I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

A plot-level reading of Mervyn LeRoy’s 1932 film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, which depicts Robert E. Burns’s autobiographical, dual existence as a falsely convicted prisoner and dubiously lionized entrepreneur, does not inspire faith in the integrity of the Southern chain gang penal system. In its promotional campaign, Warner Brothers – Chain Gang’s production studio – publicized H. L. Mencken’s condemnation of the chain gang: “simply a vicious, medieval custom…and is so archaic and barbarous as to be a national disgrace” (Lichtenstein 16). Thus, Burns and Warner Brothers launched a national, progressive movement against Southern forced labor which resonated powerfully with a 1932 audience because it linked the chain gang's brutality to bleak realities of Great Depression America.

Yet, viewing the film as Hollywood’s response to social and economic crises of this period invites skepticism regarding the industry’s motivations for advancing such radical arguments. In other words, why would it have been in the studio’s interest to align a potentially desperate viewer’s sympathies with the film’s subversive message? I will argue that Chain Gang functioned in a complex network of New Deal agitprop which facilitated Roosevelt’s intimate business relationship with Hollywood, most notably with Warner Brothers. If Depression desperation rendered tenuous the dominant industries’ power, it would have protected Hollywood’s concerns to focus a frustrated viewer’s struggles specifically against the chain gangs which the film paints as “so archaic and barbarous as to be a national disgrace.”

I am a fugitive from a chain gang [videorecording] / Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. & the Vitaphone Corp. ; directed by Mervyn LeRoy ; screenplay by Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes.

A wonderful piece of Warner Brothers 1932 New Deal agitprop directed by Mervyn LeRoy and released a week after Roosevelt's election to office. It depicts the life of James Allen / Allen James, a falsely convicted prisoner, ex-soldier, twice escaped chain gang fugitive who makes good, has a messy romantic life, and is plagued by the flagrant injustice of the Southern chain gang penal system. Very exciting even though it gets its history wrong (see my bibliography on this film).

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I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

I am a fugitive from a chain gang [videorecording] / Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. & the Vitaphone Corp. ; directed by Mervyn LeRoy ; screenplay by Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes.