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.”

Roffman and Purdy describe the social problem film as politically rather tame, arguing that “there is no direct relationship between the problem film and social change” (304). However, they posit as an exception to this paradigm “examples of isolated reforms—in chain-gang regulations after Fugitive” (304). Chain Gang’s lack of narrative closure at the end, which suggests the failures of a malfunctioning society, approaches, they argue, a sincere and radical criticism of Great Depression politics and culture.

Roffman and Purdy’s reading of the film demonstrates a counter-argument to my own. Despite Chain Gang’s uniquely bleak ending, historical evidence refutes Roffman and Purdy’s claims. Warner Brothers, who enjoyed a longstanding political collaboration with President Roosevelt, released the film a week after FDR’s election to office. In a production context, I group Chain Gang with other films that propagandize the New Deal Administration. Its criticism of Depression society condemns Hoover’s failures thereby aligning a potentially desperate viewer’s political energies with subsequent New Deal propaganda campaigns.

Chain Gang’s historical misreading of the southern penal system, which Roffman and Purdy also overlook, reinforces its function as New Deal agitprop. By depicting the South’s cultural backwardness as antithetical to modernity (epitomized by industries like Hollywood), Chain Gang fosters a dichotomized interpretation of malfunctioning Depression American society. According to the film’s logic, anti-modern Georgia opposes modern Chicago, whereas evidence suggests that the South’s convict labor and subsequent chain gang penal systems evolved in with Northern industry. The film annihilates the chain gang’s profound complexities framing it as purely antagonistic in a typical codified Hollywood good-cop/bad-cop conversation.

In other words, I strongly disagree with Roffman and Purdy’s historical reading of the film’s politics.

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).