The Big House (1930)

This is one of my favourite early examples of the dog-eat-dog world in prison as the young “Marlowe” (Robert Montgomery) is sent down for a decade after a road accident led to a fatality. Not surprisingly, he’s as anxious as hell - not least when he learns that he is to share facilities with “Morgan” (Chester Morris) and convicted murderer “Butch” (Wallace Beery). The governor (Lewis Stone) is broadly sympathetic, as is the chief warder (George F. Marlon) as they reckon putting this naive and impressionable young man in with folks like this isn’t going to aid his chances of survival, much less rehabilitation. Quickly, though, “Marlowe” learns there is a code of practice to be honoured here, and the first rule is never welch to the authorities. When he is misled into breaking that rule, he incurs the wrath of “Morgan” whose parole is promptly cancelled! It isn’t him that’s the target, though, because when “Morgan” decides he’s leaving anyway he decides to target his new nemesis’s sister “Annie” (Leila Hyams) on the outside. Thing is though, might she end up have a far more mellowing and civilising effect on this hitherto bank robber than his years behind bars? The curmudgeonly, knife-wielding, Beery steals the show for me here but both Morris and Montgomery also deliver quite potently as this pretty scathing analysis of the flaws of the prison system and it’s rotten eggs in one basket is writ large. The screenplay keeps the dialogue tight and the direction really does offer us a sense of the perilous claustrophobia that prevailed in their overcrowded environment where a survival of the fittest mentality and solitary confinement techniques that wouldn’t have shocked Spartacus still ruled the roost.