The partnership between the characters played by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman is crucial to the way the story unfolds. What quietly amazes everyone in the prison - and us, too - is the way he accepts the good and the bad as all part of some larger pattern than only he can fully see. Or when he oversteps his boundaries and is thrown into solitary confinement. Or when he befriends the old prison librarian ( James Whitmore). There are key moments in the film, as when Andy uses his clout to get some cold beers for his friends who are working on a roofing job. His fame spreads, and eventually he's doing the taxes and pension plans for most of the officials of the local prison system. For the warden ( Bob Gunton), he is both a challenge and a resource Andy knows all about bookkeeping and tax preparation, and before long he's been moved out of his prison job in the library and assigned to the warden's office, where he sits behind an adding machine and keeps tabs on the warden's ill-gotten gains. But he is not violent, just formidably sure of himself. Red's narration of the story allows him to speak for all of the prisoners, who sense a fortitude and integrity in Andy that survives the years. Oh, most surely, yes, he replies but the fire goes out of his assurances as the years march past, and there is the sense that he has been institutionalized - that, like another old lifer who kills himself after being paroled, he can no longer really envision life on the outside. From time to time, measuring the decades, he goes up in front of the parole board, and they measure the length of his term (20 years, 30 years) and ask him if he thinks he has been rehabilitated. He's apparently innocent, and there are all sorts of details involving his case, but after a while they take on a kind of unreality all that counts inside prison is its own society - who is strong, who is not - and the measured passage of time. Andy was a banker on the outside, and he's in for murder. Andy turns out to be a surprise to everyone in Shawshank, because within him is such a powerful reservoir of determination and strength that nothing seems to break him. But Andy does not cry, and Red loses the cigarettes he wagered.

King shawshank redemption