I keep thinking I don’t like prison movies, and yet many of the best noirs are set in prison. 1956’s Behind the High Wall isn’t of the caliber of Brute Force, but there is still a lot I liked here.
Tom Tully plays a prison warden who genuinely cares for the prisoners and wants to help them reform. He is only the acting warden, and his effort to make that role permanent is threatened by a penny-pinching committee that believes he is too lenient.
Sylvia Sidney plays his wheelchair-confined wife. Her character is introduced without drawing attention to her disability, which is a nice touch. Alas, it is only a few minutes later that she is lamenting the day she stepped in front of that car. I wish the film had simply treated her as any other character, and not commented on her condition. This moment also anticipates a hard turn into melodrama near the end.
Getting in his car to return to work, Tully finds an armed man in the backseat. Once inside the prison gates, two of three prisoners who have staged a riot manage to escape in his car, while taking him hostage. One of the prisoners (John Larch) is wounded by a bullet and fails to escape. We’ll see more of him later.
A motorcycle follows in an exciting pursuit. There is a stunning moment where the camera is set up on an embankment, so we see the motorcycle roar up towards us, falter, and then the cop falls off and rolls back down toward the road.
Between the prison and now, the gang has picked up another person, played by John Gavin. The nature of this character will be ambiguous for a while. He claims to be a mechanic who just happened to answer a distress call, though I suspected otherwise for the longest time.
Like the motorcycle cop, the getaway vehicle also goes out of control and crashes. Most of the bad guys are killed instantly, but one that is only injured struggles up the hill with a large suitcase. Tully shoots the guy in the back (our hero!) and, as the corpse rolls down the hill, the case bursts open and a huge amount of money goes airborne.
Tully quickly gathers up as much cash as he can and buries it. He and Gavin are the only survivors, and Tully lets him take the fall. Because movies love irony, Gavin ends up in Tully’s prison.
Gavin insists he was never with the criminals and was only where he was because he had been lured there under false pretenses. He claims he was meeting a potential investor for a service station he wants to build. Supposedly, if he can find the plans he brought with him, he will have a rock-solid alibi.
Not exactly sure why he needed plans to show what a gas station looks like, as the illustration looks like any other filling station. I was especially confused by how these missing plans would prove Gavin’s innocence, as wouldn’t plans showing he wanted to build his own place actually provide more evidence he was involved in the stolen loot?
Tully buried those plans with the money, not realizing what it was at the time. So, the central conflicts of the film become whether Tully will sit on that evidence, keeping an innocent man in prison, in order to keep the money for himself. It is a pretty good premise, though the way the movie sets it up is clumsy.
Like I said earlier, the picture will eventually devolve into pure melodrama. Before it does that, however, there are some moments of surprisingly strong violence in the prison scenes. I’m amazed how movies of that era could get away with such content, apparently so long as it happens in a prison. The sentiment behind this appears to be prisoners are inhuman monsters.
Which again makes me think of Brute Force, the very best of the prison-set noirs. Behind the High Wall doesn’t set its sights quite so high and, despite some missteps, ends up a solidly average noir.
Dir: Abner Biberman
Starring Tom Tully, Syvia Sidney, John Gavin
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XI