Let's be realistic.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Victor Halperin, who make such excellent work of both "White Zombie" (1932) and "Supernatural" (1933) obviously had an off day when he agreed to direct "Buried Alive" (1939) (available on a quite good Alpha disc), which is actually not a horror film by any stretch of the imagination, but a slack prison picture in which the luckless hero is condemned to an endless stretch. So no-one is actually physically buried alive at all. It's merely a figure of speech. That, in itself, is more than somewhat disappointing. But there is even more bad news to come! Burdened with a surfeit of dialogue and a totally uninteresting cast (including throaty-voiced Beverly Roberts in her final movie appearance — and who could blame her for quitting after being incarcerated in this turnkey turkey?), it makes for a boring 62 minutes, despite an obvious borrowing from John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men".

A prisoner with a spotless record, about to be paroled, encounters a series of misunderstandings, unlucky accidents, and set-backs that jeopardize his freedom and his future with the blonde prison infirmary nurse he's fallen in love with. Sound interesting? IT'S NOT!This movie is so badly written, it might be used as a textbook example of how not to construct a story. The exposition wanders around, trying to get a story started, and fails miserably.It's not even clear who the main character is until about 45 minutes in. The script seems to have been written as some kind of protest piece against capital punishment. A worse punishment is trying to sit through this movie to the end.Wooden dialog, poor acting and direction, and scene after scene in which characters' actions make absolutely no sense. This is almost Ed Wood- bad, but sadly it's not "so bad it's good". It's "so bad it's depressing".

This mind-bogglingly tedious and utterly meaninglessly titled prison-drama is about a convict who is wrongly accused of killing a prison guard and subsequently sentenced to death by electric chair. Victor Halperin is at the helm here, he will be known to some as a director of some low grade poverty row genre pictures of the 30's. This has to be his least enjoyable feature that I have seen so far. It simply never gets going. It's very much a drama with little in the way of thrills; however, this is not a problem in itself. The issue is that the set-up and character relationships are not believable or compelling. The prison itself is like no other I know of, where felons are allowed out to work as chauffeurs for staff and even go drinking with them in bars in town. It's very silly. So too is the romantic sub-plot, where it seems that every man in the prison is deeply in love with the nurse/token woman. It's kind of trite and is a weak and pointless thread, as it doesn't really generate any worthwhile developments in the plot.One of the few points of interest in the plot is the way the film deals with the issue of capitol punishment. It seems to be very much anti-death penalty. This surprised me, as I thought that the general consensus back in the 30's would have been 'kill them, kill them!' Shows you what I know, turns out there were some very libertarian humanistic views on the subject back then. So that was quite interesting. Sadly not a lot else actually was.

I just read a wonderful interview with Beverly Roberts on the "Midnight Palace" site and thought I would look up her films. I didn't know anything about her but I managed to find this film which was just okay.Directed by Victor Halperin of "White Zombie" fame it is the story of a prison executioner whose job is sending him around the bend. After enduring some taunts at a local bar, a brawl starts and Johnny, the Warden's prisoner chauffeur gets hurt, helping him out. As a result Johnny's parole is delayed. Johnny's cell mate is a man called "Big Billy". Early in the film Johnny describes their friendship as similar to one in a book he had read (it wasn't named but it was "Of Mice and Men").Big Billy is like a big kid - and he remembers all the guards who have treated him harshly. When he attacks and kills a guard - Johnny comes to his rescue but too late as Big Billy is shot while trying to escape. Once again Johnny has to prove his innocence.Beverly Roberts has a pivotal role as the nurse, Joan, that Johnny loves and is determined to go straight for. This was Robert's last film for a decade - the big mystery is what happened to her in those intervening years??? She was no less talented than Wendy Barrie, who had a bigger career.Dave O'Brien (minus his toupee) is one of the participants in the brawl and later in the film as a witness to an execution.