A woman, a lover and a husband with a bourbon bottle and a revolver. And suddenly two corpses. It was not difficult to send Andy Dufresne, the husband, to jail for murder.

And thus begins a saga of an incarneration, a friendship, a revenge and a memorable redemption.
There is Red (Morgan Freeman), the “regular Sears & Roebuck” man, who could get anything inside the jail - for a price.

And who wagers (and loses) that Andy (an erstwhile Vice President in Portland Bank) would break down the very first night. There are The Sisters, gay rapists, who find Andy to be a “nice fat ass, by a mile”. There is Captain Hardley, the Chief of Guards, for whom cruelty is a way of life. And then there is Norton, the warden, an epitome of avarice and corruption.

And in this world of cruelty and brutality, where there are very few bulwarks against the corruption of a man’s soul, there comes Andy, the antithesis of everything that jail had ever seen.
Jail sagas invariably come with an almost-preordained story-line of bad guys-mean wardens-tough hero. But to remain within that boundary and create magical energy is what this film does.

Andy is a cultured, sensitive man, patient to progress, a planner, and above all, a lover of life. The role has been delienated to the last graceful edge by Tim Robbins.

The old adage of one man making all the difference drives the film into its humane core and truimphant conclusion. Andy touches the lives of all its inmates and its keepers, as his financial genius in saving tax and giving creative solutions makes him the man to know.

But more than his number-crunching-genius is his ability to transcend pain in his attempt to bring what is beautiful and important into his life and of his friends in the jail. His choice of Red’s maxim of “Get busy living or get busy dying” was unequivocal.

He gets bottles of cold beer for all his friends by giving a tax advice; writes one letter a week for six years to get a grant for a library in the jail; and then puts Mozart on the prison sound system, even as the Warden threatens dire consequences outside a locked door, and the prisoners stand
transfixed listening to the ethereal music, “every last man in Shawshank feeling free” for the first time in years: result- two weeks in the “hole” for Andy.

And above all, is his love for Rita Hayworth, and for carving little models - which prove so decisive to his love for freedom and all things beautiful.

The Shawshank Redemption is a film which redeems one’s faith in life and shows how patience is often a by-word for truimph. And how a body’s incarceration can never stop the human spirit from getting wings.