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Summary: Beautiful film - I'm still here you bastards!
Review: Very sad movie, but beautiful at the same time! Best performance by Steve McQueen.
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Summary: Great Story!
Review: Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman give excellent performances in this drama based on the true life story of Henri Charriere in the prison camp of French Guyana. Well scripted and filmed on location with a great score by Jerry Goldsmith, this movie is first rate and a must for fans of this entertainment. Action packed with heart stopping drama especially in Papillon's many attempts to escape, this move is non stop suspense!
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Summary: Return of The Cooler King
Review: Exciting, extremely entertaining film with McQueen giving possibly his best performance. Expert pacing and a brilliant, dramatic Jerry Goldsmith score are just two of the factors that contribute to this engrossing movie, with Steve desperately trying and repeatedly failing to escape from the dreaded Devil's Island, a hell-hole of a prison that continuously punishes him with horrific long-term spells in solitary confinement for his attempts at escape. Hoffman is the intelligent though physically weaker inmate whom he befriends. Not overlong by any means, though the final 15 minutes are a bit of a let-down, but apart from that this is essential viewing. It's bleak direction is also interesting I think to compare to that of The Great Escape to see just how films changed in ten years in almost every sense.
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Summary: Steve McQueen Gives the Performance of his Career
Review: Steve McQueen is Papillon. He will stop at nothing to escape from Devil's Island. Man is not an animal. Man has dignity. Man does not surrender when the odds seem insurmountable. This film is fascinating and long, but not long enough. McQueen gives a tour-de-force as this character going far beyond anyone ever gave him credit for. Unforgettable!
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Summary: The Details in Devil's Island
Review: It is odd that Franklin Schaffner, the director of PAPILLON, is not better known. Repeated financial success and an Academy Award would, one would think, draw attention to his work. His best films, of which PAPILLON is an example, are visually handsome and thematically sophisticated. While it may seem perverse to call a film elegant in which one character is guillotined in close-up, another maims himself with a knife (again, in close-up), another eats insects because he's on starvation rations, another vomits in extended detail then gets beaten for it, and on and on, it is nonetheless the most appropriate word to describe the effect of Schaffner's coolly understated style.Such incidents are neither sensationalistic nor unmotivated, but you can be forgiven for thinking that PAPILLON is an escape film in which the filmmakers have mixed feelings about getting their hero out of jail. The escape scenes have snap, but it is clear that Schaffner is far more interested in prison life in French Guyana. The prison camp was meticulously reconstructed for the film and we are spared few details of its functioning. As if to prove just how exact the sets are, shots of the ruins of the prison appear under the end credits so we can compare them to their surrogates in the film. Such literal mindedness hampers Schaffner in the embarrassingly stolid dream sequences. When focused on the rhythms of the everyday, however, the method is almost abstractly precise. Close to a half hour is devoted to Charrière's solitary confinement, for example, yet as the camera moves back and forth relentlessly in the tiny cell with McQueen, Schaffner makes the sequences harrowing and compelling. You might prefer to be elsewhere, but you're never bored. (On the other hand, during the film's one respite, an extended sequence without dialogue when McQueen is taken in by a group of Central American pearl divers, you don't want to be anywhere else, you want to sign up.) Schaffner was something like an American David Lean. They shared a similar Monumental Realism, a flair for widescreen composition and a fascination with the interactions between character and history. (Schaffner's films tend to be a bit more emphatically about power. The screenplay for PAPILLON, for example, was co-written by ex-Communist Dalton Trumbo, and his THE BEST MAN focuses on a political convention.) Perhaps with a re-make of PLANET OF THE APES on the way, his work will draw more attention. Films like PAPILLON prove they are more than worth it.
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Summary: Great Character Study by McQUEEN but much Too Long
Review: I felt this film had two great things going for it: Steve McQueen's performance and a beautiful and dramatic score composed by Jerry Goldsmith. McQueen's performance here as Papillon is much different from that of his "Cooler King" Hilts in THE GREAT ESCAPE. Here he is much more world-weary with no signs of flamboyancy but still determined and dogged. I felt McQueen's full potential in this film was hindered by the script which had his character linked to Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman) a mild-mannered counterfeiter who Papillon agrees to protect if he will finance an escape. There is just no screen chemistry between McQueen and Hoffman. In many of his films McQueen was essentially a loner with his own agenda (HELL IS FOR HEROES, THE CINCINNATI KID, BULLITT, THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR). In his best roles McQueen was still the loner but he usually came through in the end either through self realization of his humanity or at the expense of his own ideals and/or his life (THE SAND PEBBLES, THE GREAT ESCAPE, SOLDIER IN THE RAIN, NEVADA SMITH). That is why the best part of this film is when McQueen is put in solitary confinement. Here we really see Steve McQueen the loner. Solitary confinement does not break him; it only strengthens his resolve to escape. Even though I liked Steve McQueen's performance as the unbreakable human spirit he represented I just never liked this film. This film is based on the novel by Henri Charriere supposedly based on true experiences. I don't see McQueen as the character Charriere wrote about. Frankly McQueen's talents are too good for this role. McQueen gives Papillon more depth than all the other characters in the film. Also McQueen's performance tremendously outweighs the script which is very plodding and just goes on too long. The film however did contain other good performances from Anthony Zerbe, Don Gordon, Bill Mumy and Gregory Sierra. Franklin J. Schaffner (THE BEST MAN, PLANET OF THE APES, PATTON and the underrated classic ISLANDS IN THE STREAM) directed the film.
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Summary: phenomenal performances by all
Review: This is an incredible movie. I saw it for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Half the time I had to turn my head and look away and half the time I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. Incredible endurance and fortitude and undying friendship. McQueen and Hoffman give performances you will never be able to forget. This is hardly a feel-good movie, but it's not a complete downer, either. Bleak, yet hopeful... and a beautifully presented story.
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Summary: MCQUEEN AT HIS FINEST!
Review: This movie is the best example of Steve McQueen's acting skills, bar none. Everyone who thought he was a one note player should look close and hard at this magnificent film. The chemistry between McQueen and Dustin Hoffman is a real tear-jearker. This should have been McQueen's Oscar, but he was not one to kiss anybody's butt for the statue. For me, this is a true tale of the survival spirit, really better than the GREAT ESACPE as far as serious pathos is concerned. Let's not forget Dustin Hoffman's character Dega. This was a composite of several people in the book. The final scene on the cliff should go down as a classic moment in cinema. Steve, we miss you!
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Summary: fluttering towards an oscar - surely
Review: I've seen Papillon three or four times now, and every time I watch it, it improves. Surely this is Steve's best acting performance. The second scene in the prison cell is surely one that has been mimicked time and time again in films over the years. Such an impression the film had on me that I have backed a racehorse four times with the name Papillon in the last few years. Readers in the UK will know that Papillon won the grand national this year, no one knows how Steve never won the oscar for his performance.
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Summary: A DVD review
Review: An extremely well done video transfer to DVD, especially for a movie of this age. Some newer movie transfers to DVD have a lot of scratches and blotches. Some interesting documentaries featuring the person the movie was based on. Probably the best value on DVD around.
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