I found this gem in the Warner Archive "Forbidden Hollywood" collection, a series of several dozen pre-code films; this one's from Volume 9, and it dazzled my eyes from start to 62-minute later finish, plunging at once into headlined stories concerning poor prison conditions, and then wasting no time depicting those conditions; as the film opens, a new prisoner whose hands are bleeding from using a pick axe and collapses from overwork, is put into "the sweatbox," a crenelated metal enclosure--to teach him a lesson.
The camera continues a barrage of brilliantly made images edited with speed and expertise, built around the main character, Richard Dix (a hugely popular star for a short period of time), in for bank robbery, and dismayed when his younger brother ends up in the same camp.
Unlike many RKO melodramas, this film has a strong documentary feeling, with some persuasive touches seldom seen in a fast-moving prison film-- during one mother's visit to the prison, the camera pauses in close-up just long enough to see a grown man feel the touch of his mother's palm. The prison supervisor is normally a unfeeling chilly individual--but in an intimate quiet scene is shown tuning up his violin and sitting down to play some music while the convicts are chained in a cage.
And for those of you who are Flash Gordon devotees, Charles "Ming The Merciless" Middleton essays the prison mystic, crucial to several plot developments, and often very funny in a space of his very own. There is much to notice in the film, such as the black prisoner's chorus with a refrain that encapsulates another plot development, and the effeminate cook treated as something other than another Hollywood stereotype. Hell's Highway is one of those gems that make digging around in the old stuff worthwhile.
The camera continues a barrage of brilliantly made images edited with speed and expertise, built around the main character, Richard Dix (a hugely popular star for a short period of time), in for bank robbery, and dismayed when his younger brother ends up in the same camp.
Unlike many RKO melodramas, this film has a strong documentary feeling, with some persuasive touches seldom seen in a fast-moving prison film-- during one mother's visit to the prison, the camera pauses in close-up just long enough to see a grown man feel the touch of his mother's palm. The prison supervisor is normally a unfeeling chilly individual--but in an intimate quiet scene is shown tuning up his violin and sitting down to play some music while the convicts are chained in a cage.
And for those of you who are Flash Gordon devotees, Charles "Ming The Merciless" Middleton essays the prison mystic, crucial to several plot developments, and often very funny in a space of his very own. There is much to notice in the film, such as the black prisoner's chorus with a refrain that encapsulates another plot development, and the effeminate cook treated as something other than another Hollywood stereotype. Hell's Highway is one of those gems that make digging around in the old stuff worthwhile.