Dispelling the notion we might have today that women in Hollywood wrote only "women's films" is The Big House, one of the first and best of all prison movies, from an original screenplay that brought Frances Marion her first Academy Award. "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." (Brian Baxter, Hollywood in the Thirties)