and
If there’s one thing that the United States of America loves more than endless warfare, it’s prisons. In the late 1800s, after the Civil War had thrown the entire concept of owning people as property into question, although not many of those questions involved the horrific nature of slavery, the bigwigs of the time stumbled upon what they considered an ingenious compromise. Slavery would thereafter be illegal, they declared in the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, except as punishment for a crime. Suddenly chattel slavery wasn’t just a luxury a some plantation owners in the South could enjoy, now every state could have their own little concrete box of people to play with, in as many counties as they could fit them. Nor was this centered solely around New Afrikan people (although they still make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population, because the U.S. is anything but subtle); No matter what your color or creed, if you were a member of the poor and undesirable segment of society then you too had a place in this brave new world of incarceration, and we’re still living it today. If you’re from another country and you’re wondering what it’s like living in the United States, picture a place that persistently demonizes countries like China, the Soviet Union or the DPRK for their supposedly hellish prison systems, yet at the same time makes self-aware jokes and even feature-length films about the fact that its own prisons are hotbeds of torture, rape, drug abuse and gang violence, and resists any and all attempts at addressing those problems, and then multiple it by 5. Also the healthcare sucks.
Today’s stop on our tour brings us to the year 1930, and unfortunately also marks the end of our exploration of silent film for the time being. We’ve broken the sound barrier baby. Of the potential films I could have covered from this year, the biggest name on the card was All Quiet on the Western Front, and indeed for a long time all signs were pointing towards that being the movie I watched. Given what has been going on these days with COVID-19 and everything surrounding it however, I figured that folks might relate to a story about being stuck somewhere for what feels like an eternity. Never let it be said that I can’t be timely and relevant when needed.
Released in 1930, written by Frances Marion (with additional dialogue by Joe Farnham and Martin Flavin), The Big House was directed by George Hill, not to be confused The Warriors and Slaughterhouse Five director George Roy Hill. After accidentally killing someone while drunk-driving on New Year’s Eve, Kent Marlowe is sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. Once he’s arrived, processed, and transformed from Kent into #48642, he meets his cell-mates, mercurial former hitman “Machine Gun” Butch (Wallace Beery) and charismatic former robber Morgan (Chester Morris), and is introduced to prison life: Harsh discipline, terrible food, no room to breathe, angry neighbors,the works. It’s the kind of environment that brings out a man’s nature, and so it does for Kent. The consequences of such a change, however, might be more far reaching than Kent, his sister Anne, Morgan, Butch, or anyone in prison could have expected.
The Big House is a film caught between worlds. We were still a ways away from the for-profit, supermax model as it’s known today, so they’re still trying to frame prison as if it's about rehabilitation. Everyone in prison is in there because they deserve it, the Warden is an upstanding gentleman who cares about the prisoners, and all you have to do is put your nose to the grindstone and you’ll be released, free to go off to some faraway island and work a plantation, which has to be one of the most ironic story beats ever recorded to film. Yet at the same time the film is trying to praise the virtues of prison, it exposes the reality of prison as well. Prison guards aren’t just humble folk trying their best to help in The Big House, they are blatantly antagonistic figures who will engage in acts of torture (and just try to tell me locking a man up in a metal box for a month with nothing but bread and water isn’t a blatant act of torture) on little more than the rumours they get from their snitches and stoolpigeons. Likewise prisoners aren’t some inhuman damnable creatures, they are human beings with all the quirks and foibles that come with it, and as human beings ourselves we naturally sympathize with them as they are dehumanized. Which isn’t necessarily by design; As I said The Big House still works under the assumption that people in jail must deserve to be in there, and this is mainly done through conversational asides by Butch of acts of horrific violence. However, since the audience is only told those things and not shown them, because of the way the information is given to the audience, and because the audience is shown the injustices put upon them by the prison, it comes across as a bit of hyperbolic dark comedy more than anything else. It all builds up an atmosphere where you start to question, even just a little, whether they were being sincere or satirical, which I think actually gives it a greater appeal to a modern audience.
Case in point, my description of the plot would lead you to believe that Kent would be the protagonist of the film. A victim of circumstance as they say, now thrust into this den of lions and forced to survive and in the end proving that he was a good person after all and didn’t deserve to be in that dirty old jail. In actuality though Kent almost immediately takes a backseat, basically becoming a walking plot device in favor of Morgan and Butch, which is for the best because they are far and away the most entertaining and the most (pretty much only) developed characters in the film. George Hill worked with Wallace Beery on several pictures aside from The Big House, and it’s easy to see why; He’s got this rough & tumble, bulldog quality about him that comes across as lovable or scary depending on the mood he’s in, which pairs quite naturally with Chester Morris, who has the good looks and easy charm of your textbook snake oil salesman. Put them together on screen and they’ve got great chemistry, and the arc of their relationship is the backbone of this film. There’s a tiny crumb of romance in there, or ‘friendship’ as they called in those days, but the only characters I was ever invested in, the only characters you’re really able to invest in, are Morgan and Butch.
Couple more things I feel worth mentioning, the first being the opening shot, with the truck pulling up to the prison, which is this Brutalist concrete behemoth. Very effective, and adding to a point made earlier, slightly surreal. I also liked the look of the scene where Morgan is sent to solitary, there’s some playing around with shadows that looked nice. In many ways this movie is bare bones, a lot of the characters don’t even have last names, but it’s cool to see George Hill and crew put some work into it.
The highlight of the film though is appropriately enough in the climax, as the prisoners stage a riot and engage in a shootout with the guards. By the year 1930 the U.S. was over a decade removed from World War I and was about a decade away from World War II, not to mention barely into the sound era, and yet filmmakers had already figured out how to translate the tension and claustrophobic terror of warfare to the silver screen. Much like the ending of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, there’s visceral feelings there, a catharsis as the prisoners finally stand up for themselves and a growing sense of desperation as their ultimate fate draws near. Unfortunately a lot of the emotional resonance is undercut by the ending, which felt equivalent to your dad buying you an ice cream after you watched him beat your mom. I don’t think it’s enough to write off the movie entirely, but given what came before it does leave a sour taste in one’s mouth.
The Big House gets the recommendation. It’s a bit bare bones to be sure, but Butch and Morgan’s story was enough to keep me engaged the whole way through, and as I mentioned there’s a degree of schadenfreude to be had in seeing a movie struggling against its own message in such a way. Check it out if you’ve got the time, and at the moment you’ve probably got nothing but time. Next stop on our Reelin’ In The Years tour we’re going ahead about 365 days, to the not-that-much-better year of 1931. While the card is always subject to change, odds are I’ll be writing about a film that I probably should have covered years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment