Big House, U.S.A.

Desperation and depravity reign in Don Siegel’s cold-hearted Big House, U.S.A., in which Ralph Meeker stars as Jerry Barker, aka “the Iceman,” an ex-con who stumbles onto a perfect kidnapping opportunity in the mountains of Colorado. It doesn’t go exactly as planned, of course, and he ends up back in the slammer, this time Casabel Island Prison where he shares a cell with four inmates led by “strategist” Rollo Lamar (Broderick Crawford) who recruits Barker to join his escape plan (involving a boiler and makeshift SCUBA gear) not out of the goodness of his heart but because he knows Barker is sitting on a stash of kidnapping loot which could set them up for a long time (“I’m gonna kidnap a kidnapper for the ransom he kidnapped for”). Siegel’s action sequences are excellent, as always, and the film’s pacing never lets up for a moment. The escape sequence involves impressive underwater camera work, and the film’s accented by disturbing moments of violence: crushing a man’s skull while he sleeps, then melting off his face with a blow-torch; incarcerating a child in a mountain watchtower in the middle of an asthma attack; trapping a man in an industrial furnace; chucking a corpse off a ledge. A young Charles Bronson shows off his perfectly sculpted and tanned body (he’s introduced reading a muscle magazine in his cell) as Benny Kelly; Lon Chaney, Jr. and William Talman round out the gang as Alamo Mason and William “Machine Gun” Mason, respectively.