Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is "Birdman of Alcatraz," a biographical prison drama released by United Artists in 1962.

It was directed by John Frankenheimer from Guy Trosper's screenplay based on the 1955 book of the same title by Thomas E. Gaddis.

"Birdman of Alcatraz" stars Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, and Thelma Ritter, supported by Neville Brand, Betty Field, Edmond O'Brien, and Telly Savalas.

"Birdman of Alcatraz" is the story of Robert Stroud, who was convicted of murder in 1909 and spent the rest of his life in prison, notably in Leavenworth Penitentiary and on Alcatraz Island.

The film begins with an introduction by Thomas Gaddis near the Embarkation Dock for tours of the San Francisco Bay, including views of Alcatraz Island and the penitentiary there.

Gaddis tells Robert Stroud's story, beginning with a train journey transporting Stroud and other prisoners to a new location.

The train car is suffocating, and Stroud breaks a window to let in fresh air.

We soon learn that Stroud is habitually disruptive and refuses cooperate with prison officials.

Upon his arrival at Leavenworth in Kansas, Stroud meets with the warden, Harvey Shoemaker, who attempts to persuade him to obey the rules.

Stroud refuses, and before Long, has made an enemy of Shoemaker and antagonized many of the other prisoners.

Sometime later during mealtime, Stroud learns from a guard that his mother had come to the prison to see him, but was denied and told to come back a week later.

Infuriated, Stroud stabs the guard with a makeshift knife.

He's convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

His mother approaches various officials in search of clemency, finally making an in-person appeal to First Lady Edith Wilson.

As a result, Stroud's death sentence is commuted, but he is to serve the entirety of his life sentence in solitary confinement.

The time hangs heavily upon him until the day he discovers a wounded sparrow in the exercise yard, and decides to take it in and care for it.

There were several different filmmakers interested in making a movie out of Thomas Gaddis' book, "Birdman of Alcatraz" after it was published in 1955.

20th Century Fox bought the option on the book.

Producer Jack Cummings planned a movie version with Joshua Logan directing, but gave up the project after objections from the US Bureau of Prisons, Sunaris' Guy Troper turned to Harold Hecht, who jointly owned Norma Productions with Burt Lancaster.

Lancaster agreed to star as Stroud, and according to the film's publicist, gave up eight months of his life to the picture, overseeing almost every aspect of production.

Charles Crichton, who had directed the Ealing comedies "Hue and Cry," "The Lavender Hill Mob," and the "The Titfield Thunderbolt," was originally hired to direct.

He later said, "Had I known that Burt Lancaster was to be de facto producer, I do not think I would've accepted the assignment as he had a reputation for quarreling with better directors than I.

But Harold Hecht, the credited producer, had assured me that there would be no interference from Lancaster.

This did not prove to be the case."

Chrichton soon left the film.

Hecht then turned to John Frankenheimer, who had directed Lancaster in "The Young Savages," a crime drama released in 1961.

Frankenheimer had also previously been part of an attempt to present a drama based on the life of Robert Stroud for live television, but the logistics of working with the necessary birds made the project impossible.

Telly Savalas, who played a police detective in "The Young Savages," also appears in "Birdman of Alcatraz" as inmate Feto Gomez.

Savalas was in awe of his co-star, later saying, "I couldn't catch my breath in the presence of Burt Lancaster."

James V. Bennett, then director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, continued to oppose the project, because he said, "It is simply not our policy to glamorize criminals."

The warden of Alcatraz, James F. Morone, turned down an offer from United Artists to show the finished film to the inmates.

He said, "Prison life is always fascinating to people who have never been confined to a prison."

It's probably occurred to you that tonight's movie really should have been titled "Birdman of Leavenworth", since it was in that Penitentiary's exercise yard that Robert Stroud found the wounded Runty, and there that he had his prison aviary, which at one point numbered over 300 birds.

But somehow Leavenworth just doesn't have the cultural cache of Alcatraz, any more than Lawrence, Kansas competes for tourists with San Francisco.

As you can imagine, one of the chief difficulties when making "Birdman of Alcatraz" was getting the many birds in the film to hit their marks.

In, in other words, to do what the director wanted when he wanted them to do it.

The birds were trained by two men from Japan who worked with them during the filming, along with Hollywood animal trainer, Ray D. Berwick.

But birds have short memories for what they learn in training, so their performance on any given day was essentially a matter of chance.

Burt Lancaster said sometimes during filming, they would get a scene with the birds right off, while at other times it might take an entire day to get things done right.

Part of the apparent intention of Birdman of Alcatraz was to give audiences a real sense of the deadly routine of life in a penitentiary, especially for a prisoner in solitary confinement.

The pacing of the film is slow and deliberate, with the black and white cinematography by Burnett Guffey emphasizing the monotony and bleakness of life inside.

The initial final cut of the film was four and a half hours long.

Director John Frankenheimer later told Charles Chaplin of the Los Angeles Times, Lancaster had been offered a part in "Judgment at Nuremberg", and he didn't know what to do.

"I said, you go do "Judgment at Nuremberg", and we'll rewrite the script.

That's what we did.

Then we went back and reshot the whole first part of the movie."

Karl Malden, for one, wasn't always happy with the rewrites.

His character, Harvey Shoemaker, was a combination of several different prison wardens who supervised Robert Stroud.

Malden would learn his lines every night, but would often discover the next day the script had been revised, with pages of new dialogue for him to learn.

He was also at odds with Burt Lancaster on the set, although he felt that enhanced the screen tension between Shoemaker and Stroud.

When Malden as Shoemaker introduces a new warden to some of the prisoners, he gives one of their names as Sekulovich.

Karl Malden, the son of a Serbian father and a Czech mother, was named Mladen George Sekulovich at birth.

Birdman of Alcatraz received generally positive reviews.

A. H. Weiler in the New York Times called it "a thoughtful, yet powerful portrait that cleaves to the heart and mind despite its omissions."

He continued, "the drama is both moving and persuasive, even though all the facts do not appear on the screen.

One wonders why a 73 year old man incarcerated since 1909 for two murders has not been paroled by federal authorities.

One questions if they did not base their denials on circumstances not noted in the largely good behavior of the bird man in the film."

Indeed, Burt Lancaster's largely sympathetic portrait of Robert Stroud led to petitions asking for his release.

But those in authority who were more familiar with the real Robert Stroud, than with the sanitized portrait presented by the movie, refused to comply.

According to a former guard at Alcatraz, Frank Heney, Stroud was an extremely difficult inmate who was a threat to his fellow prisoners, a villain, and a psychopath.

Gillette Babyak, who had lived on the island of Alcatraz as a girl, wrote, "Birdman, The Many Faces of Robert Stroud" in 1994.

In it, she said the reputation he gained from the book, "Birdman of Alcatraz", and the subsequent movie, was essentially a hoax.

She described his personality in an interview with the Lawrence Kansas Journal World, in these words.

"Massive ego, manipulative, very emotional, powerful, enraged.

I always throw in the word diabolical.

Stroud was very intelligent, but emotionally unstable."

Stroud killed two people in prison, stabbed an orderly who revealed a plan of his to escape, and told a parole hearing late in his life he had a lot of people left to kill, "...and I don't have much time to do it."

He was also a sexual predator who posed a threat to other inmates.

Burt Lancaster himself later admitted Stroud could not be set free because of fears he might sexually abuse children.

In 1959, Stroud was transferred from Alcatraz to the Medical Center for Federal prisoners in Springfield, Missouri due to failing health.

When he died at 73 on November 21st, 1963, he had been incarcerated for more than 54 years with 42 of those years spent in solitary confinement.

He never saw the movie "Birdman of Alcatraz".

Please join us again next time for another Saturday night at the movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.