If, as Arthur Knight suggests, Escape From Alcatraz “asks us to concern ourselves for the better part of two hours with the escape of three jailbirds we have little reason to root for..., the three characters we care least about inching their way off the Rock,” Riot In Cell Block 11, one of the grimmest, bloodiest prison pictures of the fifties, had already supplied the reason. In Escape..., as the difference in the two titles indicates, Siegel's concerns are elsewhere. What Knight calls an “inaction picture” is in fact every inch an action picture:
“Though it's cut to the caper or escape formula - and though its melodramatic excitements oppose it to neo-realism - the film is dominated by hands at work, hands with knives or wooden sticks, carving a man-sized hole in a cell air-shaft, or sculpting a bust to double for the prisoner. Its concentration on the physical... weirdly matches Robert Bresson's strange way - in Pickpocket and, most aptly, A Condemned Man Escaped - of emphasizing physical action even as he de-materializes it. Escape From Alcatraz celebrates the criminal as skilled craftsman, as blue-collar worker, alienated from social norms but not from his work, and passionately involved in that strange zone between social hostility and physical survival.” --Raymond Durgnat