Trailer
Plot summary
Harris Wagner believes his grandson Jay is interfering with his business schemes, which reach into the CIA. He has an operative named Cable arrange a murder in Mexico, and Jay is framed for it and locked in a Mexican prison. Jay's wife Ann wants him free and turns to Nick Colton, a bush pilot working out of Brownsville, Texas, and his partner Hawk Hawkins, who are offered fifty thousand dollars to reach the prison by air and bring Jay out. Their first attempts do not work, so Colton sets about learning to pilot a helicopter. The men who put Jay away have no intention of letting him walk free.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Breakout (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Part of the box-office success came from the then-novel strategy of "saturation booking", with Columbia releasing 1,350 prints simultaneously behind a $3.6 million opening-week advertising campaign. It grossed $12.7 million in its first two weeks, and Universal then used the same technique for Jaws, after which saturation booking became standard.
- The original director was Michael Ritchie, but he did not like the idea of the female lead Ann Wagner 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.
SPOILER
On August 19, 1971 a helicopter landed in the prison yard and the guards mistakenly thought it was an official visit. Within two minutes Kaplan and his cellmate, a Venezuelan counterfeiter, had boarded the craft and been piloted away, and no shots were fired.- In the real plot, hatched by a San Francisco attorney, a Bell Helicopter with its bottom painted in colors similar to the Mexican attorney general's helicopter would land in Mexico City's Santa Maria Acatitla prison and carry out a daring prisoner escape.
- The prison scenes were filmed at Fort de Bellegarde in France, and Romani people local to Southern France stood in for many of the Mexicans on screen.
