43) Buried Alive (1939)

"There's no doubt Johnnys' been a victim of unfair tactics. But we must accept things as they are."

Director
Victor Halperin

Cast
Robert Wilcox - Johnny Martin
Beverly Roberts - Joan Wright
Wheeler Oakman - Manning
George Pembroke - Ernie Matthews
Peter Lynn - Gus Barth

Watching the early thriller Buried Alive puts me at four movies in out of the 50 included in the Night Screams collection.
As I've mentioned in previous reviews, this collection includes B-horror, thriller, and suspense films from a variety of decades.
Buried Alive falls into the suspense/ melodrama movie genre. And for a film from an early decade, it doesn't hold back in dealing with injustice perhaps too often found in the justice system.
For this story, the scary part is the officials with the remiss attitude surrounding an innocent person in jail and on death row.
A prison executioner, Ernie Mathews (George Pembroke), is overwhelmed by his job and asks a prison trustee named Johnny Martin (Robert Wilcox), whose on his way to the airport to drop off prison doctor Robert Lee (Steven Chase), to drive him over to a local bar.
While he's having a drink at the bar, Mathews is confronted by a jerk tabloid reporter named Manning (Wheeler Oakman) which ultimately leads to a fist fight.
Meanwhile, Joan Wright (Beverly Roberts), a prison nurse who was driving with Martin to see Lee off at the airport, asks him to swing by the bar to pick up Mathews.
When he arrives, Martin is pulled into the ensuing fight and ends up punching Manning pretty hard.
He manages to pull Mathews out of the bar and into the car. And in retaliation, Manning writes an unsavory article about Martin, blaming him for the fight though he himself is the one who actually started it. The article also makes the governor look pretty bad.
Martin ends up in jail, and the governor is now inclined to delay his parole.
After spending time in jail, Martin is in fact denied parole and sent back to jail.

His outburst of anger after the hearing certainly doesn't help his image with the parole board.
Meanwhile, Joan has been helping him deal with the list of injustices Martin has been buried under, and they both end up falling in love.
To add to Martin's dilemma, his cell mate ends up killing a prison guard and attempts to escape.
Martin chases him to discourage his attempt at fleeing, and is shot and captured under the belief he was also trying to escape.
Martin is brought up on murder charges thanks primarily to false testimony from an inmate who has nothing but contempt for Martin.
Now, Martin has to somehow find a way to prove  his innocence among unsympathetic officials.
The plot just seems a little too convoluted. I had trouble paying attention and trying to recall just what was going on, and what the significance behind a few characters was.
Nevertheless, I was intrigued enough to carry on, especially after Martin is falsely accused. The story tightens up at that point in the movie.
Despite the title, Buried Alive isn't a horror film. It's a metaphor for the main character being "buried alive" under a large amount of injustices.
The ending is a payoff worth waiting for.
This movie's pacing helps keep my interest, despite boring and often times disinterested acting.
But I have to hand it to early cinema choreography. The fist fight in the bar is brutal.
Actors really get into the scene. I imagine the director telling actors on set, "just start punching, and we'll see what we get." I've seen this same kind of style in other movies produced in the same era.
Director Victor Halperin had earlier directed Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi, in the famous horror movie, White Zombie (1932). So, he knows horror for sure.
Overall, this is a movie about determination and confidence in the truth while pursuing vindication. Martin is dangerously close to insanity with the heavy weight forcing him down. And being up against the justice system, escape seems impossible.
For early cinema, and film noir melodrama fans, this movie could easily satisfy.