I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG
The year 1932 was probably the most desperate faced by the American people since the end of the Civil War. With the nation mired in an economic depression for which there was no end in sight, unemployment growing to ever more unprecedented levels, and a government that seemed totally unable to make any effective response to the disaster, it was a bleak time indeed.
Rarely has the mood of a year been so accurately reflected in a feature film as the hopelessness of 1932 was in director Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Based on the story of a man, Robert Elliot Burns, who had escaped from a Georgia chain gang, the movie is a forceful expose of the brutal conditions on southern chain gangs. Screenings were banned in Georgia, and the state unsuccessfully sued Warner Brothers for libel. But this powerful film turned out to be much more: a mirror held up to a nation's outlook at the depth of the Great Depression. In it, a veteran of World War I with great ambition, James Allen (Paul Muni), returns from the war and finds an ungrateful nation and no suitable work. He drifts around the country and is wrongly arrested in a robbery in a southern state that is not named. Put on a chain gang, Allen is harshly treated. Eventually, with the assistance of a black prisoner, Allen escapes from the hell of lashings and total dehumanization.
During the prosperous 1920s, Allen James, as he now calls himself, achieves great success as an architect—the sort of "man's job," building something, that he had originally said he wanted. He becomes a pillar of the community, but he is betrayed by an evil woman who learns his secret, blackmails him into marrying her, cheats on him, and finally exposes him.
Jim voluntarily returns to the state where he experienced a living hell because the authorities assure him he'll only have to do a few months of "easy time." Instead, the state authorities send him back to the chain gang. In a memorable statement reflective of widespread public attitudes toward government in the last year of the Herbert Hoover administration, Allen complains bitterly, "The state's promise didn't mean anything. It was all lies!"
The protagonist escapes again, but this time, as a hunted man, he has to subsist in ways similar to those to which many Depression victims resorted. In the unforgettable closing scene, Muni's character, hovering in the shadows and seeming animalistic, answers the question "How do you live?" with a desperate, hopeless: "I steal!" Such a situation was all too understandable in much of America in 1932.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baxter, John. Hollywood in the Thirties. 1968.
Bergman, Andrew. We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. 1971.
McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. 1984, 1993.
Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years. 1973.
