Ladies of the Big House (Paramount, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of a film that turned out to be surprisingly good: a 1931 Paramount melodrama called Ladies in the Big House. It began as an unproduced play by Ernest Booth, who was himself a convict. He’d been arrested for burglary as a teenager, served time in the Preston School of Industry (a so-called “reform school” that, at least in the movies, never seemed to reform anybody), and ultimately ended up in San Quentin. There he wrote a treatment for a crime-related story called Ladies of the Mob which Paramount bought as a vehicle for Clara Bow, directed by William Wellman (unfortunately that film is lost), and in 1931 Paramount came a-calling again and bought the rights to Ladies in the Big House. The story takes place in an unnamed city where the district attorney’s job has just been taken by reform-minded Lawson (George Irving) who’s determined to use his power to smash the crime ring that controls the city government. The ring is led by Martin Doremus (Rockcliffe Fellowes, who made this movie as a no-good gangster the same year he played the sympathetic gangster Joe Helton in the Marx Brothers’ spoof Monkey Business), and his lieutenant is Joe “Kid” Athens (Earle Foxe). Doremus has a spy on Lawson’s payroll: his assistant John Hartman (Purnell Pratt), whom Lawson is convinced is the one honest man in the previous administration. Lawson couldn’t be more wrong about that: Hartman is in regular contact with Doremus and is keeping him up to date about Lawson’s activities against him. On a tip from Hartman, Doremus orders Athens to leave town for a while to avoid a murder rap Lawson is about to pin on him. But Athens refuses to leave because he’s fallen so intensely in love with a local woman he doesn’t want to leave town without her and she won’t leave with him at all.

The woman, it turns out, is flower seller Kathleen Storm (Sylvia Sidney, top-billed), who’s a decent girl who went on a few dates with Athens but broke up with him once she realized who he was and how he made his living. Athens hangs around the florist shop where Kathleen works and demands that she not date anyone else, but no sooner has he left the store than someone else shows up: Standish McNeil (Gene Raymond, billed second). McNeil has just returned from a business trip to France – he’s a consulting engineer and he works around the world – when he comes to the shop and buys a bouquet of forget-me-nots, giving them to Kathleen. The two date for two weeks and ultimately get married, but Athens has a plot up his sleeve. He calls the police on the McNeils, and the police duly show up in the person of Detective Martin French (Robert Emmett O’Connor, who seemed to play nothing but decent but dimwitted Irish cops). Then Athens sneaks into the McNeils’ apartment, shoots Detective French in cold blood, and tosses the gun on the floor so it will look like Standish McNeil killed the cop and Kathleen was an accessory. With Hartman prosecuting the case personally, both McNeils are convicted of murder, and he’s given a death sentence while she’s sent to a women’s prison for life. Once the film gets to the women’s prison it becomes a lot more interesting; Kathleen meets up with her fellow convicts and has to sleep in a giant dormitory because the prison is so overcrowded she’ll have to wait her turn to be assigned to a cell. Among the people she meets are Susie Thompson (Wynne Gibson in a performance that steals the film out from under the nominal leads), who was Athens’s girlfriend until he dumped her for Kathleen. Susie tells Kathleen flat-out that she has no reason to like or befriend her, but she will just to get back at Athens for leaving her and letting her rot in prison. There’s also a quite remarkable Black character named Ivory (Louise Beavers), who plays piano in the recreation room and leads a prison band; and a Latina named Maria (Miriam Goldina), who was pregnant when she was arrested and is determined not to have her baby in prison.

The film cuts back and forth between the women’s prison and Death Row, where McNeil makes friends with the inmate in the next cell over even though they can only speak to each other through the windows of their cells. At one point Maria decides to attempt an escape (Harold Booth was known for several escape attempts in real life as well) and Kathleen insists on going with her once her appeal is denied. Ivory tries to cover for them by instructing the prison band to play as loudly as possible, but the two are caught and Maria is shot dead by guards, moaning about her unborn baby as she expires. Just when we’re wondering how the writers – Booth got credit for the original story, Louis Weitzenkorn (author of the play on which Five Star Final, a “pre-Code” masterpiece from 1931 starring Edward G. Robinson as a guilt-ridden tabloid editor who dredges up a 20-year-old scandal and Boris Karloff as his star reporter, was based) as the screenwriter and William Slavens McNutt and Grover Jones credited with additional dialogue – are going to arrange it so that McNeil isn’t executed and they’re both exonerated, fate intervenes in the form of a tabloid story about the case. It was occasioned by John Hartman, who arranged for a meeting between McNeil and Kathleen just so one of his friends in the press could send a photographer to take a picture of them embracing for a feature story about the case. The feature also contains a photo of the gun used to kill the police detective that shows the inscription, “With Love.” Susie Thompson recognizes the inscription as belonging to a gun she bought and had so engraved as a present for Athens, and she duly reports this to the warden (Frank Sheridan). Unfortunately, the assistant D.A. Lawson sends to investigate this is none other than John Hartman, who meets with Kathleen and tells her there’s nothing he can do because the word of a convict like Susie Thompson would be meaningless in court. The writers and director Marion Gering (a Russian immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1924 and worked mostly on the stage, though he was brought to Hollywood in 1931 when the studios were looking for directors with experience handling actors who had to speak lines; he directed a lot of Sylvia Sidney’s films, including a 1932 nonmusical adaptation of Madame Butterfly with Sidney as Cho-Cho-San and Cary Grant as Pinkerton) ultimately have Susie Thompson approach the warden and D.A. Lawson directly, and she fingers Hartman and at least three other city officials as being on Doremus’s payroll. This revelation happens literally in the nick of time, on the morning of McNeil’s scheduled execution, and though for some reason the McNeils are told they must remain in prison for a few days longer while everything gets sorted out, the film’s final shot is of them together, blessedly free, and heading out on a ship to Baku, Russia, where McNeil’s latest engineering job awaits them.

Ladies of the Big House, which I’d bought on a Blu-Ray disc that also contained Confessions of a Co-Ed, turned out to be a much better movie, largely due to some chiaroscuro compositions Gering and cinematographer David Abel concocted that look a good deal like film noir (though in 1931 that would have been called “the German look”). Indeed, Ladies in the Big House qualifies as proto-noir, not only visually but in the moral ambiguity of Wynne Gibson’s character, and it’s also welcome to see a film from classic Hollywood in which an African-American like Louise Beavers is allowed to portray dignity and independence instead of just being shuffled into the usual stupid servant stereotype. Indeed, Charles was surprised that the prison in Ladies of the Big House was racially integrated, at a time when apparently most U.S. prisons, both male and female, were segregated. And at least one major Black actress besides Beavers appears: one of the inmates is played by Evelyn Preer, star of many of Oscar Micheaux’s films and a woman whom Paul Robeson called the greatest artist of the Black theatre. Though there are some of the usual Hollywood sillinesses – Charles complained about the brilliantine in Gene Raymond’s hair even when he’s about to be executed (and the more scenes I see in classic-era films of people looking immaculately dressed and coiffed even after they’ve been through dire situations, the more I admire Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack for that remarkable scene in the 1933 King Kong in which Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray emerge from the jungle with their hair and clothes disheveled as we’d expect from what they’d been through in the immediately previous scenes) – for the most part Ladies of the Big House is a surprisingly good movie and a welcome souvenir of the so-called “pre-Code” era in Hollywood history. Incidentally Ernest Booth was paroled in 1937 and spent the next few years writing stories about crime and prison for the various studios, of which three actually got filmed – Penrod’s Double Trouble (1938), Women Without Names (1940), and Men of San Quentin (1942). Unfortunately he also returned to his previous profession and got arrested in 1947 for a series of burglaries and robberies, and he returned to San Quentin and served time there until he died in 1959.