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| Tom Brown and Richard Dix |
Rowland Brown's Hell's Highway is a vital and nervy B feature from Radio Pictures. This David O. Selznick production beat I Was a Fugitive on the Chain Gang to the punch in the prison exposé sweepstakes of 1932 by opening two months before the more remembered Warner Brothers feature. Hell's Highway stars Richard Dix as an inveterate bank robber facing a lifetime behind bars. He languishes in a shambolic prison camp presided over by a cruel commandant (perpetual baddie C. Henry Gordon). The conditions are medieval in their cruelty as the shackled prisoners break rocks in the hot sun in a penal system built on graft and greed. All the prisoners' wear targets on their backs in a picture that is extremely grungy and deglamorized for a Hollywood flick. Dix's character yearns to break free, but when his kid brother (Tom Brown) joins him in stir, his perspective changes. If you've seen one prison picture you might think you've seen them all, however Hell's Highway wizzes by in 65 minutes of feverish intensity that includes two prison breaks, murder, adultery, intimations of homosexuality, institutional racism, blackmail, torture, and arson.
The film's editing is swift and ironic. A prisoner's drawings spring to animated life. Popular tunes, mostly sung by the black prisoners, serve as aural transitions for this procession of carnage. Sultry blues concerning adultery (Frankie and Johnny) and dope (Willie the Weeper) create an aura of doom. Brown captures the gloomy delirium of the prisoners' plight in sweaty close-ups. The only note of hope in the picture is embodied by Whiteside (Stanley Fields, omnipresent in 1930s Hollywood), a reformer heralding the change coming with the New Deal. William K. Everson has noted how Gordon's character prefigures Hume Cronyn's fascistic prison warden in Brute Force. Similarly, Charles Middleton's mystic convict presages John Steinbeck's defrocked preacher, Jim Casy, in 1939's The Grapes of Wrath. The picture originally had Dix die after being pursued by hound dogs in a swamp, but reshoots directed by John Cromwell give us a slightly less tragic ending. Brown is credited with over twenty screenplays, but his credits as a director are few owing to his alcoholism, communism, and irascibility. Alexander Korda famously fired him on the set of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Nevertheless, on Hell's Highway he creates memorable vignettes with over twenty memorable supporting performers. Dix, who I find oafish in most of his other pictures, is at his brawny best under Brown's direction.
