Rowland Brown and John Cromwell | Hell’s Highway / 1932

stealing a spoon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Ornitz, Robert Tasker and Rowland Brown (screenplay), Rowland Brown and John Cromwell (directors) Hell’s Highway / 1932

 

Long before Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (1967) portrayal of prison life in a Southern chain gang, Rowland Brown and John Cromwell even more brutally realized the hellish world of a prison turned forced labor camp in their 1932 production of Hell’s Highway, starring Richard Dix as the popular prison camp leader “Duke” Ellis.

     The prisoners used by a contractor trying to build “liberty highway” are kept shackled together each night in bed, are offered the worst food possible, often left to starve for the slightest infraction—in one instance for a stolen spoon—and locked away in a deathly sweat box if they question or challenge any authority. But whereas Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, released later the same year, focused on the unjust system that sent the hero to such a hellish prison, the prisoners of Hell’s Highway are all guilty of robbery, murder, and other crimes such as the three-time bigamist who constantly spouts Bible verses and “reads the stars.” But the real villains in this film are not the prisoners, not even the terrible system which commits repeat offenders such as the likeable Duke to life imprisonment, but the capitalist William Billings (Oscar Apfel) who will do anything to get his highway built ahead of schedule, an effort that seems to consist mostly of the prison gang hacking away for forever on a never ending supply of boulders.

    Brown’s films is rich on presentation of character types, including several black figures, many of whom predictably—given the standard stereotypes of the day—spend their days and nights singing. But who might complain about the film’s use of the wonderful Etude Ethiopian Chorus. And some of the character types would be popular even in today’s films, one a mute man who primarily signs, uttering only a few words. One figure seems to spend his entire life collecting pictures of beautiful women, all of whom, he claims, he knew since they signed the obviously promotional photos—clearly a lie, since he later steals the photo of a boy’s sweetheart.

      Another, more tragic figure, is a guard Captain “Pop-Eye” Jackson, who is so convinced by the star-reading bigamist that his wife is cheating on him that he returns to his prison-farm cottage, gun in hand, and shoots his innocent wife dead, a major moment in the plot since it is during the star-reading session that Duke and several of his friends, having distracted that very guard, attempt an escape. They might even have been successful had Duke not turned back when he discovers that his younger brother, Johnny (Tom Brown) has just been delivered up the prison for a petty crime. He realizes that the only hope to set his brother free and get him on the right track is to stay, a fortunate choice for Duke since by the next morning they bring back the dead bodies of his two escaped friends.

      What is also truly fascinating about this film is the existence of a homosexual character Burgess, the camp cook who is evidently is in a relationship with the head guard, “Blacksnake Skinner” (C. Henry Gordon). “Cookie,” who doesn’t at all hide his effeminate manners and even looks longingly, at one point, at the handsome Duke, and is patted on the butt at one point by his guard and protector. Except for Duke’s umbrage over “Cookie’s” languid gaze in his direction, the prisoners seem quite accepting of their cook’s sexuality, if not as tolerant of the food he serves them. In short, Burgess is no mere sissy in this film, but another of the various prison “types”; and when in 1934, after the Breen and the Hays board strengthened their anti-homosexual strictures, the film could not get permission for a re-release, which is why, perhaps, this excellent work is hardly known today, whereas I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang has been listed on the National Film Registry.

     Another minor figure, but worth noting, is the beloved wife of one of the prisoners who visits, played by Louise Beavers; on that same visiting day Duke’s mother and his brother Johnny’s girlfriend show up, the mother further convincing her elder son to take care of his idolizing sibling.

   To save Johnny from possible death in the sweat box where another young boy died just a few days earlier, Duke agrees to play the role of a company overseer, a position his fellow inmates, who previously admired him, now bitterly resent. But it is only by performing that task that he gets Johnny switched to a prison desk job.

     Eventually, however, their tortures become so unbearable that the entire camp rises up, most of the men escaping and setting fire to the entire place, a remarkable scene, made even more dramatic by the fact that Duke has locked his brother away in a wooden prison carrier so that he cannot join them and endanger his own parole. But when Johnny makes an escape, he cannot avoid freeing the camp guards, trapped in another wagon in which they would certainly have been burned to death had he not opened the door.

     The long scene of escape and its aftermath, when Johnny attempts to join up with the other prison escapees, ends in his being shot by locals—a bounty has put on all the prisoners so that the locals might join in the capture—Duke turning back when he hears of his brother’s whereabouts.

      In the end, because of the governor’s arrival and an underground investigator he’s assigned to the camp, Johnny is saved from hanging and treated by a doctor, and Duke is saved from the same end—although he still may have spend the rest of his life in prison—by his testifying against the criminal acts of Billings, he and others are saved from that man’s decree about sending slackers to their death in the sweat box.

      Prison reform, accordingly, seems to save the day. But we know that any changes were only temporary. Luke Jackson (Paul Newman) and dozens of other such figures in between in both film and fiction have made it clear that many prisons throughout the world were and are still something just short of death camps even today. One only has to read of New York City’s Riker’s Island to perceive the truth.

      But Hell’s Highway gave us an early look into the system that revealed over and over again in works as various as Sex in Chains (1928), People of the Summer Night (1948), The Kingdom of Heaven (1949), The Song of Love (1950), Caged (1950), Girls in Prison (1956),The Quare Fellow (1962), Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1971), The Consequence (1977), Midnight Express (1978), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), Chained Heat (1983), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Lilies (1996), I Love You Phillip Morris (2010), Great Freedom (2021), and so very many others that we preceive not only are all prison systems often unjust but are filled with LGBTQ individuals as well as others who practice in its confines same-gender sex, the former sometimes arrested simply for acting out sexual desire.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).