Mervyn LeRoy’s chain gang film is fast, plain and still angry, and Paul Muni’s face carries it. The women are thinly written and the argument is said aloud once too often, but nothing in it has gone soft.
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is taken from Robert E. Burns’s account of his own imprisonment, and it plays like a man telling you something he needs you to hear before the door closes. Mervyn LeRoy directs it in 92 minutes with almost no fat. A man comes home from the war, wants to build things, falls into a robbery he did not plan, and is sent to break rock in leg irons. What happens after that we will describe only up to a point. It is as good as its reputation, and it is angrier than most prison films made since, which is not what we expected from something this old.
The camp is the film’s best stretch. Sol Polito shoots it in hard daylight and lamp-lit bunkhouse gloom, so the men’s stripes and the sweat on their faces are all you see, and the guards stand mostly in silhouette. William Holmes cuts the rock pile to the beat of the hammers, a row of men swinging in turn, and it goes on long enough that you feel it in your shoulders. The convicts eat fried dough and grease from tin plates. When a man is taken out to be strapped, LeRoy keeps the camera on the others in the bunkhouse, waiting for the sound. It is far worse than watching.
The first escape is the scene everyone remembers and it deserves to be. Allen has his shackles hammered thin on the rock face so he can bend them, and then he runs: through scrub, into a swamp, under the water with a reed in his mouth while the bloodhounds go past above him. We held our breath with him, and we knew how the scene ended. There is no music under any of it. Leo F. Forbstein and Bernhard Kaun’s score is confined mostly to the titles, as it often was in early sound pictures, and here the silence is the right choice. You hear dogs, water and a man breathing badly, and that is all you need.
The middle of the film moves north and changes register. Orry-Kelly puts Muni in good suits and a clean collar, and the change in his bearing is the point: this is a man who has become somebody and is waiting for it to be taken away. Glenda Farrell plays Marie Woods, the landlady who works out who he is, and Helen Vinson plays Helen, the woman he would rather be with. Neither part is written with much care. Marie is a harpy from her first scene and Helen is a coat and a kind voice. Farrell does what she can with a role that only asks her to sneer, and she sneers well. It is the one section where the film’s speed costs it something.
Muni is the reason the rest holds. In the camp he does very little, a glance at the guards, a hand flexing in the irons, and it counts. He is broader in the early scenes, the speeches about wanting to build and not to be pinned to a desk, and there the writing by Howard J. Green, Brown Holmes and Sheridan Gibney is at its weakest: the argument is stated aloud, then stated again by the brother from his pulpit. The film does not trust us to draw the moral from the rock pile, though the rock pile has already drawn it. Edward Ellis, as Bomber Wells, and Allen Jenkins, as Barney Sykes, are better served, two lifers who explain the rules with the dry courtesy of men who have stopped expecting anything.
LeRoy had made Little Caesar the year before, and this is the same studio’s plain, quick style pointed at a different target. It is a film that wants to change a law rather than admire a criminal, and it is unusually willing to make an audience uncomfortable to get there. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that the film’s view of the state’s word is not a hopeful one, and that the last minute chilled us more than anything in the camp. It is a fade to black and a line of dialogue, and it has not lost its edge.
Watch it in one sitting, in the evening, and do not expect comfort. It was made to make people angry, and it still does.
