An Optimists' Club movie about a San Quentin lifer who discovers the world of literature at the prison library ("Give me a thick book, I don't care what it's about" -- Tolstoi, Nietzsche, Genet, Dostoevski, Camus, Jacqueline Susann), writes his own play and forms his own theater troupe, is discovered by a drama critic with décolletage (who, despite the French setting and accents, fails to recognize the plagiarism of Genet's Deathwatch), is granted through her efforts a special pardon, reconstitutes the troupe on the "outside," eliminates the bits he stole from Genet and adds bits that are "more personal" ("Spirits of my dead brothers, in the darkness I feel your eyes"), and ultimately makes it to, and on, Broadway. The movie, directed by John Hancock and co-written by him with his wife Dorothy Tristan, cushions beforehand whatever punch it possibly could have had, by casting familiar and unfamiliar Hollywood professionals (or pillow-fighters) to play the members of the real-life Barbed Wire Theatre. It might well have been unthinkable, which is to say unbankable, to have hired the actual members to play themselves (Rick Cluchey, the model for the main character, is given a small nonspeaking role), but one still can't quite see how their Hollywood stand-ins could have had the face to parade out at movie's end for a curtain call -- a practice that always seems silly on screen and is accordingly better left to the likes of The Nutty Professor. Nick Nolte, Lane Smith, William Forsythe. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.