History Headscratchers / TheShawshankRedemption

*** 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 couldur sentence, off you go.
Money and resources are being spent on captives who no longer shoot each of them again." The court seems to believe they were killed with a six-shot revolver.

*** 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.
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** If nothing else, he could have had additional clothing (pants and a t-shirt if nothing else) 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.

*** 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 to forget where he ditched the gun.

*** His 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.

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* If the film takes place over a period of around twenty years, ''why none of the characters seem to age''?

** 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?

*** It wasn't a tube of solid feces 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.
** Feces 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.

** Bear in mind that it doesn't matter of 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.

** 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 know 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.

** 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, which doesn't seem much of an improvement.

** 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. Once he's got the money, if he puts his foot down and drives for about twelve hours or so he can be in Virginia or Ohio.

** 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, AtLeastIAdmitIt: almost everyone there (apart from Andy) did something wrong and deserves to be in jail for it, but unlike pretty much everyone else Red is at least willing to come acknowledge it.

** He's being sarcastic. Prisoners stereotypically tend to over-protest their innocence despite their convictions and deny responsibility for what they did. Red's just sarcastically commenting on how everyone claims their innocence despite most of them being guilty as sin.

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*** 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.

* 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??

** 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."