Prison Movies

Prison movies are among the most complex kinds of cinema, impossible to classify simply according to genre, period, or narrative conventions. Yet, they have historically been characterized as full of direct and superficial social messages and, in general, as less interesting than the majority of commercial movies. This tendency, in combination with the limited availability of many early and independent films, have restricted the development of a critical body of knowledge examining the relationship between cinema and the prison, particularly in comparison to crime, detective, gangster, or legal thrillers. All this, despite the fact that prison films make up a persistent category within the Hollywood system, as well as in various independent and international cinemas. They also regularly appear across politically alternative and experimental categories, documentary, B-movie distribution, and pornography. The prison film, thus, crosses generic boundaries, amalgamating conventions and tendencies from film noir, social consciousness films (including social documentary and social problem cinema), gangster films, crime thrillers, police procedurals, mysteries, action-adventure films, melodrama, comedies, musicals, animation, and women's cinema.

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Still from “The Big House,” 1930

The prison film persists across cinema as a perennial setting in which to enact primary social dramas about physical, social, and psychological entrapment, a laboratory for enacting the struggle between good and evil, perpetually pitting the individual against the apparatus of the state, often through scenarios of stark injustice. With their characteristic bleak and oppressive worldviews, these films have served as extreme settings in which to act out the fundamental tensions of the human condition: struggles to preserve individual identity, [Page 741]humanity, and dignity in the face of inflexible power structures and corrupt authorities.