San Quentin

Product Description Do the crime, do the time. But what happens during the long years spent behind the walls of San Quentin? The penitentiary's new yard captain wants to make those years a time of rehabilitation rather than punishment. But not everyone's buying it. "He's just another copper to me," snarls inmate Red Kennedy. Humphrey Bogart portrays Red, continuing his climb to stardom in this brisk film that's one of a string of Depression-era works combining gangster-movie elements with a Big House setting. Studio mainstay Pat O'Brien plays Steve Jameson, whose carrot-and-stick reforms begin to change Red's thinking. An inmates' strike and a scripture-quoting con who swipes a rifle are among the troubles Jameson faces. And Red is another as he reverts to his old ways and makes a violent break for freedom. Amazon.com San Quentin (Lloyd Bacon, 1937) is a scrap-work effort below the standards of everybody involved. Humphrey Bogart's a small-time crook whose arrest at a nightclub occasions a meet-cute for his big sister Ann Sheridan and Army training officer Pat O'Brien--who's on his way to become yard captain at the penitentiary where Bogart will be interred! O'Brien tries to reform the lad, but with corrupt/sadistic guard Barton MacLane on one side and sociopathic con Joe Sawyer on the other, Bogart never has a chance. Neither does the viewer. --Richard T. Jameson