The Glass House | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1972’s The Glass House! It can be viewed on YouTube.

The Glass House starts with three men arriving at a location that will define the next few months of their lives.

Brian Courtland (Clu Gulager) is a veteran of the Vietnam War. He spent part of his service working as a guard in the brig. Now that he’s back in the United States and in need of a regular paycheck, he has gotten a job working as a prison guard. Courtland is not naive about where he’s going to be working or who he is going to be working with. But he is an idealist, one who tries to treat everyone fairly and who hopes that he will be able to do some sort of good in his new position.

Alan (Kristoffer Tabori) is a young man who has been arrested for selling marijuana. He is quiet and just hoping to serve his time and then get on with his life. His fellow prisoners have different plans for him.

Finally, Jonathan Paige (Alan Alda) is a liberal professor who, in a moment of rage, accidentally killed a man in a fight. Convicted of manslaughter, Paige enters the prison in a daze and cannot stop flashing back to the one moment that changed his life forever. Paige is assigned to work in the pharmacy, where he meets a prisoner-turned-activist named Lennox (Billy Dee Williams). Paige struggles to retain his humanity despite the harsh conditions.

All three of the men find themselves having to deal with the attentions of Hugo Slocum (Vic Morrow), the predatory “king” of the prison. Slocum expects Paige to help him run drugs though the the pharmacy. Slocum preys on Alan and sends his gang to punish him when Alan refuses Slocum’s advances. And Slocum expects that Courtland will just be another corrupt guard who agrees to look the other way when it comes to Slocum’s activities. Courtland, however, turns out to have more integrity than anyone was expecting.

The Glass House opens with a title card, informing the viewer that the film was shot at an actual prison and that the majority of the people in the film were actual prisoners. Not surprisingly, The Glass House does feel authentic in a way that a lot of other films about incarceration does not. The prison is claustrophobic and dirty, with every crack in the wall reminding the prisoners and the viewer that no one cares about what happens there. The extras have the blank look of men who understand that showing any emotion will be taken a sign of a weakness. Made in 1972, at a time when America was still struggling to integrate, The Glass House takes place in an almost totally segregated world. The black prisoners stick together. The white prisoners stick together. Everyone understands that’s the way that it will always be and, as we see by the end of the film, that’s the way the guards and the warden (Dean Jagger) prefer it because that means almost any incident can be written off as a being “a race riot.”

The real actors amongst the population do a good job of blending into the surroundings. Alda, Williams, and Tabori all give good performance while Vic Morrow is truly menacing in the role of the vicious Slocum. Slocum may not be particularly bright but, because he has no conscience, he is uniquely suited to thrive in a world with no morality. The film’s best performance comes from Clu Gulager, who does a great job of portraying Courtland’s growing disgust with how the system works.

Though it’s over 50 years old, The Glass House is a still a powerful look at life on the fringes. Society, for the most part, doesn’t really care much about what happens to the incarcerated. This film makes a strong case that we probably should. One is left with little doubt that, even if relatively harmless prisoners like Paige and Campbell survive being locked up with men like Slocum, they’ll still be incapable of returning to the “real world” afterwards. The viewer, like Brian Courtland, is left to wonder how much corruption can be tolerated before enough is enough.

Originally, I was planning on using the 2001 thriller The Glass House as one of my guilty pleasure reviews. Because, seriously, this film truly is one of the guiltiest of all guilty pleasures. I mean, there’s so much that you can criticize about the movie but it’s so much fun that I always feel rather bad for doing so. However, after giving it some thought, I decided to use The Glass House as one of my Back to School reviews. Seeing as how I just totally trashed a Leelee Sobieski film called Here On Earth, it only seems fair to now recommend one of her films.

In The Glass House, Leelee plays Ruby Baker, a 16 year-old whose parents are killed in a car accident. Though their uncle (Chris Noth) wants to adopt them, the will states that Ruby and her nine year-old brother (Trevor Morgan) will instead be looked after by their parents’ best friends, Erin (Diane Lane) and Terry (Stellan Skarsgard).

Now, here’s the thing. This is going to blow your mind. Guess where Erin and Terry live? They live in a big mansion in Malibu and the entire house is made out of … GLASS! We have a title, right!? But wait, there’s more! Guess what Terry and Erin’s last name is? That’s right — GLASS! So, the house is not only literally a glass house but it’s also the Glass house as well! And beyond that, there’s that old saying that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and … well, that really doesn’t apply to this film.

Anyway, I’m making such a big deal about the title because it pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about The Glass House. There is not a single subtle moment to be found in this entire film. And really, this is not a film that requires or rewards subtlety. We know that Terry Glass is up to no good from the minute we meet him, largely because he’s played by Stellan Skarsgard and when was the last time Stellan Skarsgard played a trustworthy character? Skarsgard pretty much gives the same performance here that he’s given in almost every thriller that he’s ever appeared in (including David Fincher’s rehash of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — which I’m still ticked off about, by the way) but it works wonderfully because there’s not a hint of pretension to The Glass House. It just wants to entertain and it does just that. There’s little that can match the entertainment value of watching Stellan Skarsgard go totally over the top.

Sure, the film has all sorts of flaws. Ruby’s intelligence changes from scene to scene, depending on what the film’s story needs her to do. (For that matter, the same thing can be said about every character in the film.) But the film’s a lot of fun and Leelee Sobieski gives one of the best and most sympathetic performances of her career. Ruby may be an inconsistent character but she’s so well-played that you like her anyway. In a film that often threatens to go just a little bit too crazy, Leelee gives a performance of both believable grief and believable inner strength. She keeps the film grounded just enough that you’ll continue to watch even when the narrative hits a rough patch. As well, Bruce Dern is hilariously sleazy as a possibly duplicitous attorney. The only thing more entertaining than watching Stellan Skarsgard go over the top is watching Bruce Dern do the same thing in the same film.

The Glass House is one of those films that seems to show up on cable constantly. And, 9 times out of 10, I’ll at least watch at least a little bit of it. It’s just a fun movie.