Don Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954)

Siegel’s most successful films express the doomed peculiarity of the antisocial outcast.
--Andrew Sarris

Although acting as a mob, the prisoners in reality are loners who have a variety of motives for inciting the revolt.

--Judith M. Cass

Don Siegel’s Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) is a depressing movie to see today; prison conditions are worse than ever, as private prisons cut budgets in order to increase profits.  Siegel’s film was in some ways ahead of its time, with its integrated prison population and its integrated guards; the guards all have to work additional jobs to supplement their meager pay of $50 a week.  One prisoner makes the astute observation that prisons will not get better until everyone realizes that they could conceivably end up in prison one day.  In fact the movie was made by producer Walter Wanger after he spent for four months in prison for shooting an agent that he thought was having an affair with Joan Bennett, Wanger’s wife at the time.

Siegel and his cinematographer Russell Harlan show an intense black-and-white environment where all characters –prisoners and guards alike –are various shades of grey.  The warden (Emile Meyer) has to keep telling the press that the prison has all kinds of people in it, just as on the outside.  Even after the warden and the governor save the lives of the guards by agreeing to the modest demands of the prisoners  –nothing more than what the warden had long advocated, including job training – the agreement is repudiated by the state legislature, which insists that the leader of the riot (Neville Brand)is to be put on trial.  Siegel does a superb job of showing the riot itself as well as the conflicts among the prisoners on one side and the politicians on the other, in an all masculine world; women are often talked about but the only time there are any shown is at the very end when the guards are released to their wives.