I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang

Over the next week or so I'll be discussing DVDs that are included in a boxed set called "Controversial Classics." They come from different studios and over a great deal of time, but are supposedly linked by some sort of social significance.

I start with the earliest film, 1932's I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, from Warner Brothers, directed by Mervyn Leroy. The film starred Paul Muni as a World War I vet who left home to find a job as a civil engineer. He ends up unwittingly involved in a robbery, and is sentenced to ten years of hard labor on a chain gang. He and his fellow prisoners undergo all sorts of brutality, but he escapes and makes his way to Chicago.

The years pass and he becomes a respected citizen, but a woman he does not love learns his secret and blackmails him into marrying her. When he falls in love with another woman he calls her bluff, and she turns him in. Since he is in a different state, he doesn't have to go back, but the state he was imprisoned in (which is left purposely vague) promises him he'll only serve 90 days in a clerical role and then be pardoned. He goes back, but of course is double-crossed.

This is a pre-code film, and there are little nuggets that would have been gone in a later film (one soldier says, "SOL," a reference to "shit out of luck" that made me do a double-take). Muni has an encounter with a prostitute that while discreet, is a lot more salacious than anything under the Code. However, the filmmakers eased up on describing conditions on the chain gang. They didn't include, for example, scenes involving the sweat-box (which would be memorably used thirty-five years later in Cool Hand Luke).

The film was based on the book by Robert Burns, who wrote I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. Warner Brothers judiciously dropped references to Georgia, but it caused a stink anyway, as the state threatened to sue, and some said that Leroy and Jack Warner would get "southern hospitality" if they ever happened to visit the Peach State. Burns lived in New Jersey, which refused to honor Georgia's request for extradition. He was never pardoned.

The film itself still holds up pretty well, though there are some creaking reminders of old-time film days. Muni does well when he isn't hammy, but some of the characters, like his sainted old mother and his sanctimonious older brother (who is a pastor) are cliches. What's great about these old movies are how economical they are. This film tells a complex story in only ninety-three minutes. Not a shot is wasted. If they remade it today it would be about two and a half hours, and not nearly as good.