificant job."

"What would I say to a hamburger? Oh, boy. I'd shake Mr. Hamburger by the hand and say, 'Pal, I haven't seen you in a long, long time.'"

"The state's promise didn't mean anything. It was all lies! They just wanted to get me back so they can have their revenge, to keep me here nine more years. Why, their crimes are worse than mine, worse than anybody's here. They're the ones that should be in chains, not we!"

"[about the convicts' food] Grease, fried dough, pig fat, and sorghum. And you'd better get to like it, 'cause you're gonna get the same thing every morning, every year."

"You gotta ask their permission to wipe the sweat off...And in the first place, you got to get their permission to sweat."

"Well, there's just two ways to get outta here. Work out and die out."

"Marie Woods: I told you I was satisfied with the way things are...I'm happy. I'm taking no chances of letting you go. Hey, listen. You're gonna be a big-shot some day with plenty of sugar, and I'm gonna ride right along. Get that? I'm no fool. I'd be a sucker to let you go now."

"Newspaper Editorial: Shall we stand by while a man who has become a respected citizen of the community has the shadow of medieval torture again creeping over him? Must James Allen be sent back again to a living Hell? This is the question that Chicago officials must decide within the next few days."

"Rev. Allen: ...the story of James Allen as a human being - a man of essential fineness and integrity of character. A man who was decorated for bravery in the world war. A man who committed a crime, but only when forced to at the point of a gun. His first and only offense. A man who showed his true character by rising from less than nothing to become a prominent and honored citizen."

"Prison Board Chairman: The life of a convict in a chain gang is one of hard labor. The discipline is strict but there is no brutality. The purpose of prison is not only to punish crime but to discourage it. And there is less crime in this state in proportion to her population than into 40 other states in this Union. Finally, as evidence of the chain gang's value as a character builder, I have but to present to you the very case that has been presented to us today, the case of James Allen, who entered the chain gang as a worthless tramp, and who left it to become one of a great city's most worthy and respected citizens."

"Paul Muni - James Allen"

"Glenda Farrell - Marie Woods"

"Helen Vinson - Helen"

"Noel Francis - Linda"

"Preston Foster - Pete"

"Allen Jenkins - Convict Barney Sykes"

"Berton Churchill - The Judge"

"Edward Ellis - Convict Bomber Wells"

"David Landau - The Warden"

"Hale Hamilton - Reverend Robert Allen"

"Sally Blane - Alice"

"Louise Carter - Mother Allen"

"Willard Robertson - Prison Board Chairman"

"Robert McWade - Attorney F.E. Ramsey"

"Robert Warwick - Fuller"

"William Le Maire - The Texan"

"My only crime was saving a life. You call that treason?"

"[to Gaudet] Perhaps you'll lose some of that mutinous spirit when you get an axe and a saw in those soft hands."

"He escaped from a life worse than death . . . Devil's Island . . . the last haven of horror for the fiercest criminals on earth!"

"A Drama of Inhuman Cruelty!"

"Boris Karloff — Dr. Charles Gaudet"

"Nedda Harrigan — Madame Helene Lucien"

"James Stephenson — Colonel Armand Lucien"

"Adia Kuznetzoff — Pierre Leroux"

"Rolla Gourvitch — Collette Lucien"

"Will Stanton — Bobo"

"Edward Keane — Dr. Duval"

"Robert Warwick — Demonpre"

"Pedro de Cordoba — Marcal"

"Tom Wilson — Emil"

"John Harmon — Andre"

"This experiment... is over."

"You have no right to fuck with my head!"

"Blow it out your ass, Mr. Correctional Officer!"

"It's easy for you to say, 'Oh, I wouldn't have acted that way, but you don't know. That's - that's the truth. You don't know. And now, I know what I'm capable of, and it hurts."

"Billy Crudup - Dr. Philip Zimbardo"

"Michael Angarano - Christopher Archer/"John Wayne" Guard"

"Ezra Miller - Daniel Culp/Prisoner 8612"

"Tye Sheridan - Peter Mitchell/Prisoner 819"

"Thomas Mann - Prisoner 416"

"Miles Heizer - Marshal Lovett"

"Keir Gilchrist - John Lovett"

"Johnny Simmons - Jeff Jansen"

"Moises Arias - Anthony Caroll"

"Olivia Thirlby - Christina Maslach"

"Nelsan Ellis - Jesse Fletcher"

"James Wolk - Mike Pennyl"

"Gaius Charles - Paul Vogel"

"Logan Miller - Jerry"

"James Frecheville - Townshend"

"Ki Hong Lee - Gavin Chan"

"Matt Bennett - Kyle Parker"

"Jack Kilmer - Jim"

"Nicholas Braun - Karl Vandy"

"Brett Davern - Hubbie Whitlow"

"Jesse Carere - Paul"

"Gene Wilder as Skip Donahue"

"Richard Pryor as Harry Monroe"

"Georg Stanford Brown as Rory Schultebrand"

"JoBeth Williams as Meredith"

"Miguel Ángel Suárez as Jesus Ramirez"

"Craig T. Nelson as Deputy Ward Wilson"

"Barry Corbin as Warden Walter Beatty"

"Nicolas Coster as Warden Henry Sampson"

"Joel Brooks as Len Garber"

"Jonathan Banks as Jack Graham"

"Erland Van Lidth as Grossberger"

"Charles Weldon as Blade"

"Franklyn Ajaye as Young Man in Hospital"

"Cedrick Hardman as Big Mean"

"Luis Avalos as Chico"

"Grand L. Bush as Slowpoke"

"Herbert Hirschman as Man at Dinner Party"

"Dave Moore as Skip Donahue (stunts)"

"Mickey Jones as Guard #8"

"Billy Beck as Flycatching Prisoner"

"Lee Purcell as Susan"

"Tony Burton as Guy who Punches Big Mean (uncredited)"

"Al Silvani as Inmate (uncredited)"

"We will now have the role call. Those that are here will answer "present". Those that are not here will say "absent"."

"We will now have an intelligence test"(camera pans to his unintelligent pupils)"

"Their jail break is a riot! It will give you the time of your life."

"The world has been waiting for THEIR FIRST FULL LENGTH TALKING PICTURE"

"Mr. Hardy is a man of wonderful ideas—so is Mr. Laurel—as long as he doesn't try to think."

"Stan Laurel — Stan"

"Oliver Hardy — Ollie"

"June Marlowe — Warden's Daughter"

"Wilfred Lucas — Warden"

"James Finlayson — Schoolteacher"

"Walter Long — The Tiger"

"Tiny Sandford — Prison Guard"

"Charlie Hall — Dentist's Assistant"

"Mel Blanc as Bugs Bunny / Yosemite Sam / Warden"

"Ladies and gentlemen, a little while back, I had a kind of a vacation with a bunch of men in a big place way out yonder. And while I was there, well, these uh, these men, kind of guests, you might say, uh, we'd get together and horse around a little bit and sing and - 'cause we were havin' such a good time. And uh, we always had a lot of fun with this one: 'The Jailhouse Rock'."

"Elvis in Action as Never Before!"

"His first big dramatic singing role!"

"MGM Presents ELVIS PRESLEY at his greatest"

"M-G-M Presents Elvis Presley - Rebel of Song"

"Elvis Presley - Vince Everett"

"Judy Tyler - Peggy Van Alden"

"Mickey Shaughnessy - Hunk Houghton"

"Vaughn Taylor - Mr. Shores"

"Jennifer Holden - Sherry Wilson"

"Dean Jones - Teddy Talbot"

"August Diehl — Franz Jägerstätter"

"Valerie Pachner — Franziska Jägerstätter"

"Michael Nyqvist — Bishop Joseph Fliesser"

"Jürgen Prochnow — Major Schlegel"

"[Dictating to prompt] She had always known it was there, barely perceptible. A shadow behind her. But now... it was... as if the darkness... had swallowed her up. She became part of it now. Part of the... dark... [sighs staring at wall hologram of her transcribed speech and scrunches face tightly] it's rubbish! Erase session. [Wall hologram complies]"

"Shower... on? [Shower head turns on]"

"[To Rita after getting a bottle of wine] Everytime I fucking turn around!"

"[Rita confiscates wine bottle from her and pours it out] No, what are you doing?!"

"[To Rita] You saved my life."

"[To Rita] Can you meet me in the study?"

"[To Rita] It is completed!"

"[Answering machine] Hi, Claire, it's Alice again, urgently awaiting your call. I can't keep fobbing off the publishers."

"[Answering machine] Alice, it's friend as well as your agent. I know something's gone very wrong, but you have to find a way to deal with whatever this is. Get some help. Speak to a therapist, go to one of those retreat places. The publishers are spitting. You've got one month. Now ring me."

"[Website greeting] This is your invitation to the retreat, where your new chapter awaits you. So don't delay. Accept your invitation to receive your customized brochure. Welcome to the beginning of you."

"[Repeated line] Hello Claire. My name is Rita. I will be your assistant for the next 30 days. I am here to make your stay here as comfortable as possible and assist you in the completion of your work."

"[Repeated line] I can sense that you are distressed, Claire. Perhaps you should lie down."

"[Repeated line] I am fully equipped to handle all types of medical emergencies."

"[Repeated line] I apologize Claire. Let me clean that up for you."

"Your blood alcohol level is dangerously high."

"You are reaching dangerously high levels of alcohol poisoning. [Confiscates wine bottle and pours it down drain]"

"[Dumps bowl on floor to young Claire] Stop putting that poison in my food!"

"Your father was so sure you'd come out a boy. He wanted to give you his name. Sinclair. But when you came out, he... he was so disappointed. I told him we could still give you his name. Just drop the "sin" off, but you can never take away a sin. Ain't no hiding that. [Starts caressing Claire's chin] I'm the one that had to look at that pretty... pretty face... until I couldn't see no more. I'm the one that gets punished."

"[To Claire over stealing cigarettes] Do you think I can't count?"

"Rachel Shelley as Claire Rivers"

"Heida Reed as Rita"

"Wayne Brady as Henry"

"Annie Cusselle as Young Claire"

"Rebecca-Clare Evans as Helen Rivers"

"Bhasker Patel as Dr. Varma"