By Michael Bayer
The 1930’s brought a spotlight to American crime like never before. For good reason, we readily associate the decade with the gangster movie, especially those produced by Warner Brothers, but the prison film, perhaps an adjunct of that genre, enabled Americans to experience not only the crime but the punishment too.
Read on or click here for a complete list of prison noir titles.
Thirteen years under Prohibition, which ended in 1933, had triggered a cultural fascination with the criminal underworld. Al Capone was finally convicted and sent to prison in 1931. The Bureau of Investigations was made part of the Department of Justice and re-named the FBI in 1935, headed by the legendary and controversial J. Edgar Hoover. And the federal prison system was formally established under the Federal Bureau of Prisons, with its most famous property, Alcatraz, opening its doors in 1932. Popular prison films of this early period included 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).
As noir ascended in the 1940’s, the prison setting became a common feature of the cycle. The cold, claustrophobic cells were a natural manifestation of the noir protagonist’s mind, his or her ensnarement and alienation from the rest of society. In fact, one of the defining visual tropes of film noir is the use of slats of light or framing objects (banisters, bed frames) to encage actors on screen, symbolizing their helplessness in the face of doom. In prison noir, the cages are real, actual steel bars immuring the character’s mind and body, often for the rest of their lives. The cages weren’t just in America (The Story of Molly X, 1949; Caged, 1950; Riot in Cell Block 11, 1954) but around the world in countries like Argentina (Hardly a Criminal, 1949), Mexico (Women’s Prison, 1951), and Japan (Death Row Woman, 1960).
A relatively small number of prison noirs take place entirely behind bars, but this subset includes the two undisputed masterpieces of the category: Brute Force (1947) and Le Trou (1960). Director Jules Dassin’s first film noir, Brute Force stars Burt Lancaster as an inmate organizing a breakout under the watch of a sadistic, even psychopathic, warden played brilliantly by Hume Cronyn. The film features some of the most brutally violent scenes in all of noir: characters are attacked by blowtorch, crushed in an industrial press machine, flogged, stabbed, driven to suicide, and used as a human shield. Each man is both powder keg and spark.
Jacques Becker’s Le Trou is exactly the opposite. If Brute Force explodes with rage, Becker’s film bobs on the calm sea of reason. Lacking violence, special effects, and a musical score, the film quietly shows us the camaraderie of four cellmates as they plot and execute an elaborate escape requiring clinical precision. When a newcomer is assigned to their cell, distrust is sown, second thoughts emerge, and the whole thing will end in hopelessness. Like Brute Force, Le Trou is a tale of near escape. The men in both films come so close to freedom they can smell it and taste it, but fate will have the final say.
Unsurprisingly, films set entirely inside prison feature single-sex casts, which often engenders solidarity, like the way Dunn and Crazy Mike look out for each other in Riot in Cell Block 11 or the maternal bond that unites the ladies of 1951’s Women’s Prison in the wake of a birth. In Blonde Sinner (1956), the bonding is between the death row inmate played by Diana Dors and the prison matrons with whom she spends her final days. Of course, the close confinement of one sex can also invite homoerotic interpretations (note Charles Bronson’s character’s reading a beefcake magazine in 1955’s Big House, USA or the not-exactly-subtle dialogue eschewing men in Caged) if not outright homosexual relations (the protagonist of Death Row Woman is a victim of lesbian sexual assault).
Most prison-centered films spend plenty of time on the outside. In some cases, like in They All Come Out (1939) and Johnny Apollo (1940), the drama unfolds in the bright light of freedom and only culminates in prison. More often, however, the incarceration precedes the main drama, which is jumpstarted by either an early parole, a tumultuous reentry to society, or, most frequently, an escape. In fact, escaped fugitives seem to be everywhere in noir: Gordon Douglas’ Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950), Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Carlos Hugo Christensen’s Bloody Hands (1955), and so many others. In Lewis Foster’s Crashout (1955), the escape takes place even before the opening credits are finished.
The noir conflict in these films shines through when we consider the more specific term used for these facilities in the United States: the penitentiary. Originating in Roman Catholicism, penitence is the feeling of regret and humility for one’s sins, a requirement on the road to redemption. When noir characters antagonize wardens or plot their escapes, are they not fighting their own salvation? Often involving physical labor, the penance (sentence) may be difficult, but the prisoner’s moral obligation is to serve it; resisting it creates a disruptive ripple in the moral universe.
This interpretation of prison as penance intensifies the perversion of justice that occurs when an inmate has been wrongly convicted and forced to repent for someone else’s offense. In fact, the escaped inmate who hunts down the one who framed him is practically its own noir subgenre. See Alberto Cavalcanti’s I Became a Criminal (1947), Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage (1947), Robert Hamer’s The Long Memory (1951), and many others.
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