An eye for an eye, that's the basis and foundation of the criminal code. Somebody's got to pay.
For years I've only known 1931's The Criminal Code as the film that Boris Karloff and Peter Bogdanovich watch a scene from in Bogdanovich's directorial debut Targets. Now, thanks to TCM, I have seen it for myself and wholeheartedly agree with Bogdanovich's assessment that Howard Hawks, who produced and directed the film, "really knows how to tell a story." And what a story it is. The Criminal Code was Hawks's fourth sound film and the one he made right before Scarface. Furthermore, it gave Karloff his first significant screen role (which he originated on stage) as a hardened inmate out to get the man who squealed on him. Top-billed, however, is Walter Huston as a cigar-chomping district attorney who has to send naïve young clerk Phillips Holmes to jail for ten years after Holmes accidentally kills a man in a speakeasy and then winds up as the warden at the very same prison, which is chock full of men he sent up.
It's never revealed whether Huston had anything to do with putting Karloff away, but it wouldn't even matter if he did since Karloff's beef is with yard captain DeWitt Jennings, who's the kind of character who gives prison guards a bad name. Naturally, Holmes shares his cell with Karloff, but after six years of hard labor he starts to break down and soon after he's installed, Huston gives Holmes a job as his driver, which brings him into contact with Huston's comely daughter (Constance Cummings), who promptly falls in love with the young jailbird -- and vice versa. Things get complicated in a hurry, though, when Holmes and Karloff's cellmate gets killed during an attempted jailbreak and Karloff, who likewise has it easy as Huston's valet, takes it upon himself to kill the inmate who squealed. (This is the scene shown in Targets.) Will Holmes rat Karloff out and put his trust in the law that unjustly landed him in prison in the first place or will he keep his mouth shut? And will Karloff finally keep his "appointment" with Jennings? The answers to these questions and more can be found in The Criminal Code.