Recensioni di Metacritic

Grimly realistic and often brutal, it exposes the inhuman conditions and paranoia that deepen criminal resolve among inmates.

The prototype for every saga of the slammer to come, starring Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, and Robert Montgomery. Beery is particularly good in his toughest tough-guy role.

The granddaddy of prison pics opens with a lecture on overcrowding and ends with a high mortality rate, in which Chester Morris, a bald Wallace Beery and stoolie Robert Montgomery (Elizabeth's father) are players. [24 Jun 1994, p.3D]

The Big House is an MGM film, and while it takes on the problem of prison overcrowding, at times it’s more like a window into a secret society, with its own codes and concerns. It’s an outsized, abstracted version of everyday life circa 1930.

It is a film that sweeps swiftly along, with some conspicuously fine episodes and others where the humor is not a little forced.

As Butch, Morgan and Kent, Wallace Beery, Chester Morris and Robert Montgomery are a great trio in ‘the big house’, where each is serving a stretch for homicide, forgery and manslaughter, respectively. Prison life on the half-shell is plainly exposed.