Le Trou (1960), directed by Jacques Becker, is a French prison break drama based on a novel by José Giovanni.

Four prisoners share the same cell. They all face long sentences so they dig a tunnel and gain access to storerooms under the cell and then to the sewer system. It’s a simple but highly effective movie, focusing on the minute details of the escape attempt and refusing to back away from the physical effort involved. The core of the film is effectively what happened out-of-sight in The Shawshank Redemption (1994) – many long and unbroken scenes of the prisoners chipping away at concrete or digging through the mud.  In this way it is similar to both Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) and Jules Dassin’s Riffifi (1955), in a sense a reverse heist movie with an obsession of the human endeavour of the exercise rather than the object of the process.

Shot with a stark, claustrophobic sensibility, with a script and direction that draws on the actual prisoners involved (one of whom actually appears in the film as one of the escapees), Le Trou has a feeling of authenticity without compromising its drama and tension. Watch in a double bill with Riffifi – movies with a similar narrative trajectory and tone but one about a group of men breaking out, the other about men breaking in.