Up the River

Hill's The Big House opened earlier in the year, Spencer Tracy's sly Wallace Beeryisms here suggest a conscious lampoon. Easygoing vaudeville is the approach, though not before a moody long shot atop a foggy penitentiary wall at night, the camera pans left to follow a sentry then right to reveal a pair of inmates climbing up and leaping off. Tracy ditches his dim sidekick (Warren Hymer) on the getaway car, when they again cross paths one is a dandy and the other has found religion, their brawl is resumed mid-sermon. "Verily I say to you, the wages of sin is a punch in the jaw, you louse!" Back inside they go. It's a relaxed institution, racially integrated and with female convicts on the other side of the gate. The warden's daughter turns cartwheels amid prisoners, lullabies fill the air once the lights go out, the baseball team ran by the salty lifer (William Collier Sr.) keeps a zebra mascot along with a few problems: "Just one week before the big game, and they had to go and pardon the pitcher!" John Ford's loose truculence contrasts with Hawks' terse sangfroid in The Criminal Code, the comedy of imprisonment and escape is warmly attuned to the youthfulness of prickly artists at the dawn of their careers. (Among them is skinny juvenile Humphrey Bogart as the New England parolee in love with Claire Luce's reformed extortionist.) Stagecoach's schoolmarms turn up as social workers, the revue sequence—with its questionable skits, sentimental songs and drag acts—surely was in the back of Renoir's mind during Grand Illusion. The Ford community, bitter and sweet behind bars. "Okay to come in?" With Robert Emmett O'Connor, Joan Lawes, Noel Francis, Sharon Lynne, Edythe Chapman, and Ward Bond. In black and white.