Surfing through the offerings on The Criterion Channel yesterday I landed on The Big House from 1930 as my evening’s entertainment.

With story and dialog credit to Frances Marion and her second Oscar nomination for writing The Big House is the source for many cinematic tropes found in later prison movies. The story is concerned with three principal characters, Kent, a new arrive at the prison, starting a ten-year sentence for man slaughter after he killed a pedestrian while driving drunk, Morgan a forger, and Butch an illiterate thug serving time for murder. While the film makes sociological points about the prison system including having the warden complain that society is happy to throw people into prison but unwilling to pay for it, it avoids pulling out a soap box but instead focuses on the nature of its central characters and how their time in prison reinforces or breaks their character.

Many scenes which would later become clichés in the sub-genre of prison movies are present here in this early ‘talkie.’ The food riot in the massive dinning hall, the full riot with bedding thrown from the upper levels of a massive cell block, the sharp concern among the inmates about ‘squealers,’ and so on though it is far from routine when the climax of a prison movies involves several tanks.

Running just under an hour and a half The Big House doesn’t waste time, there is no preamble and very little fat, something filmmakers today struggle to maintain. With visuals that were sometimes decades ahead of their time this movie remains an important and watchable piece from a time nearly a hundred years ago.