Metro all over the place in personnel: stars Robert Montgomery and Wallace Beery, director George Hill, Doug Shearer on sound and Cedric Gibbons on set, and Oscar-winning Frances Marion doing a bang-up screenplay. But the studio that reveled in pretty people doing pretty things went all Warners on this one, unleashing a tough, unglamorous prison epic that created many cliches that the genre reveled in for decades. It also gave an Oscar-nominated Chester Morris probably his best chance, as an unscrupulous yet likable, redeemable convict whose cellmates are Montgomery, as a spoiled pretty boy in on a manslaughter rap, and Beery, the toughest con on the lot. The relationships are interesting, the pace is fast, the climactic prison riot is a doozy. One complaint: Montgomery's family, mainly his sister, Leila Hyams, is portrayed sympathetically, and it's stated that they'll just lose it if he doesn't get parole (but they look like just a jocular, happy upper-class family in their one scene, laughing and enjoying each other's company and not even mentioning Montgomery). Yet the screenplay has to go through some unlikely contortions to link Morris, who's made a jail break, with Hyams, who grows fond of him, and is reunited with him in a happy ending that could never happen (and again, no mention of her brother, whose fate is not a happy one). But hey, it's unusually fluent for an early talkie, and exciting, and rife with quirkier cons than your average prison movie.
Review of The Big House
