Steve McQueen is superb as unlucky safe-cracker Henri "Papillon" Charrière, an innocent man convicted of murder and sentenced to imprisonment in the French penal colony at French Guiana. Once there, he learns quickly to appreciate the sheer brutality of a prison where any semblance of decency and humanity has been long abandoned. He allies himself with "Dega" (Dustin Hoffman), the rather wealthy, calculating, forger who fully expects his release papers to arrive any day! McQueen agrees to keep an eye on Hoffman meantime, in return for enough funds to enable him to try to escape too. Over the course of their incarceration, they become unlikely friends combatting the harsh, at times lethal, prison regime and trying to keep safe from their equally savage colleagues - each with an axe, of some sort, to grind. I'm not Hoffman's biggest fan, he tends to mimic rather than act - but I'd say that this is McQueen's finest, grittiest, performance - and the sense of pain, deprivation and hope he elicits are captivating to watch. There are some pictures at the end of the facility as it looked in the early 1970s - evocative of just how cruel these places were.
