Accidentally killing a man in a drunken brawl, 20 year old Phillips Holmes gets 10 years for manslaughter. Unable to forget the loss of freedom, he manages to get a job as trustee for new warden Walter Huston who happens to be the former D.A. who sent him and a bunch of other inmates to prison in the first place. Falling in love with Huston's daughter, he gets deep into prison intrigue which threatens his chance at parole.
Brilliantly acted and nicely paced, thus is crisp crime drama from a different perspective than others released around the same time. Huston, one of the best film actors of the golden age, is a law enforcer with a strict morale conscience, at one point giving his perspective on how he could get Holmes off if he wasn't defense attorney. Boris Karloff has a prominent supporting role as one if the darker of inmates who will give an old lady a knock out drug to reach his nefarious goals.
One of the spooky moments comes with the revenge he seeks on a snitch and the countdown to retribution. Every performance is dead on, with moments of tension that are brilliantly scripted. It gets even grittier than MGM's hit prison movie "The Big House". For a film made by B studio Columbia before they moved to near the top, this is a total classic of the crime drama genre, giving an indication of what film noir would look like more than a decade later.
Brilliantly acted and nicely paced, thus is crisp crime drama from a different perspective than others released around the same time. Huston, one of the best film actors of the golden age, is a law enforcer with a strict morale conscience, at one point giving his perspective on how he could get Holmes off if he wasn't defense attorney. Boris Karloff has a prominent supporting role as one if the darker of inmates who will give an old lady a knock out drug to reach his nefarious goals.
One of the spooky moments comes with the revenge he seeks on a snitch and the countdown to retribution. Every performance is dead on, with moments of tension that are brilliantly scripted. It gets even grittier than MGM's hit prison movie "The Big House". For a film made by B studio Columbia before they moved to near the top, this is a total classic of the crime drama genre, giving an indication of what film noir would look like more than a decade later.