Headscratchers / The Shawshank Redemption

• Randall Stephens' drivers license. At the end of the movie Red states Andy had all the right information including a drivers license. Which would be fine, except then would it have had Andy's picture on it? Andy went to Shawshank in 1947. Driver's licenses started having pictures on them in 1958, so it would have made sense if the initial driver's license he made for this fake identity didn't have a picture, but it's another 8 years since it started being done. By this point wouldn't it have been standard? Having his face on a piece of identification used for money laundering seems like a risky move if he doesn't ever want to be implicated for the crime.
  • True, but not all states had the same timeline in getting photos on licenses. According to this article here Texas didn't have photos on their licenses until the mid-1970s. Maine could have been slow in that area. Also, if he could submit things by mail, he might have had a photo taken at some point in jail and then sent it out. If he explained just enough to the Warden, "Sir, I need a photo taken of me and sent to the Department of Motor Vehicles" the Warden would have permitted it.
• If the film takes place over a period of around twenty years, why do none of the characters seem to age?
  • There is only so much you can do to age up an actor before it begins to look fake, especially back in 1994. They decided to be subtle.
  • Andy does visibly age. By the time he escapes, he's grey around the temples and has lines on his face. And if you want to hand wave it, you could say that we're not seeing literally what happened but Red's memory of it. That way, everyone's appearances would blur together.
  • To be fair, the only characters we see for the whole 19 year timespan of the story are Andy, Red, Norton, Hadley plus Heywood and a few supporting inmates/guards. Everyone else comes and goes at various times and/or are at ages where they wouldn't necessarily physically change much during the time we spend with them (Brooks, for example, is already an old man when we first meet him and Tommy's not in the story nearly long enough for him to physically age at all). Andy, Red and Norton at least all do fairly noticeably age from beginning to end, mostly with regards to their hair starting to go grey. Heywood and Hadley also look a touch more "weathered" when we last see them than they did at the start.
• Why didn't they bust down the door instead of fiddling with the keys when trying to open the door to the warden's office?
  • If you had the option of opening a door without breaking it down, and thus having to pay money to replace it, wouldn't you? Plus the military and the police will teach you to never bust down a door unless you are willing to attack what is on the other side, none of the officers had their guns at the ready and clearly didn't want to have to gun the Warden down. Had they known the Warden had a gun at the ready I am sure they would have been in a more breach and clear attitude, but they were working under the assumption they would be able to take the Warden peacefully.
  • They didn't have anything to bust it down with, you can hear one of them telling another to go get the battering ram. It's the door to the warden's office in a prison, it was probably intended to stand up to more than a good solid kick. Plus all the other stuff already mentioned.
• The point of making up Mr. Stephens in the first place is to provide a kind of fictitious human shield just in case the money is traced. By becoming Stephens, wouldn't Andy's position become a little bit uncomfortable? Not to mention he actually gave the ledger to the press/police.
  • He only "became" Mr. Stephens long enough to cash out his account, drop off the evidence implicating the warden, and flee the country. After which, I assume, he discarded the Mr. Stephens identity.
  • And we know he knows how to create one fake identity - presumably he's perfectly capable of creating two.
    • The novel addresses this by saying that Andy was able to buy things from Red in prison by using an alias he created while he was in the banking business, apparently, he had a friend on the outside who was nice enough to draw money from the account of his alias and funnel it into prison for him to use. Mr. Stephens was Andy's alias which he used to launder money for Warden Norton, and as explained by Andy in the movie, even if they figure out Mr. Stephens' illegal activities, he only exists on paper and can't be tracked to him if he stops using it, which Andy would no longer need to use if he took all the money belonging to Mr. Stephens' account. The alias Andy established in his time working as a banker is something that he can fall back to if he needs to.
  • Dunno if I've missed your point (Troper above) but I'm fairly sure that in the novel Andy could buy stuff from Red using money he smuggled into the prison up his ass?
    • Yes that is how Andy managed to do it in the novel. However, note that he had a friend who took all of Andy's money before he went to prison and invested it under an alias Peter- not Randall as in the movie- Stephens which over time would gain money that would make him rich once he got out of prison. When he said that I interpreted that to mean some of that money found its way into the prison as money up your ass probably won't last very long.
    • It says he brought in 500 dollars, and that "a dollar bill in your hand looks like a twenty did outside". Andy could make that work a long time, especially when the only things he bought were rockhammers, rockblankets, posters, 2 beers a year and the rope for his briefcase. Everything for the library came from a separate account.
    • Oh, and stamps.
  • Maybe I'm wild mass guessing here, but did Andy drop off the evidence that included Norton's fake name he used to launder the money? In the papers, would it say (paraphrasing of course) "The warden laundered money using the alias Randall Stephens"? Andy drops off the info after checking all the money out, so in that case wouldn't it look like Norton did that instead? Sure, the tellers would remember who it was, but that could have been a middleman hired by Norton. Norton blows his brains out right after he gets busted, so they then have to spend a good amount of time trying to figure out where all the money went - which gives Andy plenty of time to get away.
• How did Andy stick the poster up once he was in the tunnel? Presumably he did this every night so that anyone walking past his cell wouldn't notice anything strange at a glance. Also, wouldn't the poster move and flex in the wind, which would now travel through the tunnel once opened at the other end?
  • Tape on the top end of the poster would have kept it up so that he could lift it up and let the bottom portion fall down after he went through the tunnel. Andy most likely would have been conducting his tunneling into the wall after everyone had gone to sleep at night so he wouldn't have to worry about being caught by someone walking by his cell during the day. There doesn't appear to be much wind flow into his cell on average, or at least we don't ever get to see his cell get drafty, so who knows. In any case Andy thought his escape out very well and would have taken all of these factors into mind.
    • If nothing else, he could have stacked some books, laundry, and/or other objects in the tunnel to minimize the draft. The tunnel also exited into an interior space which didn't seem to be a place intended for a lot of traffic. Combined with tape and stuff in front of the poster, he could certainly come up with ways to avoid suspicion.
  • Or more simply, if it was a particularly windy night then Andy didn't work on the tunnel.
• My sister pointed out to me that Andy should have gotten a staph infection from crawling through all that feces. I told her that he had soap at the ready to clean himself in the rain. Would the soap really be enough to prevent him from getting sick?
  • Yeah, God help him if he got any scratches; they'd probably turn gangrenous. Not only that, but all the methane from the fermenting feces would be poisonous as well. He's lucky he even stayed conscious through 500 yards of that. But if he avoided getting any open wounds, it is possible. And since he made it to Zihuatanejo at the end, we know he did.
    • It wasn't a tube of solid faeces folks, it was a sewer drain. Sewage matter doesn't sit and ferment, sewerpipes are designed so that sewage moves along them! Also remember that there would also have been floodwater from the rain. And remember too that he had no choice.
  • Faeces wash off. If Andy didn't have any open cuts for the stuff to get into, he's fine. Staph has to have somewhere to go to be a full-on infection.
• I never have understood why Captain Hadley viewed "ball-washing bastards" as an appropriate insult for lawyers. Don't men generally want to keep their balls clean so that it smells nice and avoids fungus which causes your balls to itch when they sweat? I would imagine just about every normal man out there is a "ball-washer", unless he is alluding to an unhealthy obsession with their balls.
  • Probably comparing them to homosexuals, implying they wash other people's balls. At least it's alliterative. It rings better than the insult in the original book, at least (which made it as far as the screenplay before being changed, possibly as an ad-lib): "Ambulance-chasing, highway-robbing cocksuckers!"
  • "Ball-washing" could also refer to golf (where there are "ball-washers" every third hole or so). Given that the sport was an upscale country club type thing at that point in time, it could be a double entendre or a straight-out class-based deal.
  • Also could imply they're prissy and frou-frou enough to worry about how their balls smell. Hadley probably doesn't care at all how his own balls smell, after all.
  • If nothing else, he might be saying that their hands are dirty from touching themselves a lot and so have to wash their hands to get rid of the dirtiness.
• Regarding Andy's profession I have wondered two things: 1) Firstly along with being a banker was he also a lawyer? I ask this because he seems to have a clear understanding of the law and how to manipulate it from within the prison system which the Warden and Captain Hadley use to their advantage. Or since it is mainly financial advice was he just a banker with some knowledge in business law? 2) Does Andy really have legal authority to give out legal advice and form legally binding contracts while he is a prisoner? Wouldn't being a convicted felon prevent him from having the authority to act as a banker/lawyer?
  • For the first point, his knowledge seems to be restricted to his hobbies and financial matters; knowing how to make a false identity sort of comes with his financial background, since he "knows where the cracks are."
  • Second, Andy is never implied to form any contracts with anyone in prison (he only gathers the appropriate tax/legal forms for the prison staff), and the fact that he didn't have any legal authority was what made him so appealing to the guards in the first place. It meant that the work he did could be done for free.
  • Andy has a clear understanding of financial law... which, if you're a banker, is kind of important to have.
    • Though you have to wonder how well he would have been able to keep up with changes in the details of financial law, taxation rules, etc. for the years he was in Shawshank.
    • Why wouldn't have Norton allowed Andy to view changes in financial law? In the end, he's still getting someone to file his taxes and keep suspicions of his money laundering schemes low for free. It's not like it would've helped him escape or anything.
    • That information is publicly available, and always has been. Back in the timeframe of the movie, a request to the IRS for updated tax law would have been fulfilled by mail within a few weeks. It would have been simple and inexpensive for him to make a request every year in time for his accounting work. He did, after all, run the library and probably had subscriptions to government publications and all of the financial periodicals. Note: Andy is shown reading during the "tax montage" and the narration clearly states that he keeps up with current laws.
    • I got the impression (from Andy's final scene with the Warden) that having done "The Books" for the Warden Andy goes "You need to sign these 17 bits of paper". Presumably one of these is a request to the IRS for any changes to the tax code.
  • Bear in mind that it doesn't matter if he has legal authority or not. He's laundering money so it has to be kept hush-hush so it wouldn't be under his name - that's what the Randall Stephens identity was for. And being that it was illegal, there's not really a reason to form a legally binding contract or other procedures since that makes no sense during an illegal operation.
  • He is in prison for twenty years; that's plenty of time to do some reading, and if there's a place where the law is likely to be a frequent topic of conversation it's a prison.
• Why is Red the only guilty man in Shawshank?
  • He isn't. The whole "Everyone's innocent here" line is a gag, meant to portray life in the prison as being harsh even beyond deserving of the crimes committed by the individuals themselves. That's why Heywood asks, "So you mean Andy's innocent? I mean... for real, innocent?" Red calls himself the "only guilty man in Shawshank" as a form of admission to Andy that he really did do the crimes he was accused of, and deserves his life in prison.
  • In the novella, Red explains this in the narration. He tells the reader he's one of the few people in Shawshank willing to own up to what he did - murdered two people. In the movie it's adapted into the running gag, "Everyone's innocent in here."
  • He's being sarcastic. Prisoners stereotypically tend to protest their innocence despite their convictions and deny responsibility for what they did. Red's just sarcastically commenting on how everyone there claims their innocence despite most of them being guilty as sin. In other words, At Least I Admit It: almost everyone there (apart from Andy) broke the law and deserves to be in jail for it, but unlike pretty much everyone else Red is at least willing to come acknowledge it.
  • The reason they all claim innocence is so that if something happens and they get a re-trial, nobody can claim that so-and-so confessed while he was in prison. When Red confesses to Andy, it shows that he trusts Andy completely and knows Andy won't use it against him.
• If the American authorities ever suspected that Andy was in Mexico, could he get extradited? After all, it's probable that Quentin's family know about Andy's escape. It's also probable that they want Andy found and re-arrested. Admittedly, Mexican authorities were pretty laid-back towards foreign fugitives circa 1968, but they've gotten gradually tougher in later years (for example, a US-Mexican extradition treaty was signed in 1978). Bottom line, if I were Andy, I wouldn't feel completely at ease.
  • Red is the only person who knows where Andy was heading, and Andy's smart enough to live under an assumed name. Even if the authorities suspected he'd gone to Mexico (and since he was in a Maine prison, that wouldn't be obvious) what would they do? Call up the Mexican attorney general and demand he spend his time chasing down some American fugitive? Think of the number of escaped Nazis who lived more or less openly in Latin America. Andy's gone, amigo.
  • First, there's the matter of whether they consider Andy worth pursuing. He was convicted of a crime of passion, so it's not like they consider him a career criminal. His pursuit and extradition would only reopen the publicity on the corruption at Shawshank.
    • They clearly did consider him worth pursuing. Red notes in the narration that they launched the biggest manhunt in Shawshank history.
    • "Biggest in Shawshank history" doesn't really tell us how big that is. If the prison itself was involved, they would've been limited to the surrounding area. Since Andy had a good headstart and was traveling ~2600 miles away to Fort Hancock, Texas, they would've looked many other places before finding him. They're more likely to look toward Canada than Mexico due to proximity. And even if another agency like the US Marshalls got involved, they're looking for a needle in a haystack with no leads, paper trail, or surveillance.
  • It's also possible that Andy included evidence of his innocence with the package he mails to the papers exposing the Warden's corruption. After all, exposure of Andy's innocence was the motive for murdering Tommy. He still escapes to Mexico because a) He can't be certain the evidence would be enough to exonerate him and b) He is still guilty of escaping prison, which is a crime regardless of whether you're guilty or not.
  • If nothing else, unless he already got caught by the Mexican police, he's probably not worth truly hunting for in any real active sense. He'd be known as a basically non-violent criminal whose only additional crimes were money laundering under duress - hardly someone to actively hunt for. That said, he probably also knows not to attract too much attention for precisely that reason. But then again, he's an innocent man; it's not like he wants to commit any more crimes.
  • In the absence of a retrial or a formal exoneration, Andy is officially a convicted double murderer and escaped felon. He's also a witness, if not an accomplice, to the corruption at Shawshank (not to mention the $350k of dirty money he made off with). So yes the authorities would be very interested in recapturing him. The fact that he claims to be innocent is immaterial. Escaping from prison is also a felony in itself, even if you were innocent of the original crime. The US Marshals claim they don't close a case until the escapee's 100th birthday, and there have been real life instances of people being recaptured decades later, so Andy is going to spend a long time looking over his shoulder.
    • Witness, certainly, and the authorities would probably like to get that money back, but "accomplice" might be a bit more difficult; Andy's a prisoner at the facility working for the Warden and guards, any halfway decent lawyer would be able to argue a case that Andy's participation in the scheme was coerced (especially when all the other details about the corruption at Shawshank are made public). They had near-literal power of life and death over him, after all.
  • Ultimately, while Andy does face the possibility of extradition and return to prison should he one day be found, he's probably not too worried about it. It's a risk of breaking out of prison, after all, and even if one day the cards fall against him and he gets found and extradited, he nevertheless gets to spend some time in a beautiful part of the world living free. After twenty years wrongfully imprisoned, that's not nothing. It's part of the point of the film — having hope and finding the ability to live your best life even in difficult or uncertain circumstances. If he let the fact that he hypothetically wouldn't "feel completely at ease" after escape stop him, then he'd have never started to begin with out of fear. Clearly he feels that such anxiety is outweighed by the benefits of his plan.
  • And if nothing else, if he gets returned to prison for his escape, then at least this time he'll be put in prison for something he actually did.
  • Remember also that Andy is fleeing to Mexico with around $350,000 to his name. That's roughly equivalent to just over $3 million in 2022 money. That's a lot of Benjamins to spread around if necessary to convince the locals — and, especially important, the local authority figures — in the small community he's planning to live a quiet, peaceful life in that nah, this gringo couldn't possibly be Andy Dufresne, escaped convict.
  • And while Andy is an escaped convict, he isn't exactly the most high-profile of criminals. His crime is unlikely to propel him to the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list. The authorities will still put a lot of effort into trying to recapture him, because of course they will, he's an escaped convict. But he's not a major organised crime figure or terrorist, a serial killer, a kidnapper or robber operating across state lines, or the kind of high profile criminal who gets an intensive and prolonged nationwide manhunt on his trail. All he has to do is avoid the initial dragnet, keep ahead of any alerts being sent to other law enforcement agencies, and once he gets to safety he's pretty much home and dry. All the banks he visits are in Portland, so once he's got the money it's only an hour's drive until he's across the state border in New Hampshire, meaning he's already slipped into one different jurisdiction, and if he puts his foot down and doesn't stop he can also be in Virginia or Ohio by the end of the day. By the time the authorities get called in and the feds are involved, he can conceivably be two or three states away from where he started.
• How could Brooks get parole if he didn't want it? They don't force parole on convicts, do they?
  • Probably. It's the same as if you were in the hospital and you got well. There's no reason for you to be there, so you have to leave. If the State's decided you served your sentence, off you go.
  • Money and resources are being spent on captives who no longer have reason to stay. The prison will need every last cent it can save on sheltering new fish.
  • Prisoners are not allowed to stay in prison because they want to. Once it’s determined that they are no longer a threat to themselves or others they are released (provided they’ve served a certain portion of their sentence). Remember that Brooks acted like he was going to kill Heywood just so he could stay. However after being talked down he ended up breaking down crying and letting him go, further proving that he was just a harmless old man at this point. Sadly it’s not uncommon for prisoners to commit minor infractions or crimes to extend their sentence. For many it’s the best home they’ve ever known.
    • On that subject, if they are regularly getting busloads of new fish, how is they're not so overcrowded as to prevent Andy from having a cellmate? For that matter, at the headcount when Andy disappears, it looks like there's one prisoner per cell.
    • To the above: people also regularly leave the prison. Not everyone on the new fish bus is going to be a lifer. Tommy, for example, is only in for (I think) 3-5 years for breaking and entering.
    • As for Andy not having a cellmate, once he had his arrangement with the warden and Hadley setup, he probably could just ask not to have one, on the grounds of wanting privacy and to minimize how many people know about the money laundering.
    • Andy's single cell was a privilege. Note that when he becomes uncooperative, the warden threatens: "I'll pull you out of that one-bunk Hilton and cast you down with the Sodomites!"
  • Also... it's still prison. The default assumption is that most people who have been in prison for years would be happy to get out, because being in prison isn't as nice as being outside. They don't see it as 'forcing' parole on him, they see it as rewarding him for paying his debt to society. Sure, as the movie demonstrates they could make the reacclimating-to-life-outside process a bit easier, but the alternative is keeping people locked up forever no matter what their crime was on the off-chance that they feel uncomfortable on the outside, which doesn't seem much of an improvement.
• Andy threw away a revolver. His wife was killed with a semiautomatic. Why didn't they notice the ejection pin marks? Was this just the one killer smart enough to pick up the brass?
  • Rule of Drama : Andy threw away his gun. While we see it before he throws it away, it's not stated that the gun was legally registered to him, nor that the prosecuting team knows what kind of gun Andy had, compared to the gun that killed the couple. In real life, yes that would be evidence for Andy's case, but according to Hollywood, without a gun to compare it to, and with all the other circumstantial evidence in place, it's inconclusive at best.
    • I just watched the movie. It was never established that his wife was killed with a semi-automatic. On the contrary it said they were killed with a .38. .38 is a revolver caliber.
    • The movie is actually pretty clear about this during the opening court scene. "Consider this: Four bullets per victim. Not six shots fired, but eight. That means that he fired the gun empty, and then stopped to reload so that he could shoot each of them again." The court seems to believe they were killed with a six-shot revolver.
• How could Andy prove Tommy's murder to the press? The headline says "Corruption, murder at Shawshank". Would the Warden really write that in his ledger?
  • First and foremost, people have written down stuff like that and a perp getting all literary with their own private journal is not unheard of. Andy, of course, knows it was murder and he probably managed to find a way to slip something incriminating in if he wanted to. As long as everything else checks out then a little addition of Andy's own making would probably be accepted. Once the investigation started all sorts of things would fall out of the tree and guards would start making deals, testimony in exchange for lenience, so Andy knows that he won't be damaging the investigation by doing so. Tommy wasn't the only person that died of course, we get the impression Shawshank was brutal even by the standards of the day, his was just the most cold-blooded. Ultimately the Watsonian explanation is the headline is to give the viewer closure over Tommy's death without holding up Red's narrative.
  • Who says he had to prove anything to the press? They'll run just about anything, and he's got enough for the police to take action even without evidence of murder.
  • Like Andy said to the warden, there would be a trail of records of Elmo Blatch that would be very easy to follow and would at the very least provide probably cause to formally investigate. It would be easy to find that he was Tommy's former cell mate, that he had a history of criminal activity (probably including violence), and that he worked at the golf course at the time of the murder. If someone contended (like the warden did) that Tommy was just telling a story to help out his friend, the simple response would be 'What would be the chances that Tommy, upon inventing his story for Andy's benefit, would happen to pick someone he met in prison who just happened to be working at that particular golf course at just the right time?'. Most likely, upon being given the reason to look a pattern, the police would find a series of property crimes or robberies befalling the staff and members of that golf club coinciding nicely with Blatch's term of employment.
  • The murder talked about could also be referring to Fat Ass 19 years ago.
• How long was that tunnel? It looks like it is at least 10 to 20 feet. What kind of building has a 10 or 20 foot thick concrete wall? The back wall of the cell looked like it was just a normal wall with a window.
  • The short answer is that a prison has 10 or 20 foot thick concrete walls, because prison. The long answer is explained in a bit more detail in the novella: the prison block is the older part of the building that adjoins a newer addition, with a gap between the two allowing for the pipes. Andy has what used to be a corner cell. Also in the novella, the wall was not quite as thick, so the tunnel was much shorter; the long tunnel we see in the movie might have been exaggerated for effect.
• Andy's night of escape. Something that is never explained is where Andy spent the night after escaping and how he preserved the suit he took... we know his prison clothes were abandoned right away and he washed himself in the rain with a bar of soap. Problem is he couldn't change into the suit he had in the bag right away. It was pouring rain and it would be soaking wet. It was probably a few miles to town so it was either walk the roadsides in a wet suit or go naked. Either way he would most certainly be seen and noticed by someone! When he got to town where did he stay until the banks opened in the morning? Hotels cost money...he didn't have any until he went to the banks. If he just slept on a park bench... same issue with the soaking wet suit (which as we know was dry when we see it in the bank scene). There was nowhere near enough time to take it to a dry cleaners that morning and have it be done already by the time banks opened.
  • He possibly did go naked until he found somewhere to dry off. The countryside is not empty, there are often outbuildings and field stores dotted around, so he presumably found one of those to dry off in, even moreso in towns where there is nearly always somewhere to shelter out of the rain for a short period. We don't know how long the storm lasted, it could have been over not long after his escape. If the rain really persists then he wouldn't be the only person in a damp suit, because other people would have got caught in the rain too. As for cash, Andy probably had been pilfering from petty cash, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for someone who plans as meticulously as he does to have a small cash reserve. Law of Conservation of Detail is in effect here.
  • If nothing else, he could have had additional clothing (even if only pants and a t-shirt) as a second set. As for being seen and noticed, that wouldn't have been a problem at that time. It wasn't known that he had escaped until morning and he could pass himself off as a motorist whose car broke down in the rain and needed a lift into town. As for cash, he mentions to the warden that there were a few deposits that night as a distraction. It's possible that these deposits were supposed to be cash deposits sent out in the mail... which he simply never mailed out on top of also just taking a bunch of money from the offices. He was clearly trusted to be minimally watched and was already handling a bunch of money anyway; him briefly handling money might not have been suspicious. Heck, if asked about why he's stuffing money into an envelope, he could make up some financial reason.
• Why doesn't Andy just hide his rock hammer and bible in the hole he was digging once it was big enough? It seems that by the time we see Andy's surprise inspection the hole should be the proper size.
  • Might not have thought about it that day. He might also have figured that if his bible ups and disappears one day, the warden would get suspicious. Besides, it's faster and easier to close the book and toss it on the bed just before dawn when he hears noise rather than fiddle with the poster. And the more he fiddles with the poster, the more wrinkled and suspicious it looks.
  • He may very well have been hiding the rock hammer in the hole by then, but there would still be a hammer-shaped cutout in the bible, which would be just as incriminating. Note that the book is empty when the warden finally opens it, and the search party finds the hammer in the river where Andy exited the pipe.
• If Andy really did throw his gun in the river like he said, why didn't the police find it? A gun doesn't float. It would just sink straight to the bottom. As long as Andy showed the police where he threw the gun into the river, they should have found it.
  • They didn't have modern scuba gear back then, underwater searching was a lot more difficult. They might not even have bothered looking. Not to mention that even with modern gear it can be difficult to find something like a gun under anything except ideal circumstances. If the river was fast flowing, or if the bottom is particularly muddy, then that thing is gone. There is also the complication that Andy was drunk and emotional, so might not even remember exactly where he chucked it in.
    • The prosecutor at Andy's trial said the police searched the river for 3 days, so we know they did check it. And while scuba gear back then wasn't as good as it is now, it still should have been sufficient. I suppose the point about Andy being too drunk to remember the exact spot might be an explanation, but was he really that drunk? He still remembered everything he did that night, and he was able to drive himself home. So it doesn't seem like he would be so drunk as to forget where he ditched the gun.
    • It's also possible that since the case seemed rock solid against him, they might have not searched particular hard, might have searched the wrong places, might have searched a too big area (if they did believe where he threw it away was accurate or a misdirection), or something else.
    • He says that they "dragged that river for three days", but they could easily have spent three days doing the job incompetently. It's not as if Andy was able to hire an alternate river-searching team to go do a better job of it.
  • There's no guarantee they'd find the gun no matter how much effort or time they put into it. It's not like they always find evidence thrown into rivers in modern times.
  • It's a small metal object being thrown into a large moving body of water. It would sink, but it wouldn't necessarily sink straight down; depending on how powerful the current is it could have drifted some distance away from where it entered the water before coming to a rest. And then, it's a small object amongst rocks, silt, other junk that's been thrown in there...
• Upon finding out about Elmo Blanch (the real person who killed his wife and her lover) from Tommy, why is Norton the first person Andy shares this information with? He knows Norton is severely corrupt. Besides, even if Norton wasn't corrupt, what help would a prison warden be anyway? Prison wardens don't conduct investigations or file appeals on behalf of their inmates. Think about all the news stories you ever read about an exonerated inmate being released from prison. Was a prison warden ever involved in that process? Probably not. Instead, why didn't Andy share this information with someone whose job it is to help him get out of prison: A defense lawyer. Or a private investigator? With all the money Andy had been laundering, surely he could have simply hired some good lawyers or private investigators to track down Elmo Blanch, find out if there is any incriminating evidence against him, and then file appeals to get Andy a new trial. There was no need to roll the dice by seeking aid from someone he should have known could not be trusted.
  • It was a moment of passion. He wasn't thinking about the warden as a corrupt individual. He was thinking "I could go free!" and the warden as someone he'd built up some amount of trust with.
  • Until he collected the money after escaping, Andy didn't have access to any of the laundered funds. As we see throughout the film, Andy is fairly optimistic despite two life sentences so he likely thought the relationship and goodwill he had built up with Norton would gain him some assistance and support. It wasn't about Norton actually investigating or filing any appeals.
  • Andy knew Norton was corrupt financially; he didn't know that Norton was so corrupt that he'd resort to murder just for the sake of keeping Andy in prison. There's quite a leap between the two. Also, the warden would probably be the first visit anyone in Andy's situation would have made. He literally just finds out that there's actual concrete proof of his innocence and thus there's a chance, however small, that he could get a new trial that might potentially result in his freedom. From what we hear of the conversation between Andy and Norton, it seems like Andy is just wanting to know if he's right in thinking all that and Norton is trying to convince him that he's wrong. It's not until Andy becomes so emotional that he insults Norton and then inadvertently puts the idea into the warden's head that he might end up blabbing when/if he gets out that the claws come out, so to speak. If Andy had just pretended to accept Norton's word that hope of freedom was pointless, the likelihood would have been that he (along with Red, Tommy and anyone else willing to believe and help him) would have figured out a way of getting himself a new trial with or without the warden's approval. His outburst and Norton's overreaction just brought things to a head.
    • This, there's a LOT of distance between 'stealing money from the government' and 'gunning down somebody in cold blood.' Andy wanted Norton's help because it would be a lot easier to get the evidence out with his cooperation, and probably thought that he could still go around the Warden even without his help, but Andy DRAMATICALLY underestimated the lengths Norton was willing to go to just to keep Andy there. In the book it was also considerably less brutal - instead of killing him, Norton bought Tommy off with a transfer to a cushy lower security prison.
    • But the thing is, Norton isn't just financially corrupt, he's also violently corrupt, in that he lets his guards beat inmates up to the point of death or permanent disability. While Andy might not have been able to predict Norton would murder someone to keep him in prison, it should have been easy to predict he'd do something dirty and underhanded to do it. If nothing else, Andy could be reasonably sure Norton simply would not help him. At the very least, Andy should have realized telling Norton this information gave him no benefit at all, but had a major risk. It should have been clear Norton was the one person Andy should have made sure not to share this information with.
    • The guards are violently corrupt. Warden Norton, however, never engages or orders in an act of violence that we ever see. For all Andy might know from his vantage point, Warden Norton has no idea of the kinds of things his guards get up to, or might have the wool pulled over his eyes. Andy simply assumes that the Warden is ignorant or naive regarding what goes on in his prison when he's not there, not that he is willing to have people murdered to further his interests.
• Could you really withdraw over $370,000.00 without notice, even if you had all the necessary ID? Okay, it was from "nearly a dozen banks," so say an average of $37,000.00 at each. And this was at 1966 prices. Was that much money so readily available, even back then when they weren't quite so stringent about security?
  • He was given cashiers checks
    • Yes. He's doing nothing suspicious like demanding cash in small bills, he's closing his account and asking for cashier check to move his money to a different bank (wire transfers at this stage were still quite rare for individuals). Andy or 'Mr. Stephens,' as the banks know him, is an older, calm, well-dressed, confident, at ease, polite gentleman who knows the exact details of the account he is requesting closed, and has all proper ID and documentation. He's not making unreasonable or shocking demands, he's simply closing his account and moving his money to a different bank via cashier's check, a bank CAN'T legally stop him from withdrawing his money without reasonable suspicion, and 'Mr. Stephens' is raising no red flags that could warrant such action.
  • Furthermore, the banker comments that he hopes 'Mr. Stephens' enjoys his new life overseas. A person closing their bank account because they're moving to a new location is a perfectly common and unremarkable financial transaction.
  • In short: if you have all the necessary paperwork and identification documents, then yes, you can withdraw any sum of money in your account whenever you want.
• Why didn't Red and his group defend Andy from Bogs and the sisters? Granted during those first two years (before Andy got them the beers) Andy didn't contribute much to their group and Bogs' gang was quite violent so maybe they didn't want to confront them. But Red is powerful in other ways so perhaps he could've made a financial deal with Bogs to leave Andy alone?
  • Basically, Red and his group are older and more vulnerable compared to Bogs and the Sisters and probably couldn't act as a deterrent unless everybody was there (and even then…). While we see Andy with the group often, that's more Conservation of Detail; there's probably several days in that 2 year period where Andy never has the opportunity to socialize with the others outside of lunch, and that's when the Sisters attack him.
  • Adding to the above, the basic schoolyard mentality of "if I stand by him, I'll make myself a target" was more than likely in play as well. It's not so much "Andy doesn't contribute much to the group" until he gets everyone those beers while they're working on the roof, it's more that Andy isn't actually part of the group in the first place. For the first two years, Red is heavily implied to be the only actual friend he has in Shawshank since it's only him that we see Andy having any kind of meaningful and non-hostile interaction with (I mean there's also Brooks but let's face it, Brooks isn't exactly going to be much help in this situation). And Red can only do so much to protect him considering they work in different areas of the prison (Andy in laundry and Red in the shop); it's implied that just getting Andy to work on the roof with the rest of them is Red basically doing what little he can to protect him by making sure Andy spends most of the day away from Bogs and around other people. Even a financial deal with Bogs is very likely to have done nothing since there's absolutely nothing stopping him from pocketing the money to leave Andy alone and then the next time he or the Sisters discover Andy on his own (which is implied to be the case for most of Andy's daily routine)...here we go again. And it would probably be even more violent to teach Andy and/or Red a lesson. While none of the others may want to see harm come to Andy, it's also very likely that they simply didn't care enough in those first two years to get involved and put themselves on the line, similarly to how everyone just kept quiet when Hadley dragged Fat-Ass out of his cell on the first night; none of them wanted the guy to be beaten to death and they all clearly feel bad about it but none of them were willing to try and speak out against it either.
• When did Andy bury the box with the money in for Red to collect? Surely not before he was arrested, in which case he must have done it while he was fleeing to Mexico. But then how did he know about that specific field in such detail?
  • He tells Red why he knew about that field: he went there with his wife and remembered it vividly. He made up the part about the box and presumably the rock, but he had already planned to go put them there once he got out.
• How do you suppose Andy put the poster of Raquel Welch back after he had crawled head-first through the hole behind it?
  • Andy could have easily lifted the poster up and then let it drop behind him when he went through the hole. So long as the top portion of the poster had tape on it then it wasn't going to fall down after he went through the tunnel.
  • They show us Andy working under the poster. It was only secured on top. It was a curtain with a woman on it.
• Wasn't it convenient that Andy had a corner cell—or that never in 19 years did he get moved to another cell—or that lightning struck at just the right moment? How much oxygen would there have been in that sewer pipe? How likely is it, even in 1966, that a large sewer pipe would have dumped directly into a creek? Even presuming he had a suit wrapped up and protected in that bag, how did Andy manage to present himself spic and span and dry at a faraway bank a few hours later? And most puzzling, why did Andy even consider clearing his name legally when the new convict showed up? What was he going to tell the next occupant of that cell—never tear down the Raquel Welch poster? It's best not to think too hard about Andy's escape.
  • Why would the next occupant of the cell tell anyone about the hole in the wall? One would think the next occupant would rather make use of said hole...
    • You mean the person who moves into the cell after prison authorities find the hole? One would think that repairs to the wall would be considered rather urgent before putting a new inmate in that cell.
  • Although to be fair the novella does take account of some of these issues. In the book Andy did have a cellmate for a while, and he was forced to stop working on the tunnel for a couple of years. Even then the cellmate had a few suspicions since the cell was unexplainably drafty. Andy's presence, solo, in the cell for that period of time and with no other cellmates was part of the price for doing the wardens' dirty work - it was a privilege given to him in return for cooking the books. Bear in mind also that Shawshank itself is an old facility — it had been around for ages before Andy turned up there — and some of the plumbing had more or less been forgotten about after it had been built on and over so many times. The lightning storm and bashing open the sewer pipe, though, are Artistic License and designed to keep some suspense going; Andy can't make his bid for freedom until the night of a suitably loud thunderstorm.
    • But Andy started digging his tunnel before the warden established a working relationship with him, and therefore before he could count on lasting protection. Guards come and go from the prison, only the warden is likely to have a tenure there long enough to be relied on for such a long-term project.
    • This is probably the reason for the back and forth buildup to his initial offer to Hadley. He realized it was an opportunity to build privilege and avoid potential complications but he had to be absolutely sure and figure out a rock solid way to get Hadley to agree (to not move him and/ to privacy). Otherwise, he would have been discovered even sooner. But once that trust was built, he could reasonably afford to ask not to be moved from his cell, ask not to get any cellmates, and other perks under the defense of it bothering him and making it harder to think about the money laundering (or even just to avoid more than the necessary amount of people discovering the laundering).
  • Corner cell: that's just pure convenience. Andy got lucky there. Thunderstorm: Nothing saying he couldn't wait around for a storm to happen. He waited nearly twenty years, surely he could wait another couple days/weeks/months (depending on the season). Sewage pipe: I really don't know enough about 1960s plumbing, but it doesn't seem THAT far-fetched. At least it wasn't an Absurdly Spacious Sewer. Cleanliness post sewage pipe: They showed that he had a bar of soap among his stuff. That and a rain storm could get someone reasonably clean. If he had some money, he could have bought a bottle of cologne or something on his way to the bank, too. Clearing his name / hole in his cell: In most US states, it is a felony to attempt to escape if you were incarcerated for a felony (which Andy obviously was); however, a prerequisite for that is that the prisoner was being lawfully imprisoned. If Andy's case went back to trial and he was let off, his lawyer might have reasonably been able to argue that his client was not being lawfully held (depending on the facts of the case). The state's attorney or whoever might not even want to bring a case against him for that; I mean, what jury would convict someone for trying to escape when they were innocent?? Also, I have no idea what the penalty for a conviction on attempting to escape from jail is, but I have a feeling that it's nowhere near the penalty for double homicide (and thus, an easy trade off).
    • Regarding the above, it's my understanding that Andy's case would not be unlawful imprisonment, as the only authority that had any reason to doubt he was guilty was the warden. If that had come out after he escaped, it might qualify-sadly, the witness Tommy is dead, along with Warden Norton, and Hadley may not have even know why he was ordered to kill Tommy (plus it's hearsay with the original witness dead). In some states, escape from prison is punishable through doubling the sentence the prisoner was originally serving (in Andy's case, two life sentences). Thus, from a legal standpoint, I'd say Andy was out of luck, and escaping was his only way to free himself.
    • It's possible he might have been convicted of escaping imprisonment but his sentence being commuted for time served for the crime he didn't commit. This would allow him to be found guilty without him being punished for what may would probably see as a reasonable act.
  • I know in the book Red mentions that the sewerage system of his particular block was the last to be changed over to a more up to date system, and also, I believe the novel is actually set considerably earlier (1940's initially) and thus it stands to reason that the prison itself would have been probably built before the turn of the century and any sort of pollution laws.
  • All of this is somewhat addressed in the book. It's stated that Andy's theory about what happened the night of the murder was just that he was the victim of massive bad luck. So, what happens after he's convicted of a crime he didn't commit? A whole heap of good luck. This is Stephen King, remember...
  • Why wasn't there a grate on the far end of the sewage pipe? Even if you're not concerned about human access, you're probably concerned about animals …
    • The authorities at Shawshank don't seem like the type to care about animals in the prison unless it directly affected them. Hadley might have enjoyed having prisoners squirm over rat shit.
  • While some of this falls under "convenience," other parts of it fall under "a plan Andy developed over time using the circumstances available to him." It's not like Andy went into Shawshank having already conceived of his escape plan and just happens to get all the elements required to fulfill that plan handed to him on a plate; he's there for about twenty years, that's long enough to put an escape plan together and learn of the weaknesses that will enable him to best fulfill it. Had Andy, say, been locked in a different cell, he would simply have devised a different plan.
  • As far as "spic and span the next day" is concerned, I always assumed that suit he wore to the bank was not the suit he had with him. He put on the first suit to look mildly presentable so he could walk into a clothing store and buy a new suit (with some petty cash he had saved up from all the corruption he was involved in). Likewise he could buy himself a razor or a comb or whatever. Then he walks into the bank wearing a brand-new suit and everyone assumes he's the rich man he claims to be.
• Did Andy really need to sign his name on the comment he made for Norton? If anything, that would only draw more attention to his role in this thing and create more incentives to catch him.
  • Seems to me that him being an "escaped murderer" would be all they needed to put all resources into catching him. His part in the fraud schemes is negligible compared to the crime he was convicted of.
  • But it's possible that the evidence Andy provided of "corruption and murder at Shawshank" could also serve as evidence that he was wrongly imprisoned; if they know Tommy was killed, they might look into why. If Andy ended up being exonerated from that, his only obvious crime would be breaking out of prison; why chance that with evidence of his involvement in money laundering on top of that?
  • The fact that he's innocent doesn't really matter that much, at least initially; it's going to take some time for all the dust to settle, and however wrongfully he's still been convicted of murder by a court of law. They're still going to be hunting him down regardless of whether he implicates himself in a money-laundering scheme.
  • Considering that Andy is a prisoner under the control of Warden Norton (and thus probably shouldn't have access to the finances anyway), and Warden Norton is quite obviously corrupt and abusive of his authority, it probably wouldn't be too hard for him to make a case that he was coerced into participating in the fraud should anyone actually manage to find and arrest him for it.
  • In any case, Andy is planning to be in a sunsoaked paradise living under an assumed identity with hundreds of thousands of dollars well out of US jurisdiction long before Warden Norton ever receives his little note; I doubt he could give two shits about whether his signature on the note gives the authorities more incentive to find him on top of the plentiful incentive that they'll already have (namely, that he's already a prison escapee from a conviction however wrongful for murder).
• There's another piece of Fridge Logic that Family Guy commented on; how did Andy know that same oak tree and box would be there after decades? So much could have changed since then.
  • He didn't, it was a story he told Red to give him the information he needed without telling him he was going to escape. He put the box there after he escaped.
    • Yeah, did the Family Guy people actually watch the movie or just read someone's synopsis? How could Andy's letter to Red possibly have been written before Andy went to Shawshank? He didn't even know who Red was! If you crunch the numbers (Andy arrives right after Red's 20 year parole hearing, Red is released on his 40 year parole hearing; Andy escapes after 19-odd years), the box only had to stay hidden for less than a year.
    • Family Guy wasn't saying that the area would change between Andy escaping and Red being released, they're saying the area could've changed between Andy being imprisoned and Andy escaping. It had been at least 20 years since Andy last saw that spot, the odds of it being identical to the point of being able to use a single tree and a loose brick wall as a point of reference are amazingly low.
    • Actually, in many places (especially in New England, where the story is set) it's illegal to demolish a stone wall. Presumably this is because they are useful as historical property markers. So, the chances of the stone wall being there are incredibly high in a Maine country town. As for the tree, a single tree in the middle of a field was likely planted there deliberately (or at least not cleared) and thus unlikely to be cut down.
    • Plus, even if the area had changed in that time, with the tree or wall missing, Andy could easily have included new information about where to find the cache along with his postcard from Zihuatanejo.
  • Again, this is mentioned in the novella, Red specifically mentions that he wouldn't have been able to cope with the worry about something happening to the stone in the field, but Andy had always been much cooler and calmer than him.
  • Also, Andy could have planted the tree figuring it grow to a decent size by the time Red was released.
    • The tree was already there to begin with. When Andy tells Red about it, he says that he'd gone on a picnic with his then-girlfriend in the hayfield and proposed to her under that exact tree.
  • The tree is many hundreds of years old. The stone wall looks like it might be older than the United States. The place is beautiful, easy to find with directions, probably impossible to find without, and significant to Andy personally. It might be a less likely spot to be plowed under by real estate developments after so many decades than most, though of course it's not foolproof, and Andy couldn't know for sure Red would ever get his message, even if he got out. Kind of fits with the movie's message of hope, don't you think?
  • If nothing else, Andy could have used a little of his money to setup some kind of trust or other mechanism to ensure that the plot of land remains untouched while also being able to keep a (legal) eye on it. Heck, he might have done that while in prison as one way to launder the money (buying up land).
• The point of making up Mr. Stephens in the first place is to provide a kind of fictitious human shield just in case the money is traced. By becoming Stephens, wouldn't Andy's position become a little bit uncomfortable? Not to mention he actually gave the ledger to the press/police.
  • What do you mean, gave the ledger to the press/police? Care to clarify? . . . Anyway, he only "became" Mr. Stephens temporarily, so that he could get the money, and so that he could use that money to flee to Mexico. He is going to be on the run from the law anyway, so I think the idea was to get the money so that he could be further from the US and enjoy that spot he had longer to go to.
  • We don't really know how much of the evidence really led to "Randall Stephens" at the time of Andy's escape in 1966. Andy tells Red that the idea behind Randall Stephens is to make up a fictitious person to assign guilt to, but Andy himself was in charge of the operation and could have rearranged things to cover Randall Stephens' tracks. Also, as noted above, he only needed to be Randall Stephens long enough to steal Warden Norton's stolen money—a few hours of bank visits. He could well have created another fake identity to go to ground with.
  • If you notice, he only tells the woman to "place this in your outgoing mail" once he's gotten his check. I always assumed that was the last bank he had visited. That way, he has plenty of time (a day or two depending on how fast the mail works) to make a run for it.
  • As far as anyone on the outside was concerned, Randall Stephens was just a name on the paperwork until the day he showed up to withdraw the money. A few days later, the whole corruption is revealed, including a lot about Andy's part in it. If the investigators don't quickly get the bank personnel looking at Andy's prison photo, they simply aren't doing their jobs. By the time they can put that together, though, Andy is long gone, with a small mountain untraceable cash.
  • Also keep in mind that Stephens was part of the laundering scheme but not Andy. At least initial, as far as the investigators might be concerned, Stephens was a device made up by the Warden and Co. - and Andy's role would have been interpreted as a job under duress at first. Hadley would have had to say that he literally threatened to kill Andy for Andy to start doing the job. And given that Stephens had a license and what not, it's probable that Andy intentionally setup Stephens to be similar to himself, further adding to the idea that the warden was using Andy. It's plausible that Stephens running away with the money might be seen as a way for the Warden to escape with his cash before he was caught. So, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors before realizing that Andy WAS Stephens and Andy was intentionally duping people. Also, this was likely part of the reason he went over the border - even once his intentional use of Stephens was found out, he's outside of the US jurisdiction. And if nothing else, even if the connection wasn't found out, he was already an escaped felon and wrapped up in money laundering. It's not like using the alias makes his potential punishment worse - it's a risk he surely thought he would take.
  • It's a risk he needs to take. The account needs to be in someone's name, that name can't be his own, and in order to extract the money he'll need to give the name. He is presumably counting on the fact that, by the time his disappearance is noticed and his escape is uncovered, he will be far enough ahead of the authorities to be able to get to the banks to get the money, and by the time the financial irregularities and the truth of "Randall Stephens" is uncovered, he will have had enough time to claim all the money and escape with it. No doubt that once he has access to the money in a form he can use, "Randall Stephens" will disappear off the face of the planet and he will complete his escape with a new name.
• Why did the rest of the prisoners let the Sisters get away with raping people? From what we see there are only five or six of them; you'd think that the rest of them could pretty easily put a stop to it. Hell, Andy's group of friends has seven or eight guys. You'd think they could have helped him out.
  • If they attempted it, they could put themselves in danger of being attacked themselves. Andy's group also seemed to have a large amount of older or out of shape guys in it, not a group that would want to take on the younger, violent Sisters.
    • Also note that the Sisters are stealth predators, if their treatment of Andy is of any indication— they seem to single out their prey and wait until he's alone and unaware before closing in. Neither Andy nor anyone else can be protected by his friends all the time.
    • Also keep in mind that rape is about power. Challenging that power (much less keeping it suppressed) would likely just provoke the Sisters even more not make them back down because the Sisters clearly want that power over others. And given some of the dialogue by Norton and Hadley, I wouldn't be surprised if the Sisters had some amount of leeway (or at least, a blind eye turned to) as an indirect form of control by the guards and warden over the other prisoners. Threatening a means of exerting power by the warden would potentially mean getting isolated intentionally with the Sisters. Note that even after helping the warden, Andy was still beaten up and it's possible that the warden continued to use that threat to keep Andy in line, balancing attacks with promises of moments of reprieve. It was only when the Sisters went too far were they taken care of - and note that Red only says that Andy was never attacked again, not that the Sisters stopped attacking other people.
    • The Warden outright threatens to "cast [Andy] down with the Sodomites" as one of the many threats he uses to keep him laundering the money. So, he seems more than aware of what goes on he either doesn't care or just considers it part of their punishment.
• Is it possible Andy made a mistake by doing all the illegal financial dealings for Norton? We understand why he did it, it gives him considerable leverage in the prison (and initially helps stop the vicious assaults he's receiving from the Sisters), but when he tries to get Norton to help reopen his case after Tommy arrives, it's implied Norton's motive for keeping Andy there is because he fears Andy might rat him out on his illegal activities. If Andy had kept his head low from the beginning and not taken on this financial-advisor role in the first place, he might have been able to prove his innocence and become a free man, rather than go through an elaborate escape plan that made him a fugitive for the rest of his life.
  • Yeah, but he had no way of knowing in advance that Tommy would ever show up.
  • This is a Fourth Wall Myopia issue; Andy is doing what he feels best serves his interests at the time based on the knowledge he has. Unlike the audience (including the OP) he has no idea about upcoming plot developments that might change his circumstances and create problems for himself.
• I have long wondered about the murder of the character known only as "Fat Ass" early in the film. Are we supposed to believe that Fat Ass didn't have any family or friends who wondered why he died on his very first night in prison? Even if he didn't have anyone he was close to that questioned it his death would still have to be reported and a cause of death would have to be put on the death certificate. They couldn't just say "Well...he was too loud so we beat him to death". Did they just lie and say it was a heart attack or something? If so..it would be rather difficult to explain the state of his body. It was pretty clear he had been beaten to death. Was there no autopsy? No investigation at all? They just announced his death and nobody had any questions?
  • Presumably they just claimed that he was killed by fellow prisoners. There's no CCTV footage to contradict their claim, and all the witnesses who might call them out on it are prisoners whose testimony won't be considered especially trustworthy. And they wouldn't volunteer to testify anyway, since anyone who talks about testifying is likely to end up dead like Tommy.
• Andy tells Red that his dream was to one day live in Mexico and fix up an old boat and take people out sailing on it. Sure enough we do see Andy fixing up an old boat at the end of the film. But..wouldn't running such a business be a little too risky? Lots of American tourists go to Mexico...what if some of them recognized Andy from a wanted poster? The chances may be small but is it really a risk worth taking? The risk would increase even more by the 1980's when a show like America's Most Wanted or Unsolved Mysteries might do a segment on Andy...people who Andy took on a boat ride might remember his face when they see it on tv and...now Andy is busted!!
  • How many tourists can remember exactly what unsolved criminals can look like? And in the 80s, Andy will have aged quite a bit, so he'll look even less like the last known pictures of him. Ultimately, it's very unlikely a tourist will randomly guess that their boat guide is a wanted criminal, and feel so strongly that they're sure it's him that they call the American authorities on a random Mexican boat dude. It's more likely that they'd tell Andy he kind of looks like this old unsolved case, to which Andy may reply, "I get that a lot."
  • Never mind unsolved criminals; how many tourists can remember the face of the guy who once took them on a boat ride when they were on vacation one time a few weeks or months or years afterwards?
• When Andy gets out of the hole after being put there for playing the opera record Heywood jokingly asks him why he didn't play any Hank Williams. Heywood should have no idea of who Hank Williams is though. Williams's first record wasn't released until 1947..that was the same year that Andy arrived at Shawshank and Heywood was already there by then. Hank Williams was fairly well known in his home state of Alabama before then but Heywood lived in Maine...far away from the Country Music scene of the Deep South. There is no way he discovered who he was after being sent to prison because as we know Warden Norton was not the kind of guy who would give his prisoners the luxury of enjoying listening to modern music on the radio. So..how did Heywood know about the music of Hank Williams?
  • Just because Norton is a cruel bastard that doesn't mean that they never have any kind of amenities, at least on the odd occasion. Especially with Andy being in good with Norton and the guards, he could easily have asked for them to have a radio to listen to while they were performing menial labor similar to how he got them cold beers while they were resurfacing the roof. Heywood seems to be a country music fan, so during radio time he tuned it to a country station and found himself really loving the Hank Williams music that was playing.