Chester Morris – Movie Musings

Foundational Hollywood prison film, not only establishes many genre tropes but does it with genuine style

Director: George W Hill

Cast: Chester Morris (Morgan), Wallace Beery (Butch), Lewis Stone (Warden), Robert Montgomery (Kent), Leila Hyams (Anne), George F Marion (Pop), JC Nugent (Marlowe), Karl Dane (Olsen), DeWitt Jennings (Wallace), Matthew Betz (Gopher)

We’re all familiar with the prison movie: cell yards, newly arrived prisoners, old lags, gangs, exercise yards, tough wardens, snitches, shivs, escape plans, betting on insect races, coolers, bad food, riots… many of these now age old cliches first sprang into life in The Big House, the first major prison movie released in Hollywood. And it’s a good one, a well-paced mix of character study and morality tale with a surprisingly action packed ending.

In an overcrowded prison, where conditions are as tough as the inmates, new arrival Kent (Robert Montgomery) is nervous. He’s a rich guy struggling to adjust to spending the next seven years in the slammer after he drove the car in a fatal hit-and-run. He’s chucked into a cell with two tough inmates: Morgan (Chester Morris), a strong-and-silent type who takes no nonsense, and Butch (Wallace Beery), his best friend who swings between friendly and threatening. As mutterings about escape plans and prison feuds heat up, Kent goes to increasingly selfish attempts to save his skin, against the advice of Morgan, who is dreaming of his imminent parole.

“Prison doesn’t give a man a yellow streak, but if he has one it brings it out.” Those are the wise words of Lewis Stone’s gruff, patrician warden. It’s fair to say Kent doesn’t listen. One of the neatest tricks The Big House pulls off is the decoy protagonist. As we watch Kent’s intimidating arrival and processing, the ferrying him from room-to-room as he is reduced to another overall-clad number (48642), our natural instinct is to feel sorry for him as Robert Montgomery’s eyes widen in shock and horror. But Kent isn’t our hero. In fact, if anything, he’s the villain.

The more we see of Kent, the more we realise he’s a spoilt rich kid who, uniquely among the main prisoners, takes no responsibility for his crime (even the sociopathic Butch does that). He will betray anyone or anything to try and lesson his sentence: and as a seasoned old-timer tells him, the best material for that is snitching on other prisoners. It’s not long before Kent is nervously planting a shiv in Morgan’s bed (leading to the cancellation of Morgan’s parole), and his utter lack of any sense of principle beyond protecting himself is directly responsible for the concluding prison riot blood bath.

Instead, The Big House’s real hero is Morgan. Played with stoic firmness by Chester Morris, Morgan may well be a criminal (tellingly, of the three principles, he’s a professional thief giving him the most ‘sympathetic’ crime, with no body count) but he has a code of loyalty to his fellows. That doesn’t mean he won’t step in against bullying – he orders Butch to return the cigarettes he wrestles from Kent – but it does mean he’ll turn a dutiful blind eye to their misdemeanours. He sticks firmly to the code of the prison – don’t snitch – even while he planning to go straight. In The Big House, it’s fascinating that is the stool pigeon and snitch who is morally the lowest-of-the-low.

That’s arguably even lower than Butch, even though he’s a sociopathic murderer who wistfully talks about his crimes with slight regret only because they got him caught. But, despite this – and even though, when the riot comes, Butch proves himself absolutely, ruthlessly, without morals – Butch is strangely likeable. Perhaps because Wallace Beery (Oscar-nominated) plays him with a mix of childish innocence as well as brutish bullying. Butch, with his illiteracy and delight in games like racing insects, along with his affectionate readiness to trust (and his blinding rage when he feels betrayed) is like a big kid. He bounds around the yard like the king of the playground.

The heart of The Big House is the close friendship (and, while surely unintentional, it’s hard not to see a homoerotic undercurrent) between Butch and Morgan. These two are inseparable, trust each other completely, tell each other everything and won’t hear a word against each other from someone else. They are both familiar with the slammer, a dark corridor with several tiny, dark cells. Butch gets chucked in there after leading a dinner hall protest at the terrible food – the protest that will lead to him passing his shiv to Kent who then plants it on Morgan to gain favour with the guards. This leads to Morgan’s spell there – where, in a fixed shot of the empty corridor, Hill has us overhear the shouted conversation between the two as Morgan vows revenge and Butch naively argues he can’t believe Kent would do that.

Morgan’s rejected parole leads to his own escape. It’s a slightly forced touch of melodrama that, on escape, he of course meets and falls in love with Kent’s sister Anne (Leila Hyams) who recognises him. It’s, of course, the silver bullet that sees Morgan vowing to go straight and allowing him to tick the film’s crucial moral boxes: he forswears crime (and willingly returns to prison when caught) but without sacrificing his loyalty to the prison code of no snitching. Once again, this is contrasted with the yellow Kent, who won’t admit his guilt and has no honour at all among the thieves.

The Big House culminates in Butch’s bungled escape attempt, made infinitely worse by Kent’s cowardly actions and Butch’s capacity for violence when crossed. You have to question the competence of the prison: crowded or not, Butch and his gang manage to smuggle in several guns, and the Warden’s refusal to even consider negotiating a release of captured guards Butch is hopefully not standard practice. This is probably the only prison film you’ll see where a tank rolls in to settle the matter (one possible cliché no one picked up), but the real heart of the clash is Morgan’s attempt to both stick to his new-found determination to do the right thing, without betraying his brotherly love for Butch.

It makes for a tense, high-octane, surprisingly ruthless final act in a prison film that sets out the rules but also tells a compelling, exciting and engaging story. With very good contrasting performances from Morris, Beery and Montgomery, it’s snappily directed with real verve by Hill, whose camera soaks up the impressively grand sets and then throws in to the midst of the violence. It’s interesting to see its moral judgements on its characters: loyalty prized above all other virtues – would that still be the case today?

Early talkie as flashes of interest here-and-there as it awkwardly adapts to sound

Director: Roland West

Cast: Chester Morris (Chick Williams), Harry Stubbs (Buck Buchanan), Mae Busch (Daisy Thomas), Eleanor Griffin (Joan Manning Williams), Regis Toomey (Danny McGann), Purnell Pratt (Sergeant Pete Manning), Irma Harrison (Toots)

After a long stretch, Chick Williams (Chester Morris) is finally out of the slammer – and he’s celebrating by getting married to Joan Manning (Eleanor Griffin), who just happens to be the daughter of Police Sergeant Pete Mannings (Purnell Pratt). But it’s all fine, because Chick is going straight. And when the police are convinced Chick killed a police officer during a bungled burglary, Joan is certain he didn’t. In fact, she can give him a cast iron alibi – they were at the theatre together and, even if the killing did happen when they were separated during the interval, he definitely didn’t do it. Or did he?

Alibi (an early nominee for Best Picture) is another classic example of both Hollywood adapting a melodramatic Broadway murder-drama hit to the screen and a silent film hurriedly (and sometimes awkwardly) retrofitted to sound. It makes it a strange beast, a hodgepodge of different acting styles with scenes ranging from dynamic and experimental camera movement with flashes of intriguing sound usage to painfully awkward dialogue scenes where most of the actors stand very still and enunciate very slowly and clearly to make sure the mics pick up every word.

We get an explosion of sound at the start – films of this era knew audiences were gripped by such humdrum audio marvels as prisoners marching out of cells, bells ringing and police rhythmically tapping nightsticks against a wall. West does shoot this with quite a bit of interest – in particular the sudden appearance of the prisoners from behind a row of doors that swing shut. It’s handsomely designed by William Cameron Menzies and there are the odd moments of flair: a camera that tracks from a low-angle into the hotel Chick and his associates use for their base of operations; a stool pigeon crumbling into panic with a nightmare vision of his interrogator’s heads swirling around him; a drunk leaning in towards a massive bottle in close-up; shadows are cast behind doors; there are some dynamic fights and punches and an impressive rooftop flight.

But it’s mixed with some painfully stilted dialogue scenes, with most of the cast shown up in a bad light. Scenes involving Sergeant Manning and his police cronies seem to take hours as the actors trudge painfully slowly through the dialogue, their voices at time sounding like the film has been caught in a projector reel. You really notice the difference when the actors do something silently, their bodies moving with a swift confidence they lose as soon as they speak. Several actors – most notably Eleanor Griffin – still rely on tried-and-trusted silent reactions, signposting reactions they are also communicating with dialogue.

It stands out when the film does use dialogue well. The stool pigeon interrogation sees the interrogators repeat “Who killed O’Brien” and “Come on, come on” over and over again with an increasing rhythmic pace which really captures the mood of relentless interrogation. A scene involving a police switchboard sees a line of operators all speaking, but each sentence we catch forms a coherent narrative whole. There are some relatively ambitious song and dance numbers in Chick’s club. It’s just a shame so many of the core dialogue sequences are so dire.

Alibi does throw in a few decent twists here and there. Today we are not a jot surprised that Chick is in fact a villain, but the film manages to play its cards fairly close to its twist. That’s largely due to Chester Morris’ (an Oscar nominee) very effective performance, easily the finest in the film. Morris has the air of a cocky James Stewart, a false small-town bonhomie covering his greed and arrogance. He plays the humble suitor well – but his smug grin to Sergeant Manning when Joan reaffirms her complete faith in Chick is a great insight to who he is. He’s also a bully and, it transpires, a complete coward – Morris nails a great breakdown scene late in the film where his assurance disappears in a cloud of begging.

Morris is probably slightly better than much of the film deserves. He’s also luckier than Regis Toomey, whose ‘drunken acting’ as booze-hound criminal (truly some of the worst bits of alcoholic acting I’ve ever seen) is still not really excusable, even when you find out it’s a double bluff on his character’s part. (It’s so awful I’m amazed anyone is fooled). Toomey is also the centre of a death scene so ridiculously overblown, maudlin and sentimental it’s far more likely to illicit laughs than tears today as it stretches out over almost five minutes of screentime.

There is the odd intriguing idea in Alibi. It’s remarkable how critical of the police it is – even if it defaults to framing them as heroes in the end. Joan tells her father she could never marry the copper suitor he favours, because she believes cops to be corrupt bullies. An idea you can see partially borne out when our stool pigeon is made to put his fingerprints on a gun and threatened with judicial fake-self-defence murder unless he confesses. Bullets are fired freely at criminals, who left alone to be roughed up and threatened when arrested. It’s not exactly the most flattering view of law enforcement, who (despite reverting to heroes at the end) are constantly shown to be willing to bend the word of the law.

These moments of interest just about sustain it, added to Morris and West’s touches of flair. But it’s also got some painfully dated, awkward moments as Hollywood still struggled to stumble from silence to sound.