Why so much hype?

disgusting, overrated, pointless

Absolutely amazing

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This pseudo-documentary style film failed to disguise the disjointedness of it's narrative. This case history of a crime begins in the great outdoors. It was filmed in Clorado Royal Gorge Park. A sick young boy with asthma runs away from camp after being scared by the nurse at the camp (a young Felicia Farr who made her feature debut with this film as Randy Farr) The boy is 'helped' by a strange man (Ralph Meeker) who then kidnaps him and proceeds to blackmail the boy's wealthy father.But then the the boy accidentally dies in a fall from a condemned forest lookout tower where the man had put him. It's a very disturbing scene as Meeker finds the dead boy and he remains ice cold and callously just throws the dead boy over a cliff of rocks below. And because the body id never found, Meeker can only be convicted on a extortion charge.The story then shifts gears entirely turning to prison drama which was filmed at the Cascabel Island facility. The plot now focuses on four cutthroat convicts: Broderick Crawford, William Talman, Lon Chaney Jr., and a young, super ripped muscle bound Charles Bronson. With the "extortionist" now called the "Ice Man" because of his stone cold stare and demeanor, is thrown in with them. A breakout is planned, of course, with their target the hidden $200,000 ransom money Meeker hid away before being arrested. The escape is successful but their is a falling-out among them and two gang members are killed. A gun battle ensues with the remaining gang and one more is killed and the remaining are arrested once again.All in all not a great film but what a great cast of convicts! Especially Bronson stood out. After his big breakout role opposite Alan Ladd in "Drum Beat" a year before, Bronson was relegated to the sort of supporting 'heavy' roles he had done so often before in this black-and-white supporting feature. As in "My Six Convicts", his tough physiognomy lends itself well to the inside of a prison. But director Howard W. Koch and scriptwriter John C. Higgins gave him the short end of the stick by killing Bronson off once the prison escape had been effected. His death is a grisly one also. Crawford orders Talman to use a blowtorch on Bronson's face and fingers to obliterate any means of identification in a effort to distract the police. All in all , I had never seen Bronson so 'cut' in muscularity. I bet that for the time , 1955, the was not a single body builder at that time with a ripped torso that Bronson presented in this film. Had he been competing , I bet he would have been winning like crazy. Bronson had muscles on top of muscles!I was so glad to finally see this film. What a great and tremendous cast. The characters were depicted very brutal as to anesthetized all sympathy and their savagery is minutely explored by the director Koch, in a manner that leaves one shocked yet disinterested. The melodrama provides a fair amount of entertainment, plenty of violence is featured throughout in some rather chilling scenes but it fits the tough characters involved with which the story deals. Meeker did a great job as a cold-blooded crook nicknamed "The Iceman" by Crawford. Talman , Chaney and especially Bronson made great members of Crawford's gang.

Big House, U.S.A. is directed by Howard W. Koch and written by John C. Higgins, George George and George Slavin. It stars Broderick Crawford, Ralph Meeker, Reed Hadley, William Talman, Lon Chaney Jr., Charles Bronson and Felicia Farr. Music is by Paul Dunlap and cinematography by Gordon Avil.A Kidnap, A Ransom and A Prison Break = Powder Keg.Out of Bel-Air Productions, Big House, U.S.A. is a relentlessly tough and gritty picture. Beginning with the kidnapping of a young boy from a country camp, Howard Koch's film has no intentions of making you feel good about things. Deaths do occur and we feel the impact wholesale, tactics and actions perpetrated by the bad guys in the play punch the gut, while the finale, if somewhat expected in the scheme of good versus bad classic movies, still leaves a chill that is hard to shake off.Split into two halves, we first observe the kidnap and ransom part of the story, then for the second part we enter prison where we become cell mates with five tough muthas. Crawford, Chaney, Meeker, Bronson and Talman, it's a roll call of macho nastiness unfurled by character actors worthy of the Big House surroundings. The locations play a big part in the pervading sense of doom that hangs over proceedings, Cascabel Island Prison (really McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary) is every bit as grim as you would expect it to be, and the stunning vistas of Royal Gorge in Colorado proves to be a foreboding backdrop for much of the picture.Although it sadly lacks chiaroscuro photography, something which would have been perfect for this movie and elevated it to the standard of Brute Force and Riot in Cell Block 11, Avil's photography still has the requisite starkness about it. While Dunlap scores it with escalating menace. Not all the performances are top draw, more so on the good guy side of the fence, and some characters such as Chaney's Alamo Smith don't get nearly enough lines to spit, but this is still one bad boy of an experience and recommended to fans of old black and white crims and coppers movies. 8/10

Meeker kidnaps a kid, but kid dies in an accident so Meeker tosses him into a 1,000 foot deep rugged Gorge but manages to get $200k ransom which he stashes. He gets caught and sent to a BIG HOUSE on a fakey looking island in the USA. His cell-mates are: Broderick Crawford, chess playing chief mastermind, Lon Chaney Jr., lovable loony who reads romance magazines, Charles Bronson, ever shirtless and bulging with greased up muscles(reading muscle magazines) and William Talman (Perry Masons own D.A., Hamilton Burger) They are about to escape. They kidnap the kidnapper to make him take them to the ransom money. After the escape Crawford makes Talman bash Bronson's brains in and blow torch his body. Then Crawford shoots Chaney Jr. This leaves Meeker to lead Crawford & Talman to the ransom loot. When they get to the stash, they conk Meeker on the noggin but now the Park Rangers and F.B.I. ambush them. Talman get shot about twenty seven times by the F.B.I guy and Crawford gives himself up, sniveling like a baby. The coward. Voice-over says Crawford & Meeker get nuked in the BIG HOUSE. This is a kidnap story but I guess BIG HOUSE, USA sounds more fun than KIDNAP, USA. The flick is fun. You won't hate it, nor will you insist on getting back the time you spent watching it.

Loosely inspired by a real life case, this gritty little film documents the fate of a ne'er do well drifter who seizes the opportunity to make money off the disappearance of a wealthy child. Meeker plays the stoic (and uncomfortably good-looking) extortionist who locates a missing boy only to hole him up in a condemned ranger station while he attempts to milk $200,000 from the boy's panicked father Bouchey. Bouchey does everything he's told, in an effort to spare his sick wife from even knowing about the boy's ordeal, but it's all for naught when Meeker is caught, but the boy isn't retrieved. Meeker is convicted of extortion (not kidnapping!) and sent to the Big House where he's confronted with some unfriendly cellmates. Crawford is the burly ringleader, Chaney is the more sensitive, lunkheaded one, Bronson is an antagonistic muscle man and Talman is a skittish follower. All of them wish to escape and when they find out that Meeker has some ransom money hidden on the outside, they decide to drag him along with them so they can split it up! They bust out via a fairly elaborately constructed tunnel, but that's hardly the end of their problems. Meeker does a very solid job in a film with few, if any heroes. It's disconcerting for the viewer to see a nice-looking man resorting to some of the things he does here. Crawford, top-billed though he takes quite a while to show up, is savvy and ruthless (and, unfortunately, shows off far more chest that Meeker does!) Talman, infamous as the constant nemesis of "Perry Mason", and Chaney don't get a lot of screen time, but handle what they get effectively. Bronson is rock hard and frequently shirtless, revealing an impressive figure for 1955, a time when most men rarely worked out to that degree. Jack Lemmon's future wife, Farr, amusingly billed as "Randy", plays a nurse. Votrian portrays the little rich boy and it's not without amusement, though there's residual guilt in laughing at someone whose fate is so horrifying. He starts off with a persistent cough, intended to be an asthma attack and can't ever stop hacking UNTIL he has a line, during which he's perfectly fine! This occurs several times. He also has a jaw-dropping hysterical scene when Farr attempts to give him a shot. Saddled with an overbite and toothpick legs jutting out of the planet's shortest shorts, he's a gangly mess and is agonizingly annoying. Still, no one likes to think of any child receiving this type of treatment. This film should really have had a different title since only a small portion of it takes place behind bars. It's a startlingly brutal piece of movie-making for its time with a couple of really rough deaths including a bad fall, a broiling in a steam tank and a hammer to the head, followed by a face-roasting via a flame gun! The worst thing is the horrendous and almost completely unnecessary voice-over narration supplied by Hadley as an FBI agent. It's one of those terrible things in which the events depicted clearly on screen are described by a dry, stony voice when viewers simply could have watched it themselves. One great thing is the use of outdoor locations and the assemblage of interesting cast members. It's certainly worth the 83 minutes it takes to watch it!