Canon City (1948)

I watched the 1948 prison break film Canon City on Netflix, and found the visual strategies fascinating. There are at least four distinct shooting styles used: 1) standard semi-documentary, for the establishing scenes shot on location at the real prison; 2) expressionistic, with lots of extreme close-ups, interesting shadows, arty angles, and so on, for most of the dramatic dialogue scenes; 3) lyrical/poetic, for most of the outdoor scenes recreating the snowy night of the prison break (which occurred on December 30, 1947, in Colorado; the movie was in theaters exactly six months later, on June 30, 1948); 4) theatrical, mainly scenes in houses showing whole rooms and placement of people in proscenium-arch style (or close to it). I've seldom seen a more pictorially diverse Hollywood feature from that era. No sticking to one style for director Crane Wilbur! But I'm not sure whether this indicates aesthetic sophistication, or catch-as-catch-can incoherence.

The escapee played by Scott Brady, Jim Sherbondy, had a troubled subsequent career and was eventually memorialized in a 1976 paperback original biography, The Gray Walls of Hell by John Harvey Williamson, that goes for a pretty penny on the second-hand market.