The story of Papillon (Steve McQueen), the prisoner sent in the Thirties to a horrendous prison establishment in French Guiana, from which his attempts to escape land him with various periods of solitary confinement. But he never gives up. The dialogue between McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, as his fellow-sufferer, is a shade too joky for such a desperate situation and the film's doses of sentiment are sometimes hard to swallow. McQueen works tremendously hard, but the situations are so banal - there's even an idyllic interlude with a native girl - that all but a few of them defeat him.

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