San Quentin

There are better prison movies from the 1930’s than Lloyd Bacon’s San Quentin, but it’s still a perfectly fine B film that demonstrates the best of 1930’s Warner Brothers, even if on a slightly smaller scale. The plot is standard fare: Joe “Red” Kennedy (Humphrey Bogart) is sent to the infamous prison under the watch of yard captain Steve Jameson (Pat O’Brien) and soon joins the road gang with fellow inmate “Sailor Boy” Hansen (Joe Sawyer) to execute an escape plan. Already a pretty bitter guy (“Aw shut up and gimme the works,” he retorts when Jameson threatens him with solitary confinement), Kennedy blows a gasket later when he learns that the only reason he was assigned to the road gang, which is usually reserved for the most well-behaved cons, is because yard captain Jameson is dating Kennedy’s sister Mae (Ann Sheridan). The film’s final act follows Kennedy’s return home to Mae under the cover of night and concludes with a somewhat touching scene at the prison’s gate. Going on to star in an unrelated 1946 film with the same title, Barton MacLane plays Druggin, the disillusioned prison guard captain, and Veda Ann Borg plays Hansen’s girlfriend Helen, whose car plays a crucial role in the break. Religious faith gets an unexpected treatment in the form of a preaching, scripture-reading inmate who’s mocked, tripped, and abused in the prison yard until he seizes a guard’s gun and threatens to open fire on the place (“That man is mentally sick!”).