The Shawshank Redemption Scenes 66-70 Summary

Scene 66

  • The next morning, the guards do roll call and Andy doesn't step out of his cell. Uh oh. We know where this is going…

Scene 67

  • We totally did not know where that was going. The warden—after finding Andy's dirty prison shoes in his shoebox in place of his shiny black ones—is summoned to the cell, where Andy has just up and vanished. Like a "fart in the wind." Such colorful imagery.
  • Frustrated out of his mind, the warden starts having himself a rock-throwing party. It's only when he throws a rock at the Raquel Welch poster on the wall that he realizes something is up.
  • The rock doesn't bounce back; instead, he can hear it rattling down some sort of tunnel.

Scene 68

  • The search party begins, with cops and police dogs. They don't find much, other than Andy's old rock hammer.
  • Red says he thought it would take someone 600 years to tunnel through the wall with that thing, but it took Andy less than 20. He is really bad at guesstimating.

Scene 69

  • Flashback/montage alert. We see Andy carving his name into his cell wall, and a big chunk of wall gives way. He rubs the chunk between his fingers and it crumbles.
  • This must have been where Andy first had the idea to tunnel his way out. It's also why he needed a poster—to obscure his tunneling efforts. We hope Rita, Marilyn and Raquel's feelings aren't too hurt.
  • Then we see him in the warden's office on his last night. Andy pulls the ol' switcheroo, handing Norton a phony folder of paperwork to be put into the safe, while he discreetly hides the real documents—and Bible—in the back of his pants.
  • Then he walks out of the office wearing the warden's snazzy shoes. Fortunately for Andy, no one notices. "How often do you really look at a man's shoes?"
  • Back in his cell, rope in hand, Andy decides to go for it. He takes the warden's nice clothes, the stolen paperwork and a few other odds and ends, puts them in a plastic bag roped to his leg, and crawls right out of Shawshank Prison. It isn't as easy as we make it sound. There's some sewage and puking involved.

Scene 70

  • The next morning, a well-dressed man walks into a bank and makes a request to withdraw all the money in his account. The manager is sorry to lose Mr. Stevens' business. We haven't seen anyone this excited about an imaginary friend since the movie Harvey. 
  • Andy also asks the bank to drop an envelope in the mail. We're gonna guess there's some incriminating evidence in there, of the sort Norton would rather no one get their hands on…