As an inmate at Leavenworth prison, Robert Stroud has a series of confrontations with the guards and with the other convicts. When Stroud kills a guard, he is sentenced to be executed, and only his mother’s impassioned intervention gets his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, which he must serve in solitary confinement. As he serves out his sentence in boredom and despair, one day he finds a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard. Stroud soon takes a deep interest in caring for birds, which gives him a new purpose in life, but which also brings new conflicts with prison authorities. –IMDb
Born in New York and raised in Queens, John Frankenheimer wanted to become a professional tennis player. He loved movies and his favorite actor was Robert Mitchum. He decided he wanted to be an actor but then he applied for and was accepted in the Motion Picture Squadron of the Air Force where he realized his natural talent to handle a camera. After his military discharge he began a TV career in 1953 convincing CBS to hire him as an assistant director, which consisted mainly working as a cameraman at that time. He eventually started to direct the show he was working on as an assistant director. Frankenheimer still didn’t want to direct films. He liked to direct live television, and he would have continued to do it if the profession itself hadn’t cease to exist. He first turned to the big screen with The Young Stranger (1957) which he hated to do because he thought he didn’t understand movies and wasn’t used to work with only one camera. Disappointed with his first feature film experience… read more
Strouds "Looking Outward" has never been published, yet the manuscript still exists in the hands of Charles Dudley Martin. Petition for it's publishing! It hasn't been published because of political restriction!
Law and prejudice are very arbitrary, Stroud may not of went to jail if he had defended a woman of "worth". I think the pimping was more defamatory for him than the murder! We say murder is wrong,but we have legal killing,There is a disconnect from the issue. In this depiction I find him to be a victim of a corrupt judicial system and prejudices of the time.
