Escape from Alcatraz

January 1960. A prison launch crosses San Francisco Bay through the rain, and a quiet, watchful man named Frank Morris is delivered to Alcatraz. He is stripped, searched and marched down a corridor of staring cells to a bare concrete box. Later he is taken to the warden, a cold, precise man who trims his fingernails while he explains that the island takes the prisoners nobody else can hold, and that nobody has ever escaped from it and nobody ever will. Morris says almost nothing. He leaves the office with the warden's nail clippers in his hand.

Life settles into routine and threat. Morris makes friends: English, a Black inmate serving two life sentences who runs the library and keeps his own counsel; Litmus, a cheerful older man with a weak heart; and Doc, who paints portraits and grows chrysanthemums in the yard. He also makes an enemy — Wolf, who corners him in the showers and later comes at him in the yard with a blade. Both men go to solitary.

The warden's power is absolute and petty. When he sees that Doc's portrait of him is unflattering, he takes away the old man's paints. Doc, who has nothing else, goes to the workshop and cuts off his own fingers. As he is led away he presses a chrysanthemum into Morris's hand. Morris understands what the island is really for: not to hold men, but to erode them, quietly, until they stop.

Alone in his cell, Morris notices something small. The concrete around the ventilation grille at the back of the cell is soft; decades of salt air have been eating the building from the inside. He scrapes it with a spoon, and it gives.

Then chance hands him the rest of a plan. Two brothers, John and Clarence Anglin — bank robbers he knew years earlier — arrive on the island, and their cells are on the same tier. Charley Butts, next door, becomes the fourth man. Night after night, under the cover of Morris's accordion, they dig with sharpened spoons, the stolen nail clippers and a drill improvised from the motor of a broken vacuum cleaner. Painted cardboard grilles hide the holes at inspection time. The work is slow, secret and meticulous.

Above the cells lies a forgotten space at the top of the block, and there they build the rest of it: dummy heads moulded from soap and paper and finished with real human hair from the barbershop, so that the beds will look occupied; life vests and a raft stitched together out of dozens of stolen raincoats. Meanwhile the warden keeps tightening his grip. He crushes the chrysanthemum that Morris has set on a dining table in Doc's honour, and Litmus, protesting, collapses and dies. It is clear that nobody is coming to help these men.

On the night of 11 June 1962 the four men wait for lights out. Morris pushes out his grille, then the Anglins push out theirs; the dummy heads go onto the pillows, and the three slip into the utility corridor behind the cells. Butts cannot get out. He panics, works at his own wall far too late, and by the time he is through, the others are gone. He climbs back onto his bunk and lies there in the dark, listening.

The three climb the pipework to the roof, cross it between the sweeps of the searchlights, slide down a vent pipe to the ground, and go over the perimeter fences to the water on the north-east shore. They inflate the raft and push out into the bay. The camera simply lets them go into the darkness. That is the last we see of them.

In the morning a guard taps a sleeping head and it rolls onto the floor. The alarm goes. The warden, hunting for proof that his island beat them, lands on nearby Angel Island and finds shreds of raincoat and a few personal effects — planted, one of his officers suggests, so that the world will believe the men drowned. Then he sees something else in the grass: a chrysanthemum, of a kind that does not grow there. He crushes it and throws it into the water. A closing card tells us that the men were never found, and that Alcatraz closed less than a year later.

The mechanics in the film are close to the record. Over roughly six months the men widened the ventilation openings beneath their washbasins using discarded saw blades found on the prison grounds, metal spoons from the mess hall and a drill improvised from the motor of a broken vacuum cleaner. They hid the damage behind painted cardboard and masked the noise with Morris's accordion. On the unused top tier above the cells they set up a workshop.

The dummy heads were real, and were made from a paste of soap, toothpaste, concrete dust and toilet paper, painted and finished with human hair collected from the prison barbershop. So were the vests and the raft: more than fifty raincoats, sewn by hand, sealed with liquid plastic and heat from the steam pipes, and worked up from designs in Popular Mechanics, with paddles cut from plywood. They inflated the raft with a concertina taken from another prisoner and converted into a bellows. Then they climbed a ventilation shaft to the roof, went down some fifteen metres of kitchen vent pipe, crossed two barbed-wire fences and reached the north-east shore — a blind spot in the searchlights, near the power plant. It was an audacious plan built out of nothing but patience and ingenuity.

Three days later a Coast Guard cutter picked up a paddle floating roughly 180 metres off the southern shore of Angel Island, and workers on another boat recovered a wallet wrapped in plastic containing names, addresses and photographs of the Anglins' family and friends. On 21 June a home-made life vest washed up on Cronkite Beach, outside the Golden Gate. No raft was ever recovered. No bodies were ever recovered either.

The FBI worked the case for seventeen years and closed its file on 31 December 1979 — the same year the film was released. Its conclusion was that the three most probably drowned in the cold water of the bay: the debris suggested the raft had broken up, and investigators found no later crimes, no contact with families and no credible evidence of survival. The evidence was handed to the US Marshals Service, and that investigation has never been closed; in 2022 the Marshals released age-progressed images of all three men, by then notionally in their nineties. For the wider record: across the island's 29 years as a federal prison, 36 men made 14 escape attempts. Twenty-three were recaptured, six were shot dead and two drowned. Five — these three among them — are still officially listed as missing and presumed drowned.

In 2014 a Dutch team — the coastal scientist Fedor Baart of the research institute Deltares and the hydrologist Rolf Hut of Delft University of Technology — ran the escape through a detailed computer model of the tides and currents of San Francisco Bay. Their answer was startlingly specific: the hour was everything. Launch much before 11.30 p.m. and the current would have dragged the raft straight out towards the open Pacific, where cold water would have finished it. Launch well after midnight and it would have been pushed into the East Bay, to be recaptured at dawn or killed by exposure. But in the narrow window between about 11.30 p.m. and midnight, a raft leaving that north-east shore and paddled north would have been carried out towards the Golden Gate and could have landed near Horseshoe Bay, on the shore just north of the bridge. The team also noted that a paddle abandoned at Horseshoe Bay would drift to roughly where the real paddle was found. Hut's own summary of the range of outcomes was blunt: in the worst case, almost no chance; with the right hour and the right direction, almost a certainty.

The model does not say they lived. It says the escape was survivable — which is a different and more uncomfortable claim, and it is not conclusive either way.

In 2018 it emerged that San Francisco police had received a letter in 2013 from a writer claiming to be John Anglin, saying the other two were dead and offering to surrender in exchange for treatment for cancer. The FBI examined it for fingerprints, DNA and handwriting; the results were inconclusive, neither confirming nor ruling out the writer. The US Marshals treated it as a hoax. In more than sixty years there has been no verified sighting of any of the three men and no identified remains — only speculation, which has never once become evidence.

Siegel shot the film on Alcatraz itself and stayed close to the mechanics — but he changed the people. The warden is entirely invented, a single cold antagonist created for the film, partly to avoid legal trouble; the real wardens of that period were Paul Madigan and Olin Blackwell. Doc's mutilation is borrowed from someone else: an inmate named Rufe Persful, who cut off his fingers with a hatchet in 1937, long before Morris arrived. And Charley Butts is a substantial rewrite of Allen West. In the film he is a nervous newcomer who loses his nerve; in life, West had been on the island since 1957, had a record of violence and repeated escape attempts, and always claimed the plan had been his idea. The film needs Morris to be the sole mastermind. The record is messier.

One last correction, because it is the thing people most often get wrong. Alcatraz did close on 21 March 1963, less than a year after the escape, exactly as the film's closing card says. But it did not close because three men got off it. It closed because it was ruinously expensive to run — around $10 a day per prisoner in 1959, against about $3 at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta — and because five decades of salt air and salt water had eroded the concrete so badly that millions of dollars of restoration were needed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered it shut. The escape was a humiliation; the building bill was the reason.