Larry Nelson, pardoned after serving nearly half of his 30-year sentence for manslaughter, leaves Eastern State Penitentiary but faces difficulty settling into the outside world. Determined to avoid any further trouble with the law, he takes a job as a lab assistant in a country sanitarium, where he falls for attractive nurse Charlotte. Larry recognizes one of the patients in the sanitarium as Jack Bernard, another ex-convict who has just executed a million-dollar heist. Bernard offers Larry money if he will deliver some of the heist money to his ex-wife. When Larry attempts to give her the money, she mobilizes her gang to seize the rest of the loot. Sweet, wholesome nurse Ann helps Larry escape the dangerous situation.
Even though someone informs us at the beginning of "Outside the Wall" that this crime melodrama ... is one of the strangest stories ever told, we wish to observe it unlikely that this opinion will be popularly held. As a matter of fact, the average patron will probably find it completely commonplace—it being no more than the story of an ex-convict who tries to go straight but gets into trouble with some hoodlums when he attempts to raise money for a greedy dame. And that consequential dilemma, we submit, is not very rare. Likewise, the narrative structure and performance of this tale are not of an order to rate them as rare or remarkable. The pattern is strictly conventional, it being a straightaway account of one man's depressing misadventures with society, women and thugs."[3]
Critic Mildred Martin of The Philadelphia Inquirer called the film "a distinctly phony affair" and wrote that the story "gets completely out of hand".[1]
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