Air Force One | Ohio State Reformatory — The Cell Block That Plays Russia

General Radek spends the film in a cell, and the cell is the reason the whole plot exists: six terrorists take the president's plane to get one old man released. The prison on screen is meant to be Russian. It is in Mansfield, Ohio, off Route 545, and by 1996 it had already been famous for three years as Shawshank.

The Ohio State Reformatory was built between 1886 and 1910 in a Romanesque style meant to inspire reform through architecture — the theory being that a boy sent to a place resembling a German castle might come out believing in something. It held prisoners until 1990, when a court ordered it closed. The east cell block runs six tiers high and is still the largest free-standing steel cell block in the world. Nothing about it needs dressing to read as somewhere a man could be forgotten.

The Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society runs it as a museum with daily self-guided and guided tours. Go up to the sixth tier and look down the range. The bars are cold in a way film cannot transmit, and the light through the arched windows falls exactly as it does in the shot.