The Big House **** (1930, Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, Robert Montgomery, Lewis Stone) – Classic Movie Review 5346

Author Frances Marion won the Academy Award for writing the story and dialogue (Best Writing Achievement) of director George Hill’s convincing, mould-forming 1930 prison drama. Sound director Douglas Shearer also won the first Academy Award for Best Sound Recording and the film was nominated for Best Picture. It is one of the cinema’s first prison films and was as such the main influence on this type of movie.

It is sparked up with a typically tough Wallace Beery performance (he replaced Lon Chaney Sr who died of cancer during pre-production) as condemned head convict Butch, the violent career criminal who rules the prison cell block and plans a breakout.

Beery and Chester Morris (as Morgan) play the old cons, the two leaders of the inmates. Robert Montgomery plays the weak rich young prisoner Kent, sentenced to ten years for manslaughter for killing someone while driving drunk, and is a coward of an informer. And Lewis Stone has the other stars role as the stern warden of the overcrowded prison designed for 1800 and holding 3000. Leila Hyams handles the romance as Kent’s beautiful sister Anne.

This famous early sound movie is vintage material and still rewarding for patient audiences, and easy to watch with Harold Wenstrom’s fine cinematography and its short running time of 86 minutes. It is also an Oscar-winner for the sound recording (the first ever), which advanced the early techniques. It is an atypical movie from MGM studios of the era, much more a Warner Bros kind of movie.

Also in the cast are George F Marion, J C Nugent, Karl Dane, DeWitt Jennings, Matthew Betts, Claire McDowell, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Tom Wilson, Eddie Foyer, Roscoe Ates and Fletcher Norton.

Additional dialogue is by Joe Farnham and Martin Flavin, in a screenplay based uncredited on the 1926 original story The Big House by Lennox Robinson.

Beery landed an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and became the world’s highest paid actor within two years.

French, Spanish and German-language versions were also shot, and still survive, with the first two available with the original in a triple feature set from the Warner Archives.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5346

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