ALauff Review of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing

20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932)

Another success for the pre-code Warner Bros. studio

[7/10 · 14 December 2007]

This overachieving prison drama is yet another success for the pre-code Warner Bros. studio, which seemed to churn out brisk, deceptively artful crime films like this one by the dozen. Typically, the film's force derives from raw depictions of societal conditions coupled with blunt performances, montage-heavy storytelling, inspired use of light and shadow, and brash, innovative sound design. 20,000 Years's title sequence begins with a pan across a row of prisoners, each identified by a blown-up numeral designating his sentence. The film opens proper with a train containing cocky new inmate Tom Connors (Spencer Tracy) hurtling towards Sing Sing, the central conflict between penitentiary depersonalization and a larger-than-life personality set into motion in just two scenes. An avuncular warden (Arthur Byron) embodies the other half of this dialectic, a trusting, unfailingly decent man whose implausible kindness flies in the face of Hollywood logic relative to jail-keepers. (The story, adapted from real-life Sing Sing warden Lewis E. Lawes's memoirs, hinges on a preposterous act of compassion that simply must have been embellished in the retelling.) As mentioned, photography by Barney McGill is stellar throughout, especially during an escape attempt that shifts perspective between the prisoners and their captors with astonishing skill, and boasts a slyly subversive motif of guards' shadows menacingly creeping closer to foil the plot. Michael Curtiz has an innate gift for knowing where to place the camera and his editing acumen is evidenced by a montage of Tracy's glum face superimposed over strictly ordered prison routines that covers a month's time. While 20,000 Years might not be in the same class as The Public Enemy or The Roaring Twenties, its final scenes have a cold, clear logic that anticipate noir and the final shot is a wavering counterpoint to one of the warden's sturdy philosophies that draws a fitting close to the Tracy-Byron relationship. This is another intelligent entertainment from a productive period in studio film-making that doesn't belabor its social relevance but moves with an assured touch.