Pop Culture 101 - PAPILLON

Devil's Island has figured prominently in a number of movies over the years: Humphrey Bogart in Passage to Marseille (1944) and the comedy We're No Angels (1955), Escape from Devil's Island (1935), Boris Karloff in Devil's Island (1939), Clark Gable and Joan Crawford in Strange Cargo (1940), the infamous Dreyfus case in I Accuse! (1958) and I Escaped from Devil's Island (1973), among others.

Prison movies have long been a staple of action/suspense films, and often involve exciting escape attempts. Steve McQueen starred in one of the most famous, The Great Escape (1963). Others who have memorably made a break (with varying degrees of success) include Robert Donat in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) and Jim Caviezel in the 2002 remake, Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones (1958), Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Clint Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz (1979). The animated film Chicken Run (2000) spoofed various elements of the genre.



An Italian movie, Farfallon (1974), was in some ways a spoof of Papillon, transformed into a domestic murder comedy. "Farfallo" is the Italian word for butterfly.

by Rob Nixon