Papillon – 4 stars

Franklin Schaffner’s (Patton) big-budget adventure/escape flick is competent, professional, well-acted (even if Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman have no interest in playing French people) and occasionally imaginative, particularly McQueen’s dream sequences as he fights solitary confinement and near-starvation. McQueen is the title character, sent to French Guiana for killing a pimp, where he meets the bespectacled Hoffman, a forger whose only protection is the ability to bribe officials. Their relationship deepens as McQueen, the Cooler King of The Great Escape, naturally attempts escape again and again here.

You may like the flick or not, but it is noteworthy for one scene, below. That crocodile has its snout wired shut and sure, it is drugged to the gills, but those are two massively bankable stars messing with a real crocodile. Nuts!