A Man Escaped by Robert Bresson (1956)

Lyon, 1943.  Fontaine, a lieutenant in the French Resistance, is in a Gestapo car along with two other prisoners.  He is being taken to the Montluc Fortress which the Germans have turned into a prison.  When the car stops for a moment, Fontaine tries to escape but is quickly recaptured and brought back to the car.  One of the Gestapo men strikes him on the head with the butt of his pistol.  When the car arrives at the prison, Fontaine is severely beaten and bloodied before being taken to his cell on a stretcher.  When the German soldiers awaken him, he pretends to be too weak to get up.  In retrospect he thinks that this may be the only reason he wasn’t taken out and shot immediately.

By pulling himself up to a small barred window, Fontaine can see the prison yard.  He manages to make contact with another prisoner, Terry, who helps him communicate with the outside world.  Terry tosses him some string with which he lowers letters and pulls up small objects, like a razor and a pin, which his friend obtains for him.  After a few days Fontaine is led outside to the toilets where, his hands still shackled, he is able to wash up for the first time.

Fontaine is able to communicate with the prisoner in the adjacent cell by tapping on the wall. With the pin and advice from his neighbor he succeeds in taking off his handcuffs, which he puts back on each time his guards come in.  He is questioned and gives his word not to attempt to escape — with all the mental reservations we can imagine.  He is soon transferred to a new cell where his handcuffs are removed.  He is concerned about the silence of his new neighbor, who does not respond to his taps on the wall.

Fontaine learns the prison routine: the meal served in a mess tin, the daily trip to the prison yard to empty the pails which serve as toilettes, the quick washing up at the sinks. It is in the washroom that he meets the other prisoners, like Hébrard, the pastor, and Orsini, who was betrayed to the Gestapo by his own wife.  The prisoners manage to exchange a few furtive words despite the strict interdiction against speaking among themselves.  Fontaine becomes accustomed to the periodic salvos of gunshots marking the executions inside the prison.  One day in the yard he final sees his silent neighbor, an elderly man named Blanchet.

Having noticed that his cell door could be taken apart, Fontaine fashions a wood chisel from an iron spoon by sharpening the handle on his cell floor.  He begins a long painstaking task, chiseling down and slowly taking apart his door in the constant fear of being caught.  He finally makes contact with his neighbor Blanchet by helping him get to his feet one day after a fall in the yard.  They begin to speak to each other through their adjacent cell windows. Fearing a collective punishment, Blanchet asks Fontaine to stop working on his door, but a friendship develops between the two men.

After a month of patient work Fontaine is finally able to take his door apart, which permits him to step out into the corridor and erase the sanctions written on one of the prisoner’s doors.  He shares with the other prisoners his plan to escape, without knowing exactly how he’s going to go about it.  The pastor gives him a note where he has copied a short dialogue in which Christ says to Nicodemus, “The wind bloweth where it listeth.”  Since Orsini wants to participate in the escape attempt, Fontaine gives him a note explaining how to dismantle his door.  One night Fontaine leaves his cell and goes onto the roof by pulling himself up through the glass ceiling of the corridor.  He begins to make a rope with strips cut from his pillow case, then from shirts, bed sheets, and covers — a rope that he strengths with iron wire taken from the springs of his bedstead. 

Orsini becomes impatient and tries to escape alone, but he is caught, returned to his cell, and beaten.  Before his execution Orsini helps Fontaine benefit from his failure by informing him that he will need large hooks to get over the last wall and explaining how to make them.

The Germans confiscate the prisoners’ writing materials, threatening to shoot anyone who doesn’t obey.  Fontaine refuses to give up his pencil, in a silent show of defiance.  At the very moment that the guards come to search his cell, he receives a package.  The package distracts the guards, who leave without searching his room.  The package contains clothes, which Fontaine cuts up to use in his rope.  Blanchet has finally begun to believe in Fontaine’s escape plan and gives him one of his covers to help him finish the rope.  Fontaine realizes that he will need an accomplice to succeed, but he cannot find anyone.  The other prisoners encourage him to make his escape attempt as soon as possible; the longer he waits, the greater the chance of failure.

Fontaine is taken to the Hotel Terminus, the headquarters of the Gestapo in Lyon, where he learns that he has been condemned to death for his activities in the Resistance.  He had tried to blow up a bridge.  He is relieved upon returning to the prison to find himself in the same cell, because he had hidden there all of the equipment for his escape.  He understands that he must act quickly.  He is soon faced with a new dilemma, however, when a new prisoner, François Jost, is put in his cell with him.  Jost is a young Frenchman who had served in the German army before deserting.  Fontaine gives his last will and testament to the pastor.

Suspecting that he may be dealing with a traitor, Fontaine considers the necessity of killing Jost to prevent him from betraying his plans to escape.  He eventually decides to take the young man into his confidence and invites him to leave with him.  He gives Jost to understand, in any case, that he really has no choice.  The night of the escape Fontaine and Jost exit through the glass ceiling, hauling all of their material onto the roof.  The roof is covered with gravel and pieces of glass, which crunch under their feet so loudly that they have to wait for the noise of passing trains to cover their movements.  Fontaine is forced to descend into the yard to strangle a sentinel who is on watch at the foot of the first wall.  When they come to the second wall Fontaine realizes that he wouldn’t have been able to make it over without the help of Jost; the two men have to help each other reach the top.  On the other side, in a passage between the two walls, another sentinel is making his rounds on a bicycle.  Using the large hooks, Fontaine makes a bridge between the last two walls.  After waiting for hours, Fontaine suddenly makes his move.  He crawls across the space clinging to the rope, followed soon by Jost. The two men jump down on the other side of the wall and move quickly away into the night.

• Excerpt 1 :

• Excerpt 2 :

• Excerpt 3 :

• Excerpt 4 :

• Excerpt 5 :

• Excerpt 6 :

• Excerpt 7 :

• Excerpt 8 :