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In 1947, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a bankerin Maine, is convicted of murdering his wife andher lover, a golf pro. He is given two lifesentences and sent to the notoriously harshShawshank Prison. Andy always claims hisinnocence, but his cold and measureddemeanor led many to doubt his word.

During the first night, the chief guard, ByronHadley (Clancy Brown), savagely beats a newlyarrived inmate because of his crying andhysterics. The inmate later dies in the infirmarybecause the prison doctor had left for the night.Meanwhile Andy remained steadfast andcomposed. Ellis Boyd Redding (MorganFreeman), also known as Red, bet againstothers that Andy would be the one to breakdown first and loses a considerable amount ofcash.

About a month later, Andy approaches Red, whoruns contraband inside the walls of Shawshank.He asks if Red could find him a rock hammer, aninstrument he claims is necessary for his hobbyof rock collecting and sculpting. Though otherprisoners consider Andy "a really cold fish", Redsees something in Andy, and likes him from thestart. Red believes Andy intends to use thehammer to engineer his escape in the future butwhen the tool arrived and he saw how small itwas, Red put aside the thought that Andy couldever use it to dig his way out of prison.

Over the first two years of his incarceration,Andy works in the prison laundry. He attractsattention from "the Sisters", a group of prisonerswho sexually assault other prisoners. Though hepersistently resists and fights them, Andy isbeaten and raped on a regular basis.

Red pulls some strings, and gets Andy and afew of their mutual friends a break by gettingthem all on a work detail tarring the roof of oneof the prison's buildings. During the job Andyoverhears Hadley complaining about having topay taxes for an upcoming inheritance. Using his

expertise as a banker, Andy lets Hadley knowhow he could shelter his money from the IRS,turning it into a one-time gift for his wife. He saidhe'd assist in exchange for some cold beers forhis fellow inmates while on the tarring job.Though he at first threatens to throw Andy offthe roof, Hadley, the most brutal guard in theprison, agrees, providing the men with cold beerbefore the job is finished. Red remarks thatAndy may have engineered the privilege to build

favor with the prison guards as much as with hisfellow inmates, but Red also thinks Andy did itsimply to "feel free."

While watching a movie, Andy demands Red"Rita Hayworth". Soon, after asking Red for "RitaHayworth", Andy once more encountered theSisters and is brutally beaten, putting him in theinfirmary for a month. Boggs (Mark Rolston), theleader of "The Sisters", spends a week insolitary. When he comes out, he finds Hadleyand his men waiting in his cell. They beat him sobadly he's left paralyzed, transferred to a prisonhospital upstate, and the Sisters never botheredAndy again. When Andy got out of the infirmary,he finds a bunch of rocks and a poster of RitaHayworth in his cell: presents from Red and hisbuddies.

Warden Samuel Norton (Bob Gunton) hears

about Andy helped Hadley and uses a surprisecell inspection to size Andy up. The wardenmeets with Andy and sends him to work withaging inmate Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore)in the prison library, where he sets up a make-shift desk to provide services to other guards(and the warden himself) with income tax returnsand other financial advice. There Andy sees anopportunity to expand the prison library, startingwith asking the Maine state senate for funds. Hestarts writing letters and sending them everyweek. His financial support practice became soappreciated that even guards from other prisons,

when they came for inter-prison baseballmatches, sought Andy's financial advice. Andyeven ends up doing Norton's taxes the nextseason.

Not long afterward, Brooks, the old librarian,threatens to kill another prisoner, Heywood, inorder to avoid being paroled. Andy is able to talkhim down and Brooks is paroled. He goes to ahalfway house but finds it impossible to adjust tolife outside the prison. He eventually commitssuicide. When his friends suggest that he wascrazy for doing so, Red tells them that Brooks

had obviously become "institutionalized",essentially conditioned to be a prisoner for therest of his life and unable to adapt to the outsideworld. Red remarks: "These walls are funny.First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em.Enough time passes, you get so you depend onthem."

After six years of writing letters, Andy receives$200 from the state for the library, along with a

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collection of old books and records. Though thestate Senate thinks this will be enough to getAndy to halt his letter-writing campaign, he isundaunted and doubles his efforts.

When the donations of old books and recordsarrive at the warden's office, Andy finds a copyof Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" among therecords. He locks the guard assigned to thewarden's office in the bathroom and plays therecord on a phonograph over the prison's PAsystem. The entire prison seems captivated bythe music - Red remarks that the voices of thewomen in the intro made everyone feel free, ifonly for a brief time. Outside the office, Nortonappears, furious at the act of defiance andorders Andy to turn off the record player. Andyreaches for the needle arm at first, then turnsthe volume on the phonograph up. The wardenorders Hadley to break into the office and Andy

is sent immediately to solitary confinement fortwo weeks. When he gets out, he tells hisfriends that it was the "easiest time" stretch everdid in the hole because he thought of Mozart'sFigaro. When the other prisoners tell him howunlikely that could be, he tells them that hopecan sustain them. Red is not convinced andleaves, bitter at the thought.

With the enlarged library and more materials,Andy begins to teach those inmates who want toreceive their high school diplomas. After Andy isable to secure a steady stream of funding from

various sources, the library is further renovatedand named for Brooks.

Warden Norton profits on Andy's knowledge ofbookkeeping and devises a scheme whereby heput prison inmates to work in public projectswhich he won by outbidding other contractors(cheap labor from the prisoners). Occasionally,he let others get some contracts if they bribehim. Andy launders money for the warden bysetting up many accounts in different banks,along with several investments, using a fakeidentity: "Randall Stephens". He shared the

details only with his friend, Red, noting that hehad to "go to prison to learn how to be acriminal."

In 1965, a young prisoner named Tommy (GilBellows) comes to Shawshank. Andy suggeststhat Tommy take up another line of work besidestheft. The suggestion really gets to Tommy andhe works on achieving his high schoolequivalency diploma. Though Tommy is a good

student, he is still frustrated when he takes theexam itself, crumpling it up and tossing it in thetrash. Andy retrieves it and sends it in.

One day Red tells Tommy about Andy's case.Tommy is visibly upset at hearing Andy's storyand tells Andy and Red that he had a cellmate inanother prison who boasted about killing a manwho was a pro golfer at the country club heworked at, along with his lover. The woman'shusband, a banker, had gone to prison for thosemurders. With this new information, Andy, full ofhope, meets with the warden's, expecting hecould help him get another trial with Tommy as awitness. The reaction from Norton is completelycontrary to what Andy hoped for. Andy saysemphatically that he would never reveal themoney laundering schemes he had set up forNorton over the years - the warden becomesfurious and orders him to solitary for a month.

The warden later meets with Tommy alone andasks him if he'll testify on Andy's behalf. Tommyenthusiastically agrees and the warden has himshot dead by Hadley.

When the warden visits Andy in solitary, he tellshim that Tommy was killed while attemptingescape. Andy tells Norton that the financialschemes will stop. The warden counters, sayingthe library will be destroyed and all it's materialsburned. Andy will also lose his private cell andbe sent to the block with the most hardenedcriminals. The warden gives Andy another

month in solitary.

Afterwards, Andy returns to the usual daily life atShawshank, a seemingly broken man. One dayhe talks to Red, about how although he didn't killhis wife, his personality drove her away, whichled to her infidelity and death. He says if he'sever freed or escapes, he'd like to go toZihuatanejo, a beach town on the Pacific coastof Mexico. He also tells Red how he gotengaged. He and his future wife went up to afarm in Buxton, Maine, to a large oak tree at theend of a stone wall. The two made love under

the tree, after which he proposed to her. He tellsRed that, if he should ever be paroled, he shouldlook for that field, and that oak tree. There,under a large black volcanic rock that would lookout of place, Andy has buried a box that hewants Red to have. Andy refuses to reveal whatmight be in that box.

Later, Andy asks for a length of rope, leadingRed and his buddies to suspect he will commit

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suicide. At the end of the day, Norton asks Andyto shine his shoes for him and put his suit in fordry-cleaning before retiring for the night.

The following morning, Andy is not accountedfor as usual from his cell. At the same time,Norton becomes alarmed when he finds Andy'sshoes in his shoebox instead of his own. Herushes to Andy's cell and demands anexplanation. Hadley brings in Red, but Redinsists he knows nothing of Andy's plans.Becoming increasing hostile and paranoid,Norton starts throwing Andy's sculpted rocksaround the cell. When he throws one at Andy'sposter of Raquel Welch (where it used to holdMarilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth before), therock punches through and into the wall. Nortontears the poster away from the wall and finds atunnel just wide enough for a man to crawlthrough.

During the previous nights thunderstorm, Andywore Norton's shoes to his cell, catching a luckybreak when no one notices. He packs somepapers and Norton's clothes into a plastic bag,tied it to himself with the rope he'd asked for,and escapes through his hole. The tunnel he'dexcavated led him to a space between two wallsof the prison where he found a sewer main line.Using a rock, he hits it in time with the lightningstrikes and eventually burst it. Crawling through500 yards in the pipe and through the rawsewage contained in it, Andy emerged in a

brook outside the walls. A search team laterfound his uniform and his rock hammer whichhad been worn nearly to nothing.

That morning, Andy walks into the MaineNational Bank in Portland, where he had putWarden Norton's money. Using his assumedidentity as Randall Stephens, and with all thenecessary documentation, he walked out with acashier's check. Before he leaves, he asks themto drop a package in the mail. He continues hisvisitations to nearly a dozen other local banks,ending up with some $370,000. The package

contained Warden Norton's account bookswhich were delivered straight to the PortlandDaily Buglenewspaper.

Not long after, the police storms ShawshankPrison. Hadley is arrested for murder; Red said

he was taken away "crying like a little girl".Warden Norton finally opens the safe, which hehadn't touched since Andy escaped, and insteadof his books, he finds the Bible he had givenAndy. Norton opens it to the book of Exodusandfinds that the pages have been cut out in theshape of Andy's rock hammer. Norton walksback to his desk as the police pound on hisdoor, takes out a small revolver and shootshimself under the chin. Red remarks that hewondered if the warden thought, right beforepulling the trigger, how "Andy could ever havegotten the best of him."

Shortly after, Red receives a postcard from FortHancock, Texas, with nothing written on it. Redtakes it as a sign that Andy made it into Mexicoto freedom. Red and his buddies would spendtheir time talking about Andy's exploits (with a lotof embellishments), but Red just missed his

friend.

At Red's next parole hearing in 1967, he talkedto the parole board about how "rehabilitated"was a made-up word, and how he regretted hisactions of the past. His parole is granted thistime. He goes to work at a grocery store, andstays at the same halfway house room Brookshad stayed in. He frequently walks by a pawnshop, which had several guns and compasses inthe window. At times he would contemplatetrying to get back into prison, but heremembered the promise he had made to Andy.

One day, with a compass he bought from thepawn shop, he followed Andy's instructions,hitchhiking to Buxton and arriving at the stonewall Andy described. Just like Andy said, therewas a large black stone. Under it was a smallbox containing a large sum of cash andinstructions to find him. He said he neededsomebody "who could get things" for a "project"of his.

Red violates parole and leaves the halfwayhouse, unconcerned since no one would really

do an extensive manhunt for "an old crook like[him]." He takes a bus to Fort Hancock, wherehe crosses into Mexico. The two friends arefinally reunited on the beach of Zihuatanejo onthe Pacific coast.