Introduction

"I want all this cleared up before the warden gets back," is Hadley’s response to the arrival of books from the state: a cold, unfeeling response. Wiley, however, says, "Good for you, Andy."

• 
  So there is some humanity in some of the guards.
  

• 
  A character moment: he is persistent. A lovely contrast: Wiley sits in the toilet reading a Jughead comic, while Andy finds a boxed set of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. The difference in education, intelligence and refinement!
  

• 
  The music is beautiful and uplifting, the antithesis of prison life. Women have arrived in Shawshank!
  

• 
  An effective lifting crane shot gives a bird’s eye view of everyone stock-still. The shot symbolises the soaring of the prisoners’ spirits.
  
• 
  The music breaks the routine of prison life; it transcends the day-to-day numbness.
  

• 
  We see an alternative to the brutal "rehabilitation" offered at Shawshank.
  

"You’re mine now," boasts Hadley. "Two weeks in the hole for that little stunt."

It fails to break Andy’s happiness. He returns to eat with the men.

"Ah, Maestro!" Heywood says, "You couldn’t play something good, hey, Hank Williams?"

"They broke the door down before I could take requests!" says Andy light-heartedly.

Red used to "play a mean harmonica" on the outside. "Lost interest in it though." Here "it didn’t seem to make much sense."

Alternating over the shoulder shots bind the two together. "Here’s where it makes the most sense," replies Andy.

Red has given up hope: "Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing."

Solemn, slow horns and strings play mournfully, reflecting Red’s mood. He clashes down his cutlery in frustration – he’s not getting through to Andy.

BLACK

1957: Red is brought before the parole board for his annual review after 30 years as an inmate serving a life sentence - and again is rejected. Andy has served 10 years of his own sentence: "You wonder where it went. I wonder where ten years went." Andy presents Red with a "parole-rejection present" - a harmonica - something Red played as a younger man but then lost interest for in prison.

"You going to play it?"

Red is touched, but, "No. Not right now."

Andy also receives "a new girl" for his 10-year anniversary – the iconic poster of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (1955), astride a subway grating with her dress blowing up. In the dark anonymity of his cell, Red holds the harmonica briefly to his mouth and only dares to blow into it once - he reacts by gripping it inside his clenched hand.

1959: When a work crew knocks through a wall during the library expansion and creates a huge gaping hole through which light shines, Red narrates how the State Appropriations Committee voted an annual payment of $500 to Andy on account of his persistent letter-writing campaign to improve prison life: "And you'd be amazed how far Andy could stretch it. He made deals with book clubs, charity groups, he bought remaindered books by the pound." The convicts sort through the books for the new library to be named: Brooks Hatlen Memorial Library. Heywood mispronounces "The Count of Monte Crisco - by Alexander Dumb-Ass." (Dumas) The Count of Monte Cristo is about a prison escape, so Red says it should be filed under "Educational." By 1964, "Andy had transformed the storage room smelling of rat turds and turpentine into the best prison library in New England, complete with a fine selection of Hank Williams" - Heywood's favourite singer.

Warden Norton announces his famous "Inside-Out programme" to the media:

We see Norton leafing through the banknotes offered with a pie from a businessman, Ned, who will go under if he does not get a highway contract. Norton assures him that his men "are committed elsewhere." They are clearing trees and loading logs.

He orders Andy to get his suits and shirts to the laundry - last time they put too much starch in the shirts and he warns them that they’ll hear about it if it happens again. Norton hands Ned’s wife’s pie to Andy: "Woman can’t bake for shit."

Commentary

Red is up for a review after 30 years in the place. Barred doors slide back - a reprise of Red's earlier parole hearing; even the dialogue is pretty much the same. This time - 1957 - he is not so enthusiastic on convincing the board that he has been rehabilitated. He is not so sure he wants to be released after being rejected so often. He is rejected again. He appears very melancholy and depressed.

• 
  The pace of the film is very slow here. Critics held this as a fault (plus its length). But it mirrors the crawling of limitless time in their lives, with so little to brighten it up.
  

Andy has to hold Red’s note far away from his eyes; his vision is lengthening (presbyopia)

• 
  another subtle way of showing the march of time.
  

Fade to BLACK.

Andy breaks a hole in the library wall and light shines through the dust

• 
  symbolic of his breaking through the deadening oppression of prison routine
  
• 
  foreshadowing his final breakout
  

An overhead shot reveals journalists listening to Norton sanctimoniously addressing the media on the new Inside-Out programme. While he speaks, the camera is at a LOW ANGLE, the gaunt, grey tower of Shawshank rising behind him, reinforcing his power.

The programme is a scam for the warden – the real criminal – who skims money off the top from different building projects and accepts kickbacks for not using his "slave labour" to "underbid any contractor in town."

Norton has square heavy rimmed glasses, buttoned collar, and his cross has been replaced by a badge. Norton's rejection of the pie is typical of a man who makes sweeping judgements, and puts people into boxes. He despises all people, women as well as men. In fact, the pie looks very good.

Andy becomes an invaluable asset to the warden as he keeps the laundered, financial records; money is stashed in the wall safe, hidden, hypocritically behind his wife’s religious sampler! Norton makes sure Andy cannot see the combination number with which he opens the safe. An unusual shot peeps out of the safe at the two.

Norton treats Andy as a servant – foreshadowing for later when Andy will take his suit and tie.

Gives the pie away = the INPOINT of the next scene. Apple pie = so American, but here is used to cover a bribe.

Chapter 14: Fingers in most pies

Stacking books in the library, Andy and Red discuss the laundering. Red takes a piece of the pie and quips, "Got his finger in a lot of pies, what I hear." Andy's function is to camouflage the "river" of corrupt money:

INPOINT = Red eating some of the apple pie Norton despises – looks pretty good, too.

• 
  Andy’s first job was in the laundry; now he’s laundering money.
  

• 
  The audience is also left wondering why Andy is doing this – but, we learn later, it is all part of his grand plan.
  

With a "young wife and new baby girl," Tommy seeks Andy for help in fulfilling "a high school equivalency" education. Andy, who doesn't "waste time on losers," rejects Tommy's call for help until he promises "one-hundred percent - nothing half-assed."

To pass the "slow-time" of the prison, Andy adopts Tommy as his "new project" or disciple. As his mentor, he teaches him the alphabet to restore his hopes and dreams through education - it was "a thrill to help a youngster crawl off the shit-heap... In prison, a man'll do most anything to keep his mind occupied."

But Tommy has a short fuse when he fears he has failed the equivalency exam, and screws up his paper.

After he finds out from Red why Andy is in Shawshank, Tommy divulges that in Thomaston prison four years earlier, a highly-strung cellmate named Elmo Blatch admitted murdering a golf pro and his lover:

Tommy

Big twitchy fucker. Kind of roomie you pray you don't get. You know what I'm saying'? 6 to 12 for armed burglary. Said he pulled hundreds of jobs... So one night like a joke, I say to him, I say, 'Yeah Elmo? Who'd you kill?' So he says:

INSERT: Elmo in a dark cell, boasting of his exploit: "'I got me this job one time basin' tables at a country club. So I could case all these big rich pricks that come in. So I pick out this guy, go in one night and do his place. He wakes up and gives me shit. So I killed him. Him and this tasty bitch he was with. (He laughs insanely) That’s the best part. She’s fucking this prick, see, this golf-pro, but she’s married to some other guy! Some hot-shot banker. And he’s the one they pinned it on."

Andy stares, eyes wide, in amazement and leaves quickly.

The Warden refuses to accept this "most amazing story" when told; he says that Williams has fabricated the tale to "cheer" Andy up. Andy knows that with Tommy's testimony he could get a new trial, but the Warden refuses to countenance it.

Exasperated, Andy calls the Warden "obtuse" but also assures the corrupt prison head: "Sir, if I were ever to get out, I would never mention what goes on in here. I'd be just as indictable as you for laundering that money." For his insolence, and fearing that Andy will be paroled if his conviction is dismissed, the warden places Andy in solitary for a month - the "longest damn stretch" most of the cons had ever known - especially for an innocent convict "going on nineteen years."

Andy struggles as the guards take him, pleading, "What’s the matter with you? This is my chance to get out! This is my life!"

In the compound, outside, Tommy receives a big envelope. The men play with it, stopping him from opening it. Eventually, Red reads the contents.

Heywood: Are you saying Andy's innocent? I mean for real innocent?

Red: Looks that way.

A guard carries food to Andy in his solitary cell and tells him that the kid passed - C+ average. A ghost of a smile passes across his stubbly face.

Commentary

• 
  Rock 'n' roll music heralds a new generation – and reminds us how much is changing outside.
  

Andy is now wearing glasses, and with a little grey in his hair.

MONTAGE: Andy in front of the blackboard, Tommy reading at the meal table, Tommy underlining nouns in a sentence on the blackboard, plus the voiceover - signals the passage of a year.

A slow PAN around Andy’s cell shows the alabaster and soapstone chess pieces almost entirely carved and a new poster, "Lovely Raquel"(Welch). She is a cavewoman – another subtle signpost - from One Million Years BC (1966).

• 
  Another signifier of the passage of time.
  

Williams is summoned to speak to the warden in an outside, gated area, where Norton offers him a cigarette and then begins:

We've got a situation here. I think you can appreciate that...I have to know if what you told Dufresne was the truth...Would you be willing to swear before a judge and jury, having placed your hand on the Good Book and taken an oath before Almighty God Himself?

Tommy vows that everything he said was true: "Just give me that chance." Norton crushes his cigarette with his heel, and then signals to Hadley on a rooftop to blast four bullets into Tommy's chest.

Norton tells him that Tommy was killed trying to escape. "Terrible thing, man that young, less than a year to go, trying to escape." And, in a touch of supreme irony, "Broke Captain Hadley’s heart to shoot him."

Andy refuses to run any more of the warden's corrupt scams: "I'm done. Everything stops. Get someone else to run your scams." With rage in his eyes, Norton refuses to be intimidated and beats the insolence of Andy down further with another month in solitary:

CUT to Andy, disconsolate and melancholy, hunched next to the compound wall; Red wanders over. After being in isolation for two months, Andy contritely confesses his responsibility for driving his wife away, even though he is technically innocent of the murder and is serving a sentence in someone else's place. Red absolves him of the crime as the two lifer friends sit slumped against the yard wall:

• 
  Cigarette = an ironic token of friendship; also symbolic of the bullet that will kill him.
  
• 
  Another antithesis - religion and murder.
  

An overhead shot of Tommy’s corpse fades to Andy’s cell.

Andy is curled up in the foetal position, his eyes hurting from the sudden light.

"Or am I being obtuse?" Sarcasm in repeating Andy’s previous statement to Norton.

The metal door slams shut.

Zihuatanejo

• 
  'Like a closed book.' Is this how he has appeared to the other prisoners and the audience?
  

But it is Red’s turn to be depressed. "I don’t think I could make it on the outside, Andy." A CU shows him looking despairingly around the walls. "I been in here most of my life. I’m an institutional man now," like Brooks.

Andy's instructions re the field near Buxton hint that something is going to happen; in retrospect, we realise Andy is talking about what he plans as if it had already happened – suggests certainty re the outcome of his plans.

Chapter 18: He's talking funny

Mystified by this strange message and perplexed by his strange mood, Red fears that Andy is "talkin’ funny," and may be suicidal. Red is even more distressed by his pal's psychological condition when he learns that Andy asked Heywood for a six foot length of rope.

"Andy would never do that!"

"I don’t know. Every man has his breaking point."

Andy is back doing the books. He finishes his work with the black ledger and files that document, which itemises the illegal funnelling of payoff funds, placing them in the wall safe behind the needle-point sampler. The warden: "Shine my shoes. I want them looking like mirrors. It's good havin’ you back, Andy. Place wasn’t the same without you."

Norton whistles as he goes. He feels that he has broken Andy and has him for life now. Andy polishes Norton’s shoes slowly.

As Andy walks back to his cell and the lights are extinguished (although lights flash from an approaching lightning storm), Red is terribly worried and wonders whether his friend will survive the long night without killing himself. "That was the longest night of my life," says Red in a rather hackneyed phrase.

Andy sits alone in his cell, the rope in his hand. FADE to BLACK