All seven reviews are positive, and they agree on why. Paul Muni’s performance as the wrongly convicted man is praised across the board, described variously as harrowing, understated and riveting. The chain gang sequences draw equal attention: critics find the floggings, hard labour and misery convincing rather than staged, and the escapes are singled out as among the tensest of their era. Empire credits Mervyn LeRoy’s staging of the set-pieces, and several reviews note that the film’s anger at organised cruelty has not softened with age.
The spread is narrow, running from good to strong, and reservations are few. Time Out finds some of the social commentary heavy-handed. The two reviews written on release, from The New York Times and The New Yorker, are the coolest, treating it as honest, instructive melodrama rather than anything exceptional, while later critics are readier to rank it above Warner’s other social problem pictures of the period.