The story goes that no one ever officially escaped from Alcatraz, but in 1962 con Frank Morris and two others disappeared through tunnels hewn out with cutlery and got off the island on rafts made of inflated raincoats. The authorities say they drowned, but no bodies were ever found. One of the strange things about the current enshrinement of The Shawshank Redemption is how rarely anyone recalls that Stephen King lifted most of his plot from this hugely underrated 1979 teaming of Eastwood and Don Siegel, their final work together. "By that time I had known him a long time so we had a good shorthand. He also tended to like the stuff I liked. It was simple."

It's the sparest and hardest of the Siegel-Eastwood collaborations, pruned of all but the most essential detail (we learn nothing about who these characters were before they came to Alcatraz, just as we never find out what happened after the 'escape'. Eastwood, at his most iconic, is Norris, the only man tough enough to beat 'the rock' (he also, in an extreme long-shot, does his only full-frontal nude scene), while Patrick McGoohan makes a subtle megalomaniac who takes steps to crush even the dreams of his prisoners. Siegel - shooting on the concrete, rusting, brutal hulk of the Rock itself - takes things slow and steady. "The authorities were pretty good to us," recalls Eastwood. "The only odd thing was that Indians had occupied the place in the '60s and sprayed graffiti all over the place and they said, 'You can't touch that graffiti its part of the history and I said, 'Wait a second, tourists weren't going over there to see a lot of graffiti they were going over there because Al Capone and was housed there ." He got his way.

Clint Eastwood On... Thunderbolt And Lightfoot
(1974, MICHAEL CIMINO) "They said the writer wants to direct it himself." Michael Cimino wasn't unknown to Eastwood, he'd done a pass on Magnum Force the previous year. "So I said, 'Well let's take a shot with him, he writes rather vividly he should direct rather vividly." This is perhaps best-remembered as the film Cimino directed on time and under budget. As the title suggests, it's a light-hearted buddy/caper movie with an underlying melancholy suggested by the very '70s ending in which one of the buddies dies (these days, it would preview badly and be changed). Korean War veteran John 'Thunderbolt' Doherty (Eastwood), who sometimes poses as a preacher, spends his time with his wilder pal Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) robbing banks. What starts out breezily in Butch and Sundance vein, darkens as it realises just how self-destructive the mock marriage of male-bonding can be.

"Everybody there was on a no-nonsense road," asserts Eastwood. "His extravagances came out several pictures down the line. There was no reason it shouldn't be on time," says Eastwood. "To go in and do one shot after lunch and another one maybe at six o'clock and then go home is not my idea of something to do. I like to move along."