Prison Break is a 1938 American crime-drama film directed by Arthur Lubin and starring Barton MacLane, Glenda Farrell and Paul Hurst.

Joaquin Shannon, a fisherman, takes the blame for a crime to protect his brother-in-law Chris Nelson, whom he thinks accidentally killed the odious Joe Fenderson in a drunken brawl, but who really died from injuries from a mugging.

Joaquin asks Joe's sister and his girlfriend Jean Fenderson to wait for him, expecting to be paroled in one year for good behavior.

In point of stricter fact, Universal's little treatise has omitted both the racketeer and the corrupt warden, and adheres throughout to its pessimistic view of parole.

When you take an honest, non-criminal soul like Barton MacLane's tuna fisherman, Joaquin Shannon, and pen him up with hardened offenders of the Red Kincaid type you are either going to have him turn criminal himself or get a bad name with the keepers for punching Mr.

Mr. MacLane really exercises more restraint than we would expect any one of so Irish a face to show, but he does lose his temper at last, just before the scriptwriters relent and decide to clear up the mystery of the murdered Joe Fenderson.

By that time you probably will be as confused about it as we were — not knowing whether to relax and take it as just another moderately good Class B melodrama, or to muster your indignation over the seemingly iniquitous parole system.

[12] Diabolique magazine called it "a Warner Bros-style innocent-man-accused-of-crime-goes-to-prison tale... like most of Lubin’s movies from this time it is stacked to the brim with plot, and the director punches it through.