Robert Montgomery stars with Academy Award winner Wallace Beery as a young, college-educated man whose life changes utterly when he's convicted in a drunk-driving case and sentenced to hard time in The Big House. Kent Marlowe (Montgomery) believed his life would consist of a good job, a wife, kids. Instead, after he accidentally kills a man while driving drunk, he's sent to the penitentiary. Now, locked in an overcrowded cellblock full of hardened criminals under the brutal control of "Machine Gun" Butch Smith (Beery), Marlowe must learn to be cruel and ruthless to survive.