One way to check is the following test: is it something that an average woman will walk away from, bored senseless while a guy watches fascinated? If the answer is yes, it's a guy film. Using this criterion, Escape from Alcatraz fits nicely within the overall subject of guy films. Women don't get it and guys can't peel their eyes away.
Escape from Alcatraz, based on the real-life escape of an Alcatraz inmate, features Clint Eastwood as Frank Morris, a con sent to the Rock. While there, he scraps with a nasty inmate or two, befriends a couple of others, and tries to figure out a way to break out of his cell and get off the island. Essentially, that's the entire movie. A few scenes of wretched prison life and a very long, elaborate quest to get out of a cell and into the open air. Along the way, there are a couple of fights and one disturbing incident with a hatchet. Otherwise, digging and ducking from floodlights is the bulk of what's on celluloid. And really, you won't want much more than that.
Sounds boring, doesn't it? It's not. It's riveting. The actual prison break itself covers about 25 minutes of film, and it's gripping throughout. Morris and his two accomplices (played by Fred Ward and Thibeau) are always a dropped tool away from being caught. It's an amazing piece of cinema that so much happens without a word being spoken for such a long time. If you can walk away from this, you are made of stouter material than I am. It's nail-biting all the way through, even if you've seen it before.
In a nice piece of casting irony, the evil warden is played by former "Prisoner" Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan's unnamed warden is one of the most sinister cinematic presences from the entire 1970s, Darth Vader included. It's always fascinating to me that a guy who is supposed to represent the best interests of society at large can be so quickly and perfectly portrayed as a scion of pure malice and unrepentant evil. You root for Clint and his cronies, and you dearly wish he could stick a .44 magnum into the warden's face before he splits the island for good.
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