Big House, U.S.A.

This film is not the best of it's genre. It is like a low budget version of the 1950's Dragnet series. The cast is something else.

Broderirck Crawford, William Talman, a young Charles Bronson, & Lon Chaney Jr make interesting cell mates in a maximum security island prison. When the Ice Man joins them, they hatch an escape plot involving his ransom money. Like Dragnet, in this movie, the police appear to be a lot smarter than the crooks/murderers/thieves.

This could have been better but it is obvious that this is a low budget thriller. The acting talent only gets an average script to work with. While the film is based on fact, it does not quite rise to the level of a great film.

For those who like the familiar faces it is OK. It is fictionally based upon a real incident. Only the names were changed to protect the guilty, or is that innocent? Actually, the story is good enough to involve the viewer, but it does not become a must see movie.

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.

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.

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.

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.