This summer, two convicts escaped a prison in upstate New York that sparked comparisons to the epic movie Shawshank Redemption, even though the escape plans were vastly different especially since David Sweat and Richard Matt broke out of the joint because there was a female correctional officer who was happy to help since Dick had a big dick and was banging one or both of the criminals. Meanwhile poor Andy Dufresne had to crawl through 500 yards of liquid shit in a tight sewage pipe. Since the legendary movie was in the news, Rolling Stone dug around and found two fantastic scenes that were cut from the film.
Since the 1994 prison-break has near perfect reviews and is ranked as the greatest movie of all time on the IMDB’s list of the top 250 films, one would think that they edited down the movie perfectly. I’ll let you be the judge if these two scenes left on the editing floor should have been included in the final movie or not.
The first scene (2:58 mark) comes near the end of the movie when Morgan Freeman’s character is out of prison and is struggling to adjust to regular everyday citizen life. Ellis Boyd Redding is seen walking down a street with a bunch of hippies and provocatively dressed women all around as Donovan’s 1966 song “Season of the Witch” plays in the background. Morgan Freeman does what Morgan Freeman, exceptional narration.
“Women too, that’s the other thing. I forgot they were half the human race. There’s women everywhere, every shape, every size. I found myself semi-hard most of the time, cursing myself for a dirty old man. Not a brasserie to be seen, nipples poking out at the world. Jesus pleas-us. Back in my day a woman like that out in public would have been arrested and given a sanity hearing. They’re calling this the Summer of Love. Summer of Lunacy if you ask me.”
Yeah, probably a solid move to edit out chitchat about Morgan Freeman’s half erection. You next see Red bagging groceries as a young boy repeatedly fires a toy gun at his face. He has a panic attack and runs into the bathroom terrified. However director Frank Darabont ultimately felt that it slowed down the movie.
The other scene (7:33 mark) takes place right after prison officials have discovered that Andy has tunneled out of his cell. They lower young prison guard Rory Tremont into the burrowed hole and he quickly finds out that he’s being dropped into raw sewage. “Oh my God, it’s shit!” the officer exasperates. Rory then pukes his brains out from the toxic smell. This causes Red to laugh uncontrollably, to the point he gets punished by getting sent to the hole. The director thought the two minute segment slowed down the action and was cut for time, plus Freeman has a weird laugh.
These cut scenes haven’t appeared on any of the DVD and Blu-ray releases. They appeared on television and someone recorded it on their VHS, with all of it’s wobbling tracking goodness. So did the director make the right or wrong call to delete these from the original movie?