Wikipedia says that “that “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) is considered “one of the greatest films of all time.” OK. It’s a good movie. If “one of the greatest films of all time” means one of the best 250 movies, I can live with that. But let’s not get carried away. The Stephen King novella adaptation has been the #1 ranked movie on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) for over two decades, which tells me that the people who frequent that site do so because they don’t know much about American cinema—you know, like Ann Althouse. A substacker I never heard of writes, “I know I’m thirty years late, but I finally watched The Shawshank Redemption. I laughed, I cried, I threw a metaphorical tomato (many, in fact) at the warden and his prison guards, I walloped and fist-bumped in joy at the end. It lived up to every bit of hype and, in my opinion, justified its place as the #1 ranked movie…” That’s nice. You need to get out more, and I officially don’t care what you think about anything else.

But she’s not alone. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 89% approval rating from 146 critics, It has a score of 82 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 22 critics indicating “universal acclaim”.The American Film Institute ranked the film number 72 on its 2007 AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) list, outranking “Pulp Fiction” released the same year. It was also number 23 on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Cheers (2006) list of “most inspiring films.” I think I could list 23 equally or more inspiring films in the sports category alone of the top of my head. The Writers Guild of America listed Frank Darabont’s screenplay at #22 on its list of the 101 greatest screenplays. In 2014, “The Shawshank Redemption” was named Hollywood’s fourth-favorite film, based on a survey of 2,120 Hollywood-based entertainment industry members.

Yes, that’s because the California wokies want to abolish prisons. I’d vote the movie only the second-best film adaptation of a Stephen King novella.

I just watched most of the movie again for the first time in many years. Even if I had been a member of “The Shawshank Redemption” cult, however, I couldn’t forgive the film this gaffe that I missed first time around: in a long panning shot as “Red” (Morgan Freeman) goes on in his soporific narration about how the inmates must have hobbies, there is a brief shot of a chess board, set up and ready for a game.

The board is set up wrong, with a black square on the right-hand corner. I have written about that careless, insulting mistake twice, first in 2022’s Chess Board Ethics: A Popeye. Quote: