Great escapism
DIRECTOR Franklin Schaffner does not flinch from showing every horror of the French penal system in Papillon (Pearl, 9.30 pm), the authentically brutal film about the escape from Devil's Island of notorious felon Henri 'Papillon' Charriere (Steve McQueen). The theme is not crime and punishment, but man's inhumanity to man. Schaffner pushes our noses in ordure from the start, and leaves them there.
Papillon was a costly film, with McQueen's salary a reported US$2 million and Hoffman's - he plays the big-time swindler who is marked for death because other criminals know he still has money stashed away - more than US$1 million. The overall price tag for this excellent prison saga exceeded $13 million, but it gleaned $13 million in the US alone. You may remember it being shown as recently as 1990 at what was the Palace Theatre in Causeway Bay.
The story - adapted from Charriere's autobiography by Dalton Trumbo, himself a cult figure with a cameo in the film as a penal colony commandant - begins in the dingy streets of Marseille in the 1930s, with French soldiers escorting a group of prisoners to the docks for their journey to the colonies. Among them are McQueen, a convicted murderer, and Hoffman. Once in Cayenne, McQueen thinks only about escape. He attacks a guard, gets away and is captured. He does the same, and is once again captured, spending most of his time in solitary confinement, where he staves off starvation, disease and madness.
The final escape attempt seems like one too many and turns out to be just as harrowing as life on the inside. There is nothing chirpy about Papillon. You will enjoy it, in the much the same way you might enjoy necessary surgery.
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (World, 9.30 pm) has Asian interest, with Ingrid Bergman as the English servant girl who does great things in China as a missionary. Everyone is sensationally miscast, but somehow it works - even with Wales standing in for China.
THERE are two stories in Inside Story (World, 8 pm), the current affairs programme edited and hosted by Susan Yu. The first looks at the mysterious deaths of young recruits in Taiwan's military. The military says the recruits had inflicted injuries upon themselves. The parents and the public says it's a cover up.