The actual "incident" on which this is based occurred in 1901, but the visual style harks back nearer to Rembrandt -- and Rembrandt, at that, covered with three centuries of dust, and examined at dusk without the lights on. Illumination of some sort is sorely needed. Why would the prison warden's wife, always a paragon of Christian good works, smuggle hacksaw blades in her Bible to two convicts on Death Row and then run away with them? True, the woman (Diane Keaton) has anti-capital-punishment views to tie her to the future. But the deficiencies of her husband (Edward Herrmann), apart from his antipathy to such views, are not explored beyond his inequality with Mel Gibson in the department of wet-eyed, lump-in-the-throat vulnerability. The director, Gillian Armstrong, is apparently as short on factual information as on fictional imagination. Her problem thus becomes a tactical one, similar to that faced by any woman who does not want to appear too "easy," of how to maneuver the two stars into plausible proximity, how to fill the time not too boringly betweenwhiles, how long decently to postpone the first furtive kiss between the bars (how long after, that is, the first tentative contact between fingertips). Once the escape has been effected, the big question, at least for those who have followed and swallowed the promotion of Mel Gibson as the World's Sexiest Male, is how on earth the fugitives are going to find the time and a place in the Pennsylvania snow to consummate their unfathomable passion. For them, not to worry. For all others, not to care. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.