The film is loosely based on the memoir of André Devigny, a member of the French Resistance who was imprisoned by the occupying German forces at Montluc prison during World War II.

A Man Escaped was screened in competition at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival[2] and remains one of Bresson's most acclaimed and influential works.

He communicates with his neighbor by tapping on the wall and is regularly able to talk through his window to Terry, a member of a small group allowed to exercise unsupervised in a courtyard.

After fifteen days, Fontaine is moved to a cell on the top floor of Montluc, and he is no longer required to wear handcuffs.

Fontaine gets to know several other inmates on his daily trips to empty his slop bucket and wash his face, even though the guards regularly admonish them for talking.

After weeks of slow, silent, and meticulous work—which involves keeping track of and disposing of every wood shaving, as well as camouflaging the damage he is doing to the door—he is able to get out of his cell into the hallway at will.

The two climb a building and hook a rope across the gap between the inner and outer walls of the prison compound, but Fontaine loses his nerve and just sits there.

The film is based on the memoirs of André Devigny, a member of the French Resistance and Compagnon de la Libération who escaped from Montluc prison in Lyon in 1943.

In an interview, Bresson said that, with A Man Escaped, he "wanted to achieve a great purity, a greater asceticism than in Diary of a Country Priest", noting his use of nonprofessional actors.

The website's consensus reads: "A Man Escaped is blockbuster Bresson, a well-acted POW drama that builds with subtle, seat-gripping tension.

Artificial Eye put out a Region 2 release in the UK in April 2008, which contains a superior audio/video presentation and features the 1984 Dutch documentary The Road to Bresson as an extra.

Supplementary features included with this release include "Bresson: Without a Trace", the 1965 episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps that features the director's first on-camera interview; The Road to Bresson, which features interviews with filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky, Louis Malle, and Paul Schrader; The Essence of Forms, a 2010 French documentary in which collaborators and admirers of Bresson, including actor François Leterrier and director Bruno Dumont, share their thoughts about the director and his work; and "Functions of Film Sound", a visual essay on the use of sound in A Man Escaped, which features narration taken from a chapter about the film in Film Art: An Introduction by film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.