"Up the River" Review

 

by Daniel White

Happy Belated Birthday to one of the greatest male stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart. Born Christmas Day, 1899, he came to Hollywood in 1930 after a steady, if unremarkable, career on Broadway.

Directed by John Ford, and co-starring Spencer Tracy (their only film appearance together), Up The River (1930) is a Pre-Code novelty about four cons (Claire Luce and Warren Hymer are the other two), and their lives in and out of stir.

It's the oddest prison film I've ever seen, with male and female cons mingling together, matrons from the welfare society walking freely through the prison, and the warden's adolescent daughter palling around with the inmates! A comedy with moments of sadness (the male cons bedding down for the night accompanied by mournful singing), Ford does an admirable job handling both the pratfalls and the pathos, never an easy task.

It's fascinating to see Bogart (and Tracy too, for that matter), at the very beginning of his extraordinary film career. Fourth-billed, but very much a key player, he is the romantic lead. Bogart exhibits a masculine sensitivity that had all but disappeared by the time he achieved super stardom in 1941. The original anti-hero as matinee idol.

An ordinary story with some extraordinary Pre-Code touches (there is a scene where an inmate gives other inmates the middle finger!), Up The River is fairly tame when it comes to prison life. The word sissy is heard a few times, and at one point, Steve, the Bogart character is accused of "mak(ing) a favorite" of a young fish, who is referred to as a "punk". The original meaning for punk being the passive partner in a male homosexual relationship.

Up The River is not a great film, but to see legendary actors Bogart and Tracy at the very beginning of their stellar movie careers is exciting. Especially for me to watch Bogart playing such an atypical role was eye-opening and made me want to look at more of his films from the thirties. The evolution of an icon.

It would take Humphrey Bogart 11 years and close to forty films before he became a movie legend with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. Duke Mantee and Sam Spade, two men on opposite sides of the law, yet incredibly similar. Outcasts, loners, men who lived life by adhering to their own code of ethics. It was the perfect screen persona for one of filmdom's elites, and he would play variations of it until his untimely death from cancer at the age of 57, in 1957.

Based on a screenplay by Maurine Dallas Watkins (who provided the source material for the musical Chicago), Up The River is available on YouTube in a less than perfect print.