The use of sound is so integral to George W. Hill's prison drama The Big House that you could essentially watch it on the radio. In many ways, what you hear helps inform the audience almost as much as what you see. The cold, empty walls of the prison are accompanied by the mechanical sound of marching prisoners. Individual voices promising vengeance bleed out of synch with the others during hymns on Sunday. These are just two examples. Martin Scorsese cited The Big House as an exemplary development in Hollywood's adoption of sound in the early 1930s. But the film is also remarkable simply as a story. The film follows three inmates in a desperately overcrowded prison: Kent, a new prisoner locked up for manslaughter while driving drunk, Morgan, a prison veteran up for parole, and Butch, an unpredictably violent brute who rules over his fellow inmates. Besides the film's use of sound, what intrigued me the most in The Big House was how it subverted expectations concerning its central characters' story arcs. By the end of the film, the character we first identified as the hero has become a villain and one of the villains has become the hero. Finally, the film ends with an electrifying prison riot that turns into a full-on battle between the inmates and guards complete with machine guns and tanks. The Big House is a wonderful film, both as an artifact of the early Hollywood sound era and as an entertainment.
8/10
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