Tag: Papillon

TIFF17 REVIEW: Papillon [2018]

Jared Mobarak

“I have trouble seeing hope in hopelessness” It’s amazing how some tweaking can turn a decent film showing its age into a worthwhile project that earns its upgrade four decades later. To watch Franklin J. Schaffner‘s original Papillon adaptation is to see an arduous series of harrowing ordeals strung together for no reason other than the thrill of adventure. It introduces the titular tough guy safecracker Henri “Papillon” Charrière and scrawny forger Louis Dega as two men caught in a horrible place with little hope. They team-up in order to…

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REVIEW: Papillon [1973]

Jared Mobarak

“Blame is for God and small children” While Henri Charriere‘s account of his incarceration and escape from the penal colony known as French Guiana has a contentious history as far as it being an autobiography or novel of historical fiction, such debate is inconsequential to Franklin J. Schaffner‘s cinematic adaptation Papillon. Whether or not what we see actually happened has no bearing on our enjoyment of its so-called “Greatest Adventure of Escape!” What we watch are the harrowing years of men convicted (falsely or not) of heinous crimes that deserve…

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