A young man is sent to jail after killing a man in a nightclub brawl. The DA (Walter Huston) who sent him away is the newly-appointed warden of the prison. The warden takes sympathy on the young man, who is given employment as the driver to the warden's daughter. His newfound position is threatened, however, when another inmate is murdered in retaliation for snitching, and the young man refuses to identify the killer.
Reminiscent of The Big House (1930) with its gritty, pre-Code depictions of prison life, and grappling with the social issues of the penal system.
Boris Karloff has a supporting role as one of the inmates. He commands attention in every scene in which he appears, and it's easy to see why director Howard Hawks thought of him for the role of a rival gangster in Scarface. Peter Bogdanovich used a clip from this film with Karloff in his directorial debut Targets (1968).
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