Destination Big House

Many Poverty Row programmers rest in peace at the bottom of the noir barrel —  and don’t appear in this collection —  simply because they’re bad films, but a portion of them rose above their impoverished origins. A select few (see 1945’s Detour) turned out to be extraordinary films, but a larger number stand out today not because they achieved greatness but because they worked hard to tell a unique story, and their restrictive budget added an unexpected filmmaking charm and earnestness that help us root for the characters. In George Blair’s Destination Big House, Dorothy Patrick stars as Janet Brooks, a kindhearted schoolteacher who deigns to play good Samaritan when a gunshot victim named Bruno (Richard Benedict) shows up at her mountain cabin claiming to have had a hunting accident. Janet removes the bullet, and the two form a bond as she takes care of him overnight, but the next day Bruno is hunted down and shot (again) by the gangsters who want the $80,000 in cash he’s carrying. Just before dying in the hospital, however, Bruno declares Janet the heir to his fortune in gratitude for her kindness. The trouble is he neglects to say where he left the money, which sets off a frenzy of interest from undesirable characters, including Janet’s own brother Freddy (Jimmy Lydon). Based on her scandalous association with a gangster, Janet is shunned by the residents of her town and placed on a leave of absence by her school (“They make me sound like a gangster’s moll”). Robert Rockwell plays Walter Phillips, a high-profile hospital physician and Janet’s husband-to-be, and Claire Du Brey plays Janet’s occasionally hysterical mother Celia, who’s very upset that her bridge club seems to have blacklisted her. This is not the kind of noir that draws one in through visual splendor, but it’s a fun, compact film that even noir skeptics can appreciate.