Other than Wallace Beery who starred and Lewis Stone as the Warden I don’t remember ever having seen any of the other cast. This is a very early “talkie” and so the acting is a bit broad.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
An upper-class young man, Kent, is sentenced to ten years in prison for killing a man in an automobile accident while driving drunk. He is put in a crowded cell with the two toughest prisoners. Wallace Beery is “Machine Gun Butch” and the other prisoner is a master thief named Morgan.
Kent gets into conflicts with most of the prisoners because of his soft upbringing so he joins up with one of the prison rats and agrees to give information to the guards in return for lightening his sentence. Kent has a beautiful sister Anne. Morgan sees her when she comes to visit her brother and falls in love with her. Because of a frame up by Kent, Morgan loses his imminent parole chance. When an opportunity occurs Morgan escapes from the prison and goes to see Anne. She figures out that he is an escapee but helps him escape pursuit. Somehow or other they strike up a romance and he even comes home to visit her parents!
But eventually he is recaptured and arrives back in prison just as Butch is plotting a major jail break. But Kent rats them out and the escape becomes a riot with Butch and his men holding the guards as hostages and both sides blazing away at each other with machine guns. Finally Butch declares that he will kill all the guards one by one if his men aren’t allowed to escape. When Butch kills the head guard, the Warden calls for the Army to bring in tanks to break up the riot.
Morgan decides to save the guards by locking them in a cell with a solid steel door and throwing away the key. Butch decides that Morgan is the rat and goes gunning for him. In the melee Kent is killed in the crossfire and butch and Morgan wound each other in a gunfight. When Butch discovers that it was Kent who sold him out, he and Morgan reconcile with Butch dying of his wounds. The tanks overcome the prisoners’ resistance and order is restored. Afterward Morgan is hailed as a hero for saving the guards’ lives. He is pardoned and upon getting out he is welcomed out by his fiancée Anne.
This movie is a parody of prison. Butch and most of the other prisoners and guards are caricatures of the stereotypes that we would come to expect in movies about prison. But I found myself enjoying the movie mostly because Wallace Beery is an enjoyable comic actor in most of the movies I’ve seen him in. And how can you dislike a movie that features the prisoners setting up and betting on and cheering for their favorites in a cockroach race. Especially when we find out that the race was fixed by the favorite being glued to the ground with bubble gum! I don’t think I can recommend this movie for anyone in particular except for fans of Wallace Beery. Good old Long John Silver.