Papillon
“The greatest adventure of escape!”
Franklin J. SchaffnerCast
Steve McQueen 
Dustin Hoffman 
Victor Jory 
Don Gordon 
Anthony Zerbe Robert Deman 
Woodrow Parfrey
Credits
Written by: 
Dalton Trumbo
Plot
Henri Charrière, nicknamed Papillon, is a safecracker wrongly convicted of murder and sent to the French penal colony of Guiana in the 1930s. He befriends the forger Louis Dega and spends years trying to escape the brutal prison camps and the notorious Devil's Island. Based on Charrière's memoir.
Sinekatalog’s take
A tough prison-escape epic carried by McQueen's physical intensity and Hoffman's fragile cunning. The scenes of solitary confinement are hard to forget, and the final cliff leap is a famous image.Sinekatalog’s own editorial review – not a user or critic quote.
Ratings
IMDb: 8.0 / 10 (147,234 votes)
IMDb rating and vote count from the IMDb ratings dataset (October 2026). Scores change over time.