Road to the Big House (1947) User Reviews

Low rent prison film with a message.

[gordonl56 · 7/10 · 11 March 2008]

Road to the Big House - 1947

John Shelton is a low level bank employee who is tired of waiting to move up the wage scale. He wants to give is wife everything he wishes he could. He decides to help himself to 200 thousand of the bank's cash. He picks a bank long weekend so he can get away to South America where the two of them could live the high life.

The wife is horrified that the man she loves would do this and turns him over to the police. He gets 10 years in prison which will be commuted to time served if he tells where he hid the cash. He refuses and off to hard time he goes.

He is worked over by the guards and the other convicts because they all want the cash. Shelton does not break and keeps the cash location to himself. After five years he gets involved in an escape plan but is quickly recaptured and gets another 5 years added to his time.

15 years later he gets out of prison and heads for the cash. It is not there, the wife had found it and returned it to the bank. 15 years down the tubes! The old crime does not pay story again. Seen worse, seen better.

You can't feel any sympathy for a stubborn criminal.

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 18 June 2020]

For bank clerk John Shelton, life in prison doesn't have him as a prisoner of his conscience. He embezzled money from the bank, and his wife (Ann Doran) calls his boss to claim that Shelton accidentally forgot to put the money in before he closed the timed locked safe. Of course, he's furious over this, and as he is arrested, he claims in earshot of everyone around him that the money is his, that what he went through to get it makes him deserving of it, and that he has every right to keep it. Shelton ends up in a tough prison where word gets around about his crime and the fact that he has money hidden somewhere Fellow prison Guinn "Big Boy" Williams (a typecast name for an actor adept at playing crooks if I ever heard one) tries to make a deal with him to get his hands on part of it, but Shelton won't budge.

Shelton also doesn't seem at all concerned that his best friend (Richard Bailey) is looking after his wife, having been a third wheel pretty much every night before he was arrested. A jailbreak leads to Doran being put in jeopardy because of Shelton's selfishness, and there's an ironic twist that saves this from being even lower on my rating scale. If this had only tried to go for some sort of sense from its leading male, I could have taken his stupidity with less trepidation, but this grade Z programmer has little to offer in the way of any sense other than the fact that almost everybody comes out of this a loser, and Doran has to suffer with the knowledge that she married a complete lame brain.