The Despair for Freedom: On I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
Note: This is the hundred-and-seventieth in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Letterboxd, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my fifth favorite 1932 film, I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG, directed by Mervyn LeRoy.
The politically minded and strident attacks of Depression-era hypocrisies define the brief Pre-Code era of Hollywood film, in addition to the time’s sexual frankness and innuendo. Both buck some modern expectations of yesteryear entertainment being squeaky clean and inoffensive. In the former camp of impactful commentaries, few rival the power of I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG.
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy for Warner Bros., which with I AM A FUGITIVE and a handful of other contemporary films the studio was making a name for itself as the most socially conscious in Hollywood, the film adapts Robert Burns’ 1932 autobiography. The present tense of the title was literal. Burns was still a fugitive from a Southern state, as the more detailed title of his book reveals; it was called I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A GEORGIA CHAIN GANG! The studio’s decision to excise the finger-pointing in the film’s title was a concession to a mass audience (and state censors) in the South, but little else about I AM A FUGITIVE feels compromised. In fact, it rather faithfully follows Burns’ account, with changes here and there serving as powerful symbols, providing dramatic irony that cement the movie as a stirring examination of freedom and state-sanctioned violence.
Pauline Kael wrote that the style of I AM A FUGITIVE was “unadorned” and film historian and professor Richard B. Jewell stated in his DVD commentary for the film that LeRoy was a workhorse director who couldn’t quite be defined as an auteur with a distinctive visual style. But what LeRoy could often be counted on to do, which forms its own sort of signature, was service the story. He would provide the conventional Hollywood space with which to tell the bulk of the tale, but his sporadic stylistic flourishes, aided here by the great cinematographer Sol Polito, could astonish, thrill, and in the case of I AM A FUGITIVE, twist the knife.
At 93 minutes long, I AM A FUGITIVE was a longer drama for Warner Bros., and indeed for much of the American film industry in the early sound years. And yet, its passage of time (from 1918 to the early ’30s) had to be rendered swiftly. In doing so, the film could have felt ineffectual. But LeRoy’s blunt handling of the material, centered on a masterful performance from Paul Muni as James Allen, creates an episodic nature that distills the goals and suffering of the character into poignancy.
Much attention has rightfully been paid to the sequences in which Allen is indeed in the chain gang, a span of time full of cruel overseers, barely edible food, and dawn-to-dusk hours of manual labor. It would be a bit of a stretch to call I AM A FUGITIVE a work of realism. But the terrible conditions for the prison laborers is rendered with a grit that invites an uncomfortable engagement different from the sensationalist action of contemporary dramas or thrillers. Perhaps it’s the lack of thematic music, something that was not yet a technical reality for most of film. Or perhaps it’s the little details that call to mind real-world conditions, such as the crooked governmental forces that trick Allen back into the chain gang in spite of a promise of pardon. The minimal yet clear acknowledgement of segregation and preponderance of jailed African Americans over their white peers is another socially conscious aspect of I AM A FUGITIVE, tracing at least implicitly the chain gang system’s heritage in post-slavery efforts in tthe South to keep as much of the institution in place as possible.
Interestingly, Allen’s crime is the only information we receive about the “criminals’” past (although it is implied, after Allen seeks refuge with Barney [Allen Jenkins] on the outside, that the friend may have been in the chain gang for pimping). But knowing as we do that Allen was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not truly guilty of robbing a diner for a few dollars, and that the inhumane treatment of the prisoners is itself a crime against humanity, I AM A FUGITIVE invites compassion for all of the men in the chain gang.
But it’s the film’s treatment of so-called freedom, on its commentary on conditions outside the chain gang, that really drive its existential concerns home. Throughout the story, even when not contending with whips and chains, Allen feels bound. Returning from the war a decorated hero (a change from Burns’ otherwise unremarkable military service in World War I), he challenges the pencil-pushing job foisted onto him by his family, including his priest brother. Even once he begins roaming the country, looking for engaging work, he can’t get hired on (an anachronistic problem since during this part of the movie’s time period, the early ’20s, there wasn’t really an unemployment problem in this country). But I AM A FUGITIVE is evoking contemporary problems, and anyways, this issue still illustrates Allen’s dissatisfaction with his life’s path.
After Allen makes his first jailbreak, he gets a job as a laborer at a firm building bridges and makes his way up the ladder. Along the way, he gets involved with Marie (Glenda Farrell), who learns his fugitive secret and blackmails him into marrying her. At this stage, Allen is once again trapped, this time in a loveless marriage with a wife who commits infidelities left and right and spends all his money. He even remarks, before she rats on him, that he’d rather be back in the chain gang then be with her.
Allen gets his wish. The unnamed state from which he fled promises to give him a pardon after serving 90 days, instead of the eight or nine remaining years of his initial sentence (the film vacillates on the exact number). When he concedes, the parole/pardon board decides to keep him imprisoned for at least an additional year. Allen can’t take it and breaks out again, this time with the assistance of one of his few friends, “Bomber” (Edward Ellis). They steal a truck and some dynamite, and in the chase, Bomber is killed. Allen must literally destroy the one aspect of his being that brought him joy, that made him progress and contribute and, perhaps, feel free: he blows up a bridge with dynamite to foil his pursuers.
The limited nature of Allen’s freedom through I AM A FUGITIVE, even before his first internment with the chain gang, is driven home by the movie’s final moment. On the run once again, he finds Helen, the antithesis of Marie he had fallen in love with before he was once again jailed. Harried, eyes darting, sweat pouring, Allen says goodbye. She questions how he will live. He answers “I steal,” as his face is swallowed up into the darkness, finding in this iteration of supposed freedom a despair that he most likely won’t be able to shake.
I AM A FUGITIVE’s dire ending is a bold capper on a series of radical decisions for a contemporary Hollywood film, even for the Pre-Code era. LeRoy, Warner Bros., and screenwriters Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes refused to give James Allen a happy ending, perhaps because Robert Burns’ own struggle was still ongoing. He wouldn’t be pardoned until 1945.
By linking the restriction of freedom to a number of societal ills (traditional expectations, unemployment, toxic relationships, and of course, wrongful imprisonment and tortuous treatment of American citizens), I AM A FUGITIVE makes a statement about the nature of liberty beyond its central and admittedly powerful chain gang conceit. In depicting the tribulations of Allen’s life, the film charts the helplessness and despair many Depression-sufferers felt. The American Dream no longer served as the ultimate ideal; they were disabused of that notion. I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG insightfully channels this feeling of being simultaneously adrift and restricted, standing as a blistering critique of the prison industrial complex as well as an embodiment of existential concerns for everyone in the country.
