Movie Breakout 1975
Beverly Denmark
Breakout is a 1975 action film from Columbia Pictures starring Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, Robert Duvall, John Huston, Sheree North and Randy Quaid. Bronson and Ireland, the lead actor and actress, were married in real life. The film is notable for giving the usually serious Bronson a more comedic, lighthearted role.[3]
Jay's wife Ann (Ireland) is unhappy at this turn of events and hires a Texas bush pilot in Brownsville, Texas, Nick Colton (Bronson) and his partner Hawk (Quaid), to fly into the prison and rescue her husband.
While Hawk and accomplice Myrna (North) feign a rape to distract the prison guards, Colton pilots a helicopter into the prison complex, Wagner boards the helicopter, and they escape. The group (Colton, Hawk, Myrna, Wagner) return to Texas in a four-passenger light aircraft.
Alerted to the escape, Harris Wagner orders his agent Cable (Mantee) to Texas to intercept the group. Cable, driving a Citron SM with Washington, D.C. license plates, locates Ann Wagner and follows her Chevrolet Impala convertible, knowing she will lead him to Jay Wagner.
Cable uses false identification to lure Jay Wagner away from the group when they land. Cable nearly succeeds in kidnapping Wagner, but Colton becomes suspicious and pursues them. The film ends with a runway incursion as Cable and Colton fight among departing airplanes at Brownsville Airport.[5]
The original director was Michael Ritchie, but he did not like the idea of the female lead being played by Charles Bronson's wife Jill Ireland. Bronson threatened to leave the project if Ireland was not cast so Tom Gries came in as director. Producer Irwin Winkler was not a great admirer of the final film.[7]
The film featured a French Arospatiale Alouette II turbine helicopter, the type of helicopter used in the 1973 Mountjoy Prison helicopter escape. The actual 1971 Mexico event featured a Bell Helicopter.
Joel David Kaplan was a New York businessman and nephew of molasses tycoon Jacob Merrill Kaplan.[9] The elder Kaplan earned his fortune primarily through operations in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.[10]
The J.M. Kaplan Fund (named after the elder of the two) was found in a 1964 Congressional investigation to be a conduit for funneling CIA money to Latin America, including through the Institute of International Labor Research (IILR) headed by Norman Thomas, six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.[10] These funds were used in Latin America by figures like Jos Figueres Ferrer, Sacha Volman, and Juan Bosch.[11]
The CIA gave Figures money to publish a political journal, Combate, and to found a left-wing school for Latin American opposition leaders.[12] Funds passed from a shell foundation to the Kaplan Fund, next to the IILR, and finally to Figures.[12] Sacha Volman, treasurer of the IILR, was a CIA agent.[12]
According to Chester Bowles, the Undersecretary of State, internal Department of State discussions in 1961 on the topic were vigorous.[13] Richard N. Goodwin, Assistant Special Counsel to the President, who had direct contacts with the rebel alliance, argued for intervention against Trujillo.[13] Quoting Bowles directly: "The next morning I learned that in spite of the clear decision against having the dissident group request our assistance Dick Goodwin following the meeting sent a cable to CIA people in the Dominican Republic without checking with State or CIA; indeed, with the protest of the Department of State. The cable directed the CIA people in the Dominican Republic to get this request at any cost. When Allen Dulles found this out the next morning, he withdrew the order. We later discovered it had already been carried out."[13]
In May 1961, the ruler of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo was murdered with weapons supplied by the CIA.[14] An internal CIA memorandum states that a 1973 Office of Inspector General investigation into the murder disclosed "quite extensive Agency involvement with the plotters." The CIA described its role in "changing" the government of the Dominican Republic "as a 'success' in that it assisted in moving the Dominican Republic from a totalitarian dictatorship to a Western-style democracy."[15][12] Bosch was elected president of the Dominican Republic in 1962.
In November 1961, Mexican police found a corpse they identified as Luis Melchior Vidal Jr., godson of Trujillo.[10] Vidal was the unofficial business agent of the Dominican Republic while Trujillo was in power.[10] Under cover of the "American Sucrose Company" and the "Paint Company of America", Vidal had teamed up with the American, Joel David Kaplan, to operate as arms merchants for the CIA.[10]
In 1962, the younger Kaplan was convicted in Mexico City of killing Vidal.[10] He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.[10] Kaplan always maintained his innocence.[citation needed] He was held at the Santa Martha Acatitla prison in the Iztapalapa borough of the Mexico City D.F. region.
On August 19, 1971, a helicopter landed in the prison yard. The guards mistakenly thought this was an official visit. In two minutes, Kaplan and Kaplan's cellmate Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro, a Venezuelan counterfeiter, boarded the craft and were piloted away. No shots were fired.[17] Both men were flown to Texas and then different planes flew Kaplan to California and Castro to Guatemala.[9]
The Mexican police requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrest and remand Kaplan on August 20, 1971.[10] Kaplan's attorney claimed that Kaplan was a CIA agent.[10] Neither the FBI nor the U.S. Department of Justice have pursued the issue.[10]
Breakout earned $16.0 million in theatrical rentals in the United States and Canada, and was the 21st most popular film of 1975.[20][21] By the time of its second week of US release, it had already grossed $5 million internationally.[19]
Part of its box-office success was due to the then-novel strategy of "saturation booking", in which Columbia released 1,350 prints simultaneously, combined with a heavy advertising campaign costing $3.6 million on the opening week. This was one of the first major studio films to use this method of release. It grossed $12.7 million in its first two weeks of saturation release.[19] Inspired by the success of Breakout, Universal Pictures used the same technique to promote Jaws. After Jaws became the highest-grossing movie of all time, saturation booking became the standard method of releasing major films.[23][24]
TV Guide writes of Breakout: "It's one of those vigilante, simplistic stories that has audiences not mistaking the good guys for the bad guys at all. Unmotivated, often plodding, and singularly without humor, this film could have been terrific."[25]
Original Columbia Pictures Style A One Sheet Poster (27x41) for the Tom Gries action adventure, BREAKOUT (1975) starring Charles Bronson, Robert Duvall, and Jill Ireland. Robert Duvall plays a man who is framed by the mob and sent to prison in Mexico. His wife turns to bush pilot Nick (Bronson) to break him out of prison. The film was inspired by a real 1971 helicopter rescue and breakout of Joel David Kaplan from a Mexican prison. This film was one of Bronson's best starring roles, portraying a character who shows depth, humor, and humanity as well as his legendary toughness. This original one sheet poster is folded and in good condition only, with fold distresses, surface wear, and minor fold separations.
JOHN HUSTON - Actor
Robert Duvall - Actor
Randy Quaid - Actor
Charles Bronson - Actor
Sheree North - Actor
TOM GRIES - Director
Jill Ireland - Actor
EMILIO FERNANDEZ - Actor
Charles Bronson was born Charles Buchinsky, in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, in 1921. He was one of 15 children of struggling parents. His mother, Mary (Valinsky), was born in Pennsylvania, to Lithuanian parents, and his father, Walter Buchinsky, was a Lithuanian immigrant coal miner. He completed high school and joined his father in the mines and then served in WW II. After his return from the war, Bronson used the GI Bill to study art, then enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. One of his teachers was impressed with the young man and recommended him to director Henry Hathaway, resulting in Bronson making his film debut in You're in the Navy Now (1951). He appeared on screen often early in his career, though usually uncredited. However, he made an impact on audiences as the evil assistant to Vincent Price in the 3-D thriller House of Wax (Andre de Toth, 1953). His sinewy yet muscular physique got him cast in action-type roles, often without a shirt to highlight his manly frame. He received positive notices from critics for his performances in Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1954), Target Zero (Harmon Jones, 1955) and Run of the Arrow (Samuel Fuller, 1957) with Rod Steiger and Sara Montiel. Indie director Roger Corman cast him as the lead in his well-received low-budget gangster flick Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), then Bronson scored the lead in his own TV series, Man with a Camera (1958-1960).
The 1960s proved to be the era in which Charles Bronson made his reputation as a man of few words but much action. Director John Sturges cast him as half Irish/half Mexican gunslinger Bernardo O'Reilly in the smash hit Western The Magnificent Seven (1960) with Yul Brynner, and hired him again as tunnel rat Danny Velinski for the WWII POW big-budget epic The Great Escape (1963), starring Steve McQueen. Several more strong roles followed, then once again he was back in military uniform, alongside Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine in the testosterone-filled The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967). European audiences had taken a shine to his minimalist acting style, and he headed to the Continent to star in several action-oriented films, including La bataille de San Sebastian/Guns for San Sebastian (Henri Verneuil, 1968), the cult western C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) opposite Claudia Cardinale, Le passager de la pluie/Rider On The Rain (Ren Clment, 1970) with Jill Ireland, the Western Soleil rouge/Red Sun (Terence Young, 1971) alongside Japansese screen legend Toshir Mifune and Ursula Andress, and The Valachi Papers (Terence Young, 1972) with Lino Ventura and Jill Ireland, who had become his wife in 1968.
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