The Birdman of Leavenworth

During Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran The Birdman of Alcatraz; not having done a blog post on it before, I decided to DVR it. It's going to be on again tomorrow (Sept. 12) at 2:00 PM, so I watched it to do a post on here.

Burt Lancaster plays Robert Stroud, a man who was sent to federal prison for manslaughter in 1909 because he had the great bad luck of being from the Alaska Territory, which didn't have its own judicial system at the time. In 1912 he was transferred to the Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas, which is where the story in the movie opens.

Stroud, under warden Harvey Shoemaker (Karl Malden), isn't exactly rehabilitating, instead being a constant irritation. This culminates in an incident with a prison guard during one of the meal times when Stroud stabs the guard to death, which is declared murder. He's sentenced to death, but his mother Elizabeth (Thelma Ritter) comes to Stroud's aid, eventually going to Washington DC to try to get an audience with President Wilson, who unfortunately had suffered his stroke, so Elizabeth could only be seen by Mrs. Wilson.

Still, Elizabeth is able to get somebody in the administration to have sympathy, such that the sentence is commuted to life in prison. But there's a catch, which is that like all people awaiting execution, Stroud was in a form of solitary confinement that, although unlike the stereotypical dark cell of the movies, mean he was in his cell 23 hours a day and had almost no contact with other prisoners. The commutation said that Stroud was to remain in solitary confinement until his sentence could be carried out, which is technically never. Shoemaker sees to it that Stroud isn't going to get out of solitary.

One day, during one of Stroud's exercise hours in the courtyard, a storm comes up breaking several tree branches. One of those branches hass a bird's nest with a baby sparrow in it. Stroud takes that orphaned bird back to his cell and nurses the bird back to health. This leads to Stroud getting a couple of canaries, with other prisoners (including one played by Telly Savalas who earned an Oscar nomination for his role) getting canaries too. But an avian illness strikes, and the birds start dying. Stroud has to do what research he can on the illness and guess at remedies, eventually finding one.

This brings him some notoriety outside of the walls of the penitentiary, as he's been writing letters and articles to a bird lovers' magazine. One of his readers wonders about this mysterious Stroud, eventually writing and finding out that Stroud is in fact a prisoner at Leavenworth. A new federal Bureau of Prisons is formed, threatening to take away Stroud's birds, and this woman, Stella Johnson (Betty Field) and Elizabeth start another publicity campaign to save Stroud's birds. As part of the campaign, Stella marries Robert, which absolutely pisses Elizabeth off (one wonders what sort of relationship mother and son had in real life, as apparently Mrs. Stroud really did cut off all relations with her son after this marriage).

The denouement of it all is that Stroud does lose his birds when he gets transferred to Alcatraz (Wikipedia claims it's because some of the scientific equipment he'd been allowed to procure was being used as a distillery, something the movie obviously completely overlooks), where he meets warden Shoemaker again. No birds here, although Stroud would eventually be called the "Birdman of Alcatraz" when a writer named Tom Gaddis (Edmond O'Brien) wrote the book by that title.

In some ways, there's not a whole lot going o in The Birdman of Alcatraz, which shouldn't be surprising, since Robert Stroud spent 40-some years in solitary confinement of one form or another. So we get a lot of confined sets in which not a whole lot can happen. Instead, this is a movie for the performances, which are uniformly quite good. Lancaster is excellent as Stroud, and Thelma Ritter earned her sixth and final Supporting Actress in a much darker role than normal as Stroud's mother. Malden is also quite good.

The movie's only drawback is that it runs right around two and a half hours; considering the relatively limited subject material, a script clocking in at about two hours probably could have been written. Even then, the movie doesn't really feel like it's going on a long time, which is down to the strong performances.

The Birdman of Alcatraz did get a DVD release, although the TCM Shop claims it's on backorder.