Le Pacte des tueurs

A 1955 docudrama of a kidnapping gone wrong & the man who tried to make it happen. When an asthmatic kid goes missing in a national park, a crooked opportunist hears of this & tries to milk the situation by collecting ransom from his distraught father. Little does all concerned know that the poor boy would fall to his death from an elevated cabin which he escaped from, only for the kidnapper, played by Ralph Meeker, to toss his body into a forest canyon below. The FBI is called in & they capture Meeker sending him to jail w/o getting the particulars of the crime (Meeker is dubbed the Iceman for his reticence in not divulging any information). Once in stir, he meets up w/a group of convicts (Charles Bronson, Broderick Crawford, Lon Chaney, Jr. & William Talman make up some of this unit) looking to break out of prison w/the remaining ransom money (which Meeker stashed) used as a boon to keep himself alive during the escape which goes off w/o a hitch w/some of the team being killed along the way until the law finally catches up w/them back at the park. A great first half of the film gets lost in the second (almost feeling like two separate narratives which don't congeal in this 90 minutes affair!) w/a lot of the story beats sped along just to reach the end credits but I'd still recommend it for the terse first 45 minutes as the kidnapping & aftermath is thrilling & heartbreaking. Also starring Felicia Farr (she was married to Jack Lemmon) as one of Meeker's helpers, Stafford Repp (Chief O'Hara from TV's Batman) as the prison warden & William Boyett (from Adam 12) as a park ranger.

Rugged mid-fifties prison break flick with great cast,--Broderick Crawford, Ralph Meeker, Lon Chaney, Jr., Charles Bronson, Reed Hadley, Bill Bouchey and Roy Roberts--it oozes violence and cruelty, and is even today one tough, convincing little movie. Ralph Meeker is excellent as a cold-blooded killer known as 'the iceman", but Crawford has the film's best line when Meeker joins his prison cell: "The iceman cometh". Very watchable and outdoorsy, with fine work by a virile cast, it rather resembles stylistically Crawford's TV series Highway Patrol in its plain, police procedural take on the American western landscape of the fifties, with killers, like Commies, lurking behind every rock and tree. Strong stuff, and a worthy late entry in the prison escape genre.

The film begins with a little boy getting lost while at summer camp. Ralph Meeker finds the boy and pretends to be helping him, but actually is intent on kidnapping him and holding him for a huge ransom. Unfortunately, the kid dies while in his care but Meeker is an animal and STILL proceeds to get the money and then tries to skip town. However, the cold and calculating killer is caught and sent to prison--but unfortunately, all they can prove is that he extorted the money--not that he had anything to do with the boy's disappearance.

This is sort of like a prison movie merged with a Film Noir flick. That's because much of the beginning and ending of the film is set outside prison and its style throughout was rather Noir inspired--with a format much like an episode of DRAGNET (the bloodier 1950s version, not the late 60s incarnation). However, it did lack some of the great Noir camera-work and lighting as well as the cool Noir lingo--but it still succeeded in telling a great story. What was definitely Noir was the unrelentingly awful and brutal nature of the film--a plus for Noir fans. Now I hate violent and bloody films, but this one was a bit more restrained but still very shocking for a 1950s audience--featuring some of the most brutal plot elements of the decade (tossing a child's body off a cliff, burning a corpse with a blowtorch to confuse in the identification of another corpse and the scene with the escaped prisoner who is scalded to death). Because of all this, the film was above all else, realistic and shocking--much of it due to the excellent script, straight-forward acting and a few excellent and unexpected plot twists.

By the way, this is one of the earliest films in which Charles Bronson appears with this name (previously, he'd been billed as "Charlie Buchinsky"). When he takes his shirt off in the film, take a look at how muscle-bound he was--I sure would have hated to have tangled with him!! In his prime, he might have been the most buff actor in Hollywood history who DIDN'T suck down steroids (and, consequently, had minuscule testicles from this drug).

Big House USA sounds like a prison picture, but only in part of the film is the setting a maximum security prison. There is the part how Ralph Meeker got there and the last part about his escape with several other solid citizens, residents of Big House USA.

A young boy with one rich father is kidnapped by Meeker and dies while in his custody. Not that he killed him, but kidnapping alone as per the Lindbergh law gets him the gas chamber. Father Willis Bouchey pays the ransom, but gets no child back.

Meeker is arrested, but all he's charged with is extortion, without a body dead or alive, the authorities can do no more. But with the reputation as a child killer, Meeker's not going to be a popular guy even in the maximum security federal penitentiary he's sent.

But cell-mate Broderick Crawford has other ideas about the ransom money never recovered and buried in a national park. He and confederates Lon Chaney, Jr., William Talman, and Charles Bronson escape with Meeker. They had an escape plan in the works already, a quite ingenious one which costs another prisoner his life during a dry run.

A chance to see all these guys in a film is never to be passed up. Crawford we're told is a smart guy. Personally if he were that smart he'd have realized that the authorities would know full well he was heading for the park and go anywhere else. But greed overtakes intelligence.

There's also a nice role here for Felicia Farr as Meeker's accomplice. FBI man Reed Hadley and chief forest ranger Roy Roberts represent the law.

Big House USA spends more time in the wide open spaces than in a maximum security prison. Still it's a tight little noir film with a fine cast of players.

As it happens I was in this picture as an extra in the early spring of 1955. I was going to high school as a sophomore at Holy Cross Abbey in Cannon City Colo. at the time when a call came in for extras for a summer camp scene.

This movie was filmed in and around the Cannon City area,Westcliffe and Royal Gorge. Broderick Crawford had a popular TV series at the time called Highway Patrol.

This was one of Charles Bronson's earliest movies, he had just done House of Wax a year or two before.

Reed Hadley also had a popular detective TV series at the time.