Harris Wagner (Huston) is suspicious that his grandson, Jay Wagner (Duvall), is causing trouble for his nefarious business schemes, which also involve the CIA. Harris has CIA-operative Cable (Paul Mantee) arrange a murder in Mexico for which Jay is framed. Harris doesn’t want Jay killed, only silenced, so Jay is incarcerated in a Mexicanprison.
Jay's wife Ann (Ireland) is unhappy at this turn of events and hires a Texas bush pilot in Brownsville, Texas, Nick Colton (Bronson) and his partner Hawk (Quaid), to fly into the prison and rescue her husband.
The first attempts don't work, so Colton quickly learns how to pilot a helicopter.[4]
While Hawk and accomplice Myrna (North) feign a rape to distract the prison guards, Colton pilots a helicopter into the prison complex, Wagner boards the helicopter, and they escape. The group (Colton, Hawk, Myrna, Wagner) return to Texas in a four-passenger light aircraft.
Alerted to the escape, Harris Wagner orders his agent Cable (Mantee) to Texas to intercept the group. Cable, driving a Citroën SM with Washington, D.C.license plates, locates Ann Wagner and follows her Chevrolet Impala convertible, knowing she will lead him to Jay Wagner.
Cable uses false identification to lure Jay Wagner away from the group when they land. Cable nearly succeeds in kidnapping Wagner, but Colton becomes suspicious and pursues them. The film ends with a runway incursion as Cable and Colton fight among departing airplanes at Brownsville Airport.[5]
The original director was Michael Ritchie, but he did not like the idea of the female lead being played by Charles Bronson's wife Jill Ireland. Bronson threatened to leave the project if Ireland was not cast so Tom Gries came in as director. Producer Irwin Winkler was not a great admirer of the final film.[7]
Mexico would not participate in portraying this event.
Joel David Kaplan was a New York businessman and nephew of molasses tycoon Jacob Merrill Kaplan.[9] The elder Kaplan earned his fortune primarily through operations in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.[10]
The J.M. Kaplan Fund (named after the elder of the two) was found in a 1964 Congressional investigation to be a conduit for funneling CIA money to Latin America, including through the Institute of International Labor Research (IILR) headed by Norman Thomas, six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.[10] These funds were used in Latin America by figures like José Figueres Ferrer, Sacha Volman, and Juan Bosch.[11]
The CIA gave Figures money to publish a political journal, Combate, and to found a left-wing school for Latin American opposition leaders.[12] Funds passed from a shell foundation to the Kaplan Fund, next to the IILR, and finally to Figures.[12] Sacha Volman, treasurer of the IILR, was a CIA agent.[12]
Cord Meyer, a CIA official, was chief of International Organizations Division, a CIA sponsored front for manipulating international groups.[12] It served as part of the covert arsenal to engineer the New World Order.[12] He used the contacts with Bosch, Volman, and Figueres for a new purpose— as the United States moved to rally the hemisphere against Cuba's Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo, the strongman (caudillo) that ran the Dominican Republic for 30 years had become expendable.[12] The United States needed to demonstrate that it opposed all dictators, not just those on the left.[12]
For over a year, the CIA had been in contact with dissidents inside the Dominican Republic who argued that assassination was the only certain way to remove Trujillo.[12]
According to Chester Bowles, the Undersecretary of State, internal Department of State discussions in 1961 on the topic were vigorous.[13]Richard N. Goodwin, Assistant Special Counsel to the President, who had direct contacts with the rebel alliance, argued for intervention against Trujillo.[13] Quoting Bowles directly: "The next morning I learned that in spite of the clear decision against having the dissident group request our assistance Dick Goodwin following the meeting sent a cable to CIA people in the Dominican Republic without checking with State or CIA; indeed, with the protest of the Department of State. The cable directed the CIA people in the Dominican Republic to get this request at any cost. When Allen Dulles found this out the next morning, he withdrew the order. We later discovered it had already been carried out."[13]
In May 1961, the ruler of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo was murdered with weapons supplied by the CIA.[14] An internal CIA memorandum states that a 1973 Office of Inspector General investigation into the murder disclosed "quite extensive Agency involvement with the plotters." The CIA described its role in "changing" the government of the Dominican Republic "as a 'success' in that it assisted in moving the Dominican Republic from a totalitarian dictatorship to a Western-style democracy."[15][12] Bosch was elected president of the Dominican Republic in 1962.
In November 1961, Mexican police found a corpse they identified as Luis Melchior Vidal Jr., godson of Trujillo.[10] Vidal was the unofficial business agent of the Dominican Republic while Trujillo was in power.[10] Under cover of the "American Sucrose Company" and the "Paint Company of America", Vidal had teamed up with the American, Joel David Kaplan, to operate as arms merchants for the CIA.[10]
In 1962, the younger Kaplan was convicted in Mexico City of killing Vidal.[10] He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.[10] Kaplan always maintained his innocence.[citation needed] He was held at the Santa Martha Acatitla prison in the Iztapalapa borough of the Mexico City D.F. region.
His sister, Judy Kaplan, attempted to secure his release in numerous ways, finally developing an audacious plot.[10] In a plan hatched by San Francisco attorney Vasilios Basil "Bill" Choulos (1928–2003), a Bell Helicopter with its bottom painted in colors similar to that of the Mexican attorney general's would land in Mexico City's Santa Maria Acatitla prison and conduct a daring prisoner escape.[16]
On August 19, 1971, a helicopter landed in the prison yard. The guards mistakenly thought this was an official visit. In two minutes, Kaplan and Kaplan's cellmate Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro, a Venezuelan counterfeiter, boarded the craft and were piloted away. No shots were fired.[17] Both men were flown to Texas and then different planes flew Kaplan to California and Castro to Guatemala.[9]
The Mexican police requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrest and remand Kaplan on August 20, 1971.[10] Kaplan's attorney claimed that Kaplan was a CIA agent.[10] Neither the FBI nor the U.S. Department of Justice have pursued the issue.[10]
The Mexican government never initiated extradition proceedings against Kaplan.[17] The escape is told in a book, The 10-Second Jailbreak: The Helicopter Escape of Joel David Kaplan.[18]
Unlike in the film, there was no rape distraction, no shots were fired, and there was no pursuit by Mexican law enforcement.[9][17]
Release
Theatrical
The film opened internationally before opening in the United States and Canada on May 21, 1975.[1][19]
Reception
Box office
Breakout earned $16.0 million in theatrical rentals in the United States and Canada, and was the 21st most popular film of 1975.[20][21] By the time of its second week of US release, it had already grossed $5 million internationally.[19]
The film was reported to have been successful with Philippines audiences.[22]
Saturation booking
Part of its box-office success was due to the then-novel strategy of "saturation booking", in which Columbia released 1,350 prints simultaneously, combined with a heavy advertising campaign costing $3.6 million on the opening week. This was one of the first major studio films to use this method of release. It grossed $12.7 million in its first two weeks of saturation release.[19] Inspired by the success of Breakout, Universal Pictures used the same technique to promote Jaws. After Jaws became the highest-grossing movie of all time, saturation booking became the standard method of releasing major films.[23][24]
Critical response
TV Guide writes of Breakout: "It's one of those vigilante, simplistic stories that has audiences not mistaking the good guys for the bad guys at all. Unmotivated, often plodding, and singularly without humor, this film could have been terrific."[25]
The Dominican Republic is a country on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north. Geographically, the Dominican Republic is part of the North American continent. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with Haiti, making Hispaniola one of only two Caribbean islands, along with Saint Martin, that is shared by two sovereign states. It is the second-largest nation in the Antilles by area at 48,671 square kilometers (18,792 sq mi), and second-largest by population, with approximately 11.4 million people in 2024, of whom approximately 3.6 million live in the metropolitan area of Santo Domingo, the capital city.
Hudson Hawk is a 1991 American action comedy film directed by Michael Lehmann. Bruce Willis stars in the title role and also co-wrote both the story and the theme song. Danny Aiello, Andie MacDowell, James Coburn, David Caruso, Lorraine Toussaint, Frank Stallone, Sandra Bernhard and Richard E. Grant are also featured.
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, nicknamed El Jefe, was a Dominican military commander and dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from August 1930 until his assassination in May 1961. He served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, ruling for the rest of his life as an unelected military strongman under figurehead presidents. His rule of 31 years, known to Dominicans as the Trujillo Era, was one of the longest for a non-royal leader in the world, and centered around a personality cult of the ruling family. It was also one of the most brutal; Trujillo's security forces, including the infamous SIM, were responsible for perhaps as many as 50,000 murders. These included between 12,000 and 30,000 Haitians in the infamous Parsley massacre in 1937, which continues to affect Dominican-Haitian relations to this day.
Charles Bronson was an American actor. He was known for his roles in action films and his "granite features and brawny physique". Bronson was born into extreme poverty in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town in the Allegheny Mountains. Bronson's father, a miner, died when Bronson was young. Bronson himself worked in the mines as well until joining the United States Army Air Forces in 1943 to fight in World War II. After his service, he joined a theatrical troupe and studied acting. During the 1950s, he played various supporting roles in motion pictures and television, including anthology drama TV series in which he would appear as the main character. Near the end of the decade, he had his first cinematic leading role in Machine-Gun Kelly (1958).
Juan Emilio Bosch y Gaviño was a Dominican politician, historian, writer, essayist, educator, and the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic for a brief time in 1963. Previously, he had been the leader of the Dominican opposition in exile to the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo for over 25 years. To this day, he is remembered as an honest politician and regarded as one of the most prominent writers in Dominican literature. He founded both the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) in 1939 and the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) in 1973.
The Mirabal sisters were four sisters from the Dominican Republic, three of whom opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo and were involved in clandestine activities against his regime. The three sisters were assassinated on 25 November 1960. The last sister, Adela, who was not involved in political activities at the time, died of natural causes on 1 February 2014.
Félix Ismael Rodríguez Mendigutia is a Cuban American former Central Intelligence Agency Paramilitary Operations Officer in the Special Activities Division, known for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the execution of communist revolutionary Che Guevara as well as his close ties to George H. W. Bush during the Iran–Contra affair.
Sheree North was an American actress, dancer, and singer, known for being one of 20th Century-Fox's intended successors to Marilyn Monroe.
Howard Kaylan is an American retired musician and songwriter, best known as a founding member and lead singer of the 1960s rock band The Turtles, and, along with bandmate and friend Mark Volman, a member of the 1970s rock duo Flo & Eddie, where he used the pseudonym Eddie. He also was a member of Frank Zappa's band, The Mothers of Invention.
The Dominican Republic Professional Baseball League is a professional baseball winter league consisting of six teams spread across the Dominican Republic; it is the highest level of professional baseball played in the Dominican Republic. The league's players include many prospects that go on to play Major League Baseball in the United States while also signing many current MLB veterans. The champion of LIDOM advances to play in the yearly Caribbean Series.
The Fort de Bellegarde is a 17th-century bastion fortification located above the town of Le Perthus, in the Pyrénées-Orientales département of southern France.
Paul Mantee was an American film and television actor.
Bienvenido or bienvenidos may refer to:
Dominican Republic–United States relations are bilateral relations between the Dominican Republic and the United States of America. There are around 200,000 Americans expats in the Dominican Republic, and a little over 2 million Dominicans live in the United States.
The Evil That Men Do is a 1984 action thriller film directed by J. Lee Thompson, and starring Charles Bronson, Theresa Saldana, and Joseph Maher. The film was adapted by David Lee Henry and John Crowther from the novel of the same name by R. Lance Hill. Bronson plays a former assassin who comes out of retirement to avenge the death of his journalist friend at the hands of a torturer called "The Doctor", who works for various dictatorships worldwide, particularly those of Operation Condor. The film marks the fifth collaboration between Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson, following St. Ives (1976), The White Buffalo (1977), Caboblanco (1980), and 10 to Midnight (1983).
Breakout or Break Out may refer to:
Escape Plan is a 2013 American prison action thriller film starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and co-starring Jim Caviezel, 50 Cent, Vinnie Jones, Vincent D'Onofrio and Amy Ryan. It was directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, and written by Miles Chapman and Jason Keller. The first film to pair up Stallone and Schwarzenegger as co-leads, it follows Stallone's character Ray Breslin, a lawyer turned prison security tester who is incarcerated in the world's most secret and secure prison, and recruits fellow inmate Emil Rottmayer, portrayed by Schwarzenegger, to stage a breakout. The film is the first installment of the Escape Plan film series.
Never Too Late is a 2020 Australian comedy film directed by Mark Lamprell and starring James Cromwell and Jacki Weaver. The film also features Dennis Waterman, Roy Billing, Jack Thompson and Shane Jacobson.
The Mission of the Representative of the Secretary-General in the Dominican Republic (DOMREP) was a peacekeeping operation established in 1965 by the UN to observe the ceasefire agreement between the two de facto authorities in the Dominican Republic during the Dominican Civil War. DOMREP was instructed to report any breaches of the agreements between the Constitutionalists led by Juan Bosch and Francisco Caamaño, and Loyalists commanded by Elías Wessin y Wessin and backed by the United States. Once the new Dominican constitutional government was formed, DOMREP withdrew.
↑ "All-time Film Rental Champs". Variety. 7 January 1976. p.44.
↑ Dormiendo, Justino M. (June 1975). Lumbera, Bienvenido (ed.). "Mula sa Rumania, Pelikulang May Konsensiya"[Films with a Conscience from Romania]. Sagisag (in Filipino). Research & Analysis Center, Department of Public Information. p.52. Retrieved June 25, 2024. Kasi, maraming superstar ang naging kakompetensiya – si Charles Bronson ay dinudumog sa Breakout...
↑ Wyatt, Justin (1998). "From Roadshowing to Saturation Release: Majors, Independents, and Marketing/Distribution Innovations". In Lewis, Jon. The New American Cinema. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN0-8223-2115-7, p 78
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