After being unable to find a good copy of the 1932 film, The Crash, I decided on this film, in part because of its short length. The film is, on the surface, a criticism of the brutality of chain gangs and prison horrors. But there is much more there, in this Pre-Code classic. Not only are there Black actors signing spirituals about what has happened, but there is a presumably homosexual cook, a person who has three wives and is in prison to avoid them (the religious one), and the wife of a guard is having an affair, who is later killed for it! There are also the themes like greed and working people to death, with the prison warden (played by C. Henry Gordon) working the convicts, who have literal targets on their backs which has multiple meanings, to the breaking point while the contractor wants to finish the road and get the work done. At the same time, the fact that the legal system is unfair is also highlighted as well. Even so, the warden who mistreated the men is, at the end of the film, arrested for his misdeeds as the way the prison camp is operating, the conditions they are under is illegal.
In this film, Richard Dix plays the protagonist, Duke Ellis, a repeat offender, and has to choose between escape and helping his brother, Johnny, played by Tom Brown. The prisoners are not passive, despite what one of them wants to do, engaging in a food fight against the cook when they aren't given food and refusing to work until they are given food. Later on, they stage a mass riot, which burns the whole place down, and they escape. But Johnny still sets the guards free for whatever reason, perhaps because he is selfish, thinking of his own welfare and not that of others.
One preeminent film critic adds on his website that the film, at the end, reaffirms Duke's "prison life as a formality for now" is a different treatment than the film, I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, as it is a more conventional drama "built around honor and family." This same critic adds that this fiom artfully contrasts "the humanness of its characters with their degrading situation," with the awfulness the convicts experience "learned and taught through degradation and fear." This critic ends by saying that the film's real villain is the "way capitalists abuse labor and treat people worse than the dirt they're shoveling" and that people can endure. The arguments of this critic are undoubtedly valid and add to my review up to this point.
With this, this film definitely deserves a 10 out of 10 and, without a question, blows you away!
In this film, Richard Dix plays the protagonist, Duke Ellis, a repeat offender, and has to choose between escape and helping his brother, Johnny, played by Tom Brown. The prisoners are not passive, despite what one of them wants to do, engaging in a food fight against the cook when they aren't given food and refusing to work until they are given food. Later on, they stage a mass riot, which burns the whole place down, and they escape. But Johnny still sets the guards free for whatever reason, perhaps because he is selfish, thinking of his own welfare and not that of others.
One preeminent film critic adds on his website that the film, at the end, reaffirms Duke's "prison life as a formality for now" is a different treatment than the film, I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, as it is a more conventional drama "built around honor and family." This same critic adds that this fiom artfully contrasts "the humanness of its characters with their degrading situation," with the awfulness the convicts experience "learned and taught through degradation and fear." This critic ends by saying that the film's real villain is the "way capitalists abuse labor and treat people worse than the dirt they're shoveling" and that people can endure. The arguments of this critic are undoubtedly valid and add to my review up to this point.
With this, this film definitely deserves a 10 out of 10 and, without a question, blows you away!