Hell’s Highway

Directed by Rowland Brown, Hell’s Highway details the happenings within a tough-as-nails prison that forces its inmates to work on a chain gang – with the narrative detailing the exploits of one such inmate (Richard Dix’s Duke Ellis) and his eventual efforts at sparking a revolution. Filmmaker Brown, armed with a screenplay written alongside Samuel Ornitz and Robert Tasker, delivers a gritty drama that benefits from its stirring performances and smattering of compelling sequences, with, in terms of the latter, the movie’s emphasis on the rougher-than-rough treatment of its various characters certainly buoying one’s interest from time to time. (There is, for example, a fairly riveting interlude detailing the fate of a character placed into the prison’s brutal, inhumane sweat box.) And while the picture does run a brisk 62 minutes, Hell’s Highway never quite becomes as enthralling or consistently gripping as one might’ve anticipated – with the movie’s unabashedly episodic structure lending it a palpably hit-and-miss-type feel. By the time the comparatively electrifying escape-focused final stretch rolls around, Hell’s Highway has cemented its place as a decent-enough prison movie that feels like it could and should be better.

**1/2 out of ****