Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart are "Up the River" in this 1930 film directed by John Ford and also starring Claire Luce and Warren Hymer. The movie makes for tough going, as the print I saw kept skipping and the sound along with it. Well, the movie is nearly 80 years old after all. Bogart is so young-looking in this it boggles the mind. He's actually playing the romantic lead, Steve, a young man from a good family. While in prison for a fight (in which it's implied the other man was killed),he meets a woman named Judy (Luce) who was involved in a shady bond racket. She took the fall for her boss, Frosby (Morgan Wallace). Judy and Steve fall in love, and when his parole comes up, he says he'll wait for her. After being back with his family for awhile, Forsby sets up his racket in town and is cheating Steve's mother. His friends, Saint Louis (Tracy) and Dannemora Dan (Hymer) break out of prison during a variety show and come to his rescue.

I probably liked this better than most of the people who reviewed the movie here. The ongoing problems with the baseball team ("the pitcher got paroled right before the big game") are amusing. I also liked the free-for-all atmosphere of the prison, with the warden's daughter and her dog wandering around the jail yard, friendly with all the prisoners. The warden's a lovable fellow too. I also liked the bit where notes are hidden in the hem of a charity woman's skirt on the women's side, and when she enters the men's yard, they all rush over and dust off her shoes, retrieving the letter at the same time. Finally, there's an ongoing bit based on the fact that Saint Louis deliberately drove off and left Dannemora in the lurch previously. They're now in the same prison together, Saint Louis swearing up and down that he thought the car had a rumble seat.

Besides the bad sound, the film has the usual politically incorrect blackface number. I will say that the black prisoners seemed to be on an equal footing with the whites, if that means anything.

"Up the River" is fascinating, too, for the use of microphones throughout the set and actors needing to be near them. No one really has figured out screen acting yet - Bogart speaks quickly while the woman playing his mother drags out every sentence. Tracy appears very natural, however.

Films had a long way to go. This one was made quickly by a man destined to become one of the screen's greatest directors and two actors who would become two of the greatest stars ever. Humble beginnings.

Up the River finds Spencer Tracy and Warren Hymer as a pair of amiable convicts who seem to function far better in the prison environment than outside. Later sociologists would call these two institutionalized and would be thinking it's a bad thing.

Ironically I knew someone who was just like that, he'd been arrested on a couple minor beefs and found he really did function better inside jail than out among the populace. I doubt though he would have found the subject matter in Up the River as entertaining as I did.

Prison seems to be a good setting for John Ford's kind of knockabout, roughhouse comedy. Although I doubt you could ever get away with a minstrel act at the prison variety show and find two black convicts in the audience just laughing and applauding even more than the white prisoners.

Humphrey Bogart is in the film as well and he's a trustee and soon to be released. There's a woman's wing in this prison and Bogey and Claire Luce fall for each other. When Bogey gets released though another and sleazier crook played by Morgan Farley spots him in his proper New England town and threatens to tell mom about her son's prison stay. She thinks he's been in China all this time.

Word of this gets out and Tracy and Hymer crash out to help their friend.

This film would be consigned to the garbage heap of Hollywood were it not for the presence of Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart and the direction of John Ford. Ford directs them and the rest of the cast with a sure hand and the film is entertaining even after 77 years and a far more sensitive populace to racial indignity. You have to remember that in 1930 the most popular show on radio was Amos and Andy.

Some will be surprised to see Bogart cast as a young juvenile, Tracy refers to him as a kid even though Tracy was a year younger in real life. In point of fact on stage Bogart played those kind of juvenile parts so those who knew his stage work back in 1930 would not have been surprised. Still it's not the Bogey we're used to.

As for Tracy, Up the River set the pattern for his Fox career and his early films with MGM, playing lovable mugs. That's what you'll see him as for the most part in his Fox period. MGM signed him as a Wallace Beery backup. But when he played Father Tim Mullin in San Francisco it opened up whole new vistas for him as we well know.

Despite its defects Up the River is still a valuable piece of cinema history. Too bad Tracy and Bogey, good friends in real life, never got to work on a joint project when they both became big names.

It is very amusing to see Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy extremely early in their film careers here. They truly were novices at the time of making this now creaky and sadly slightly offensive film. This was the year of "The Big House", MGM's prison drama that was gritty and raw, and then very daring. John Ford had directed over a hundred films by this time, but Fox's sound and photography departments were not all that great in making their early talkies move really fast (with the exception of a few musicals). Bogart and Tracy aren't really a team here; Tracy works more with Warren Hymer, as part of a comedy team, while Bogart is the romantic hero, paired with a female convict (Claire Luce). Like his real life upbringing, Bogart comes from a well-to-do family, and Luce's former boss (Morgan Wallace),who framed her for his crimes, uses that to try and get Bogart involved in his racket. Tracy and Hymer team together to escape from prison and help Bogart escape Collier's clutches. That's basically all there is.

There is a prison talent show in the middle of the film that has one of the most offensive uses of black-face I've ever seen in film. It makes Jolson's "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule" sequence in "Wonder Bar" appear tame by comparison. It's not even the act that is offensive; It is the interspersing of a black inmate laughing at the comedy duo's antics, giving the message that the blacks of the time found black-face acceptable. I think some poor extra got the shaft by being paid to sit in front of a camera and laugh, not knowing how that would end up being used. I shook my head in disgust at the inclusion of such a travesty. It may be 80 years later, and I'm glad these things are shown just to reveal how wrong and ridiculous they were to be considered entertainment in the first place.

This is probably recommended viewing for film students if only because of the two future mega stars and its major director, plus the sociological implications of the film. There is some good dialog with the women prisoners, and a supposedly wealthy do-gooder (Edythe Chapman) who shows kindness to the prisoners by visiting them with gifts, which adds a sudden humanity. The interaction of the warden's very young daughter with male prisoners may seem strange, but has some amusement to it. There are some nice character bits as well. But the print is so choppy with a lot of dialog glitches that general classic movie fans should be warned of this and other faults before viewing. Fortunately, it's part of a double bill on DVD with "When Willie Comes Marching Home", so its not a total loss.