One of the earliest prison break movies and a Best Picture nominee from the 1929-30 award year at the Academy Awards.
"The Big House" suffers from lack of focus. Wallace Beery, as a hardened inmate, received the Best Actor Oscar nomination, but the film is really much more about Robert Montgomery, newly incarcerated and navigating the ins and outs of prison life, until it's no longer about him and is instead about Chester Morris, who escapes and falls in love with Montgomery's sister before being captured and sent back to the slammer. The film's money shot is a big shoot out at the end, during which all of the principal characters die. This grim, gritty stuff distinguishes the film as pre-Code, and it's the movie's pre-Code status that allows it to get away with the moral ambiguity in not really having good guys and bad guys and making the audience unsure of who it's supposed to be rooting for.
Being an early sound film, "The Big House" is almost by definition uneven, since filmmakers were trying to figure out what movies should look and sound like with the addition of the new medium. But many clearly thought Douglas Shearer, brother of Norma and head of the MGM sound department at the time, handled sound well, as this film has the distinction of being the very first winner of the Sound Recording Oscar. Workhorse screenwriter Frances Marion also won an Oscar for Best Writing, in a year that saw her go up against the formidable competition of "All Quiet on the Western Front" no less.
Grade: B
