“One of the first and best of all prison movies, and a knockout at the 1930 box office. Although it was one of the year's top money-makers, MGM did not follow it with a burst of violence; neither (Louis B.) Mayer nor (Irving) Thalberg relished that genre.” (J.D. Eames, The MGM Story).
“Hill's control of naturalistic lighting and sound appear best of all in his masterpiece, The Big House. Its relentless extinction of all romanticism makes this the most horrifying of penitentiary films. (Wallace) Beery is well cast as the brutish king of the jail, a stupid, violent potentate lounging among his sycophants.... But it is the atmosphere of prison life which demands one's attention. There is no humor, not even a great deal of the companionship which most prison films dramatize. In cramped, uncomfortable cells the convicts abrade each other's nerves until the irritation spends itself in bursts of violence. (Robert) Montgomery, cast against type but turning in a convincing performance, dramatizes the process by which a selfish, tough kid is made into a criminal.... Measured, photographed, clothed in a shapeless uniform, he is given a brusque, disinterested lecture by the warden and ejected into Beery's ‘empire,' with its vast Metropolis-like dining hall, twitching, haunted stool-pigeons, and, worst of all, the horrors of solitary.” (Brian Baxter, Hollywood in the Thirties)