If you watch, as I recently did, the 1973 film “Papillon” back to back with the remake, you get a double dose of prisoner abuse and appealing actors pantomiming a range of human misery. Blood is spilled, bodies are ravaged. Both movies are sober, high-minded stories about the terrible things that men do to other men in the name of country and righteousness. Mostly, these are chronicles of extreme male suffering, torments so ghastly they turn otherwise ordinary men into quasi-religious martyrs.

To what end? The most obvious reason is that the first film is based on a best seller, and the second is, well, based on the first. Each draws from a disputed memoir by Henri Charrière, a French criminal who was sentenced to life for a murder he said he didn’t commit. In 1933, he was shipped to French Guiana, a speck on the Atlantic coast of South America. The French claimed it in the 17th century, using it as a slave port and later a penal colony. Its most notorious section was a former leper settlement called Devil’s Island, which is where the wrongly accused spy Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned.