I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang

There is only one mode in this movie, and that mode is despair. Things don't ever get better for our hero, James Allen, a hard-working and forthright young man who has just returned from the front lines of WWI. They get progressively worse and worse, driving him from one hopeless situation to another. Even a lucky turn only sets him up for a greater fall.

This nihilism, I suppose, reflected the audience's similar desperation. I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang debuted in 1932, a scant three years after the stock market crash, at a time when many formerly successful, stable people were plunged into economic turmoil. But it's not just social problems that attack Allen; he's getting it from all sides. He's harshly judged by his brother, mistreated by a friendly stranger, set-up by negligent cops, poorly advised by his attorneys, and even blackmailed by his girlfriend. And at the end of every road, the only future he can see is a life on the chain gang, a life of endless toil, torture and inhumanity.



It sounds depressing, and it is. Shocking, too. This film is widely credited with the abolition of the chain gang as an institution in Southern punishment. Though this level of influence is certainly questionable, the movie does make a strong case for forced labor as a cruel and unusual form of punishment, and likewise one that's unfairly and randomly applied.

Allen (Paul Muni), unlucky bastard that he is, winds up on the chain gang merely by accident. Returning from WWI, he expresses to his preacher brother and mom a desire to become an engineer, to achieve something greater than the factory job which satisfied him before the war. But, unable to find work, he eventually becomes a drifter, and after that a hobo. One night, while following a fellow drifter around in the hopes of a hamburger, he unwittingly takes part in an armed robbery, and winds up sentenced to 10 years of hard labor.

The scenes that follow are the film's most powerful. For a middle-class man like Allen to suddenly find himself shackled to convicts, breaking down rocks in a blazing-hot valley while being berated and even whipped by guards, is a stunning turnaround and Muni's very effective at expressing a kind of hopelessness mixed with a bit of dazed bemusement. It's utterly incomprehensible to him that he must ask permission to wipe the sweat from his brow, or that he's asked to eat grease and hog fat for breakfast.

The film moves along at a brisk pace, and this sense of gallows humor really helps to maintain interest and build an affection for Allen. And you'll need it, because this movie really puts him through the wringer. There's a thrilling escape sequence in which Allen employs a clever trick that would be borrowed by a generation of Looney Tunes creators. (Okay, I'll tell you...he slips underwater and breathes fresh air clandestinely through a reed). There's the sham marriage to the evil golddigger who has found out James' little secret. And there's even a trial and the promise of a lenient sentence that goes horribly awry.

The idea here isn't just that chain gangs are a social evil (although that concept is quite clearly expressed). There's also the notion of an entire society getting together to punish one man. Allen quite clearly hasn't done anything wrong, but protestations of his innocence only seem to make the authorities more angry. Now, they're upset not only that he escaped the chain gang, but that he had the gall to complain about the style of his imprisonment. And more complaining will only cause him more grief.

So what's the answer? The only way out for James is to "take it on the lam," run away and drop off the map entirely. The final sequence finds him a desperate man once again, constantly on the run from the law, unable to settle or work or love or live his life.

What are we to make of such a story? I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang is based on the true biography of Robert Burns, a man who really did get sent to a Georgia chain gang for 10 years, who escaped and fled to Chicago and started a new life as a businessman, only to be recaptured and sent back to the chain gang. Burns' story has been altered in two major ways.

1) Muni's character in the film doesn't want to steal the hamburger, whereas Burns in real life did steal $5 from a diner in order to obtain food.

2) Burns was eventually pardoned with the help of several lawyers, and went on to write the book that became this film.

So, Hollywood changed the ending to make it...less hopeful. They took a story about a man who had risen up above a crooked system and eventually aided in its downfall, and made a movie about a man who is driven to homeless, insanity-fueled criminality by a corrupt and unfair social system. It's certainly atypical.

Interesting, as well, that Chain Gang was directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who's also responsible for the harsh Little Ceaser. Both films share downbeat conclusions, but whereas Ceaser alters history to make it more palatable (evil is punished in an immediate and clear sense, when Rico dies in the street), Chain Gang changes the verifiable truth to make a more resonant movie for a dire age. It's an interesting choice, and one that provides the film with some really taut, gripping material in its second act.

This is a film not to be missed, full of intrigue, surprises and even comedy. Muni's just an enjoyable, charismatic presence, and he thankfully has infused Allen with a wry sense of humor that makes some of the film's more unpleasant passages easier to take. Though he gets a little hammy in the final moments (the image on the cover of Warner Brothers' new DVD depicts him bugging his eyes out like Peter Lorre), it's overall an exceptionally strong, unmannered central performance.