And yet more Burt Lancaster completism. Directed by John Frankenheimer from an adaptation by Guy Trosper of Thomas E. Gaddis's bowderlized biography/hagiography of "Birdman of Alcatraz" Robert Stroud. Oscar noms but no gongs went to Lancaster, fellow jailbird Telly Savalas, mother Thelma Ritter and cinematographer Burnett Guffrey.
We meet Lancaster imprisoned in Leavenworth, Kansas for killing a man. Soon enough he kills a screw on the possibly that a small infraction would deny him a visit from his mother. The man did not like uncertainty! Ending up in solitary forevermore (on a technicality after a publicity campaign helped him evade execution) he gets into birding: sparrows and canaries. With plenty of time on his hands in a mind-bogglingly lax Federal Penitentiary, he does some apparently valuable research on avians and rattles off a few amusing lines ("You're all got, you little runt." to his new bestie sparrow) as he is caught in some semi-catch-22 prison regulations: the Bolshevik prison operators try to appropriate the profits of his bird remedies! The horror. But he's having none of that and his cell remains impeccably clean throughout.
While the first half is a bit amusing the second is solemn, almost humourless, and leans into far too much exposition. Lancaster's engagements with nemesis warden Karl Malden are all very humanistic and civil, at least until we get to a pitched (but entirely stock) battle against D block on Alcatraz.
Overall Lancaster needed to heighten the distinction between the young psycho and the aged, mellow intellectual; he's fine with the latter but couldn't locate an inner Dennis Hopper. So while he is better here than in the first part of his career I don't bracket this with the vastly better works that started with The Leopard (1963).
A. H. Weiler at the New York Times. All the details at Wikipedia.
