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.

Howard Hawks directs this terrific crime drama based on a play by Martin Flavin. Walter Huston plays the wily District Attorney Mark Brady, who fashions a 10 year conviction of a young man, Robert Graham(Phillips Holmes)who he knows for a fact killed a man in self defense. After a failed run for the governorship, Brady becomes the warden of the prison holding Graham. Brady wants to give the young man a break after serving 6 years of his term and is bitter and almost burnt out. Graham is given a valet's job for the warden. In no time the prisoner's actions earns the respect of the warden and his lovely daughter Mary(Constance Cummings). The young man is only days away from a pardon and is put in the hard position of snitching or not snitching on a cell-mate named Galloway(Boris Karloff). Coming into play is not the criminal code, but the prison code of silence. The film is well directed and the photography is superb. Supporting cast includes: DeWitt Jennings, John Sheehan, Mary Doran and Otto Hoffman.

DA Brady sends young Graham to prison unjustly, and must redeem himself once he becomes the prison's warden.The credits indicate icon Howard Hawks as the director; IMDb uncharacteristically lists no one; while Hawks' bio-site states he's the uncredited helmsman. I include this rather puzzling movie pedigree because I see very little of Hawks' characteristic style on screen. He may well have been adjusting to the new factor of sound (as others point out), but whatever the reason, the screenplay could have been filmed by any number of solid Hollywood craftsmen. The movie itself has been made several times over, so the material is familiar. But except for Huston's dynamic performance and Karloff's formidable presence, there's not much to recommend beyond the story itself. The prison yard scenes are riveting with their marching phalanxes of inmates. Sort of like a non-musical Busby Berkeley. I also like that early scene where DA Brady (Huston) strips away shady lady Gertie's thin façade of respectability. To me, its spirited air bespeaks Hawks' guiding hand, as does Brady's surprisingly intense grilling of Graham. However, what should be a highlight, Ned's (Karloff) revenge killing of the squealer, is unnecessarily down-played for this pre-Code period.Note how we're led to respect the inmates' code of conduct even though they are convicted criminals. Both the law and the inmates have their respective codes, but more importantly, the codes may well be linked by a common sense of justice. When, for example, those codes are broken by the squealer, on one hand, and by head guard Gleason, on the other, we're led to sympathize with the respective acts of retribution, bloody though they undoubtedly are. And since both acts are carried out by the hulking Ned, he becomes something of an avenging angel despite his gruesome appearance. It's the ambiguities of the two codes, united, perhaps, by a common sense of justice that suggests an interesting subtext to the story.Anyway, in my little book, this is a Walter Huston showcase, proving again that an actor of less than handsome appearance could carry a Hollywood movie.

Sometimes you seem to get into a position where you have to take your medicine for an even unintended actions. That is what happens to poor 20-year-old Bob Graham, and within 10 minutes into the movie, he's in the infinite world of prison, where he must learn yet another set of codes of the criminal sort. Creepy Ned Galloway (Boris Karloff just before his "Frankenstein" turn) takes a rather minor (at least early on) role and fills it with gusto (maybe its that creepy little haircut) in a claustrophobic cell. Later, he does the right thing for rehabilitated and soon-to-be-paroled (maybe) Graham, who does not violate the titular Criminal Code (since he's still a con).James Whale wanted Karloff for his monster after seeing Boris in this flick, and after you see it, you'll know why.BTW, who doesn't love a good prison movie yarn, and with Karloff in it, it rates a "9."