Dokument2 1 of 27
Brno Lecture 2: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
and the Politics of 1932
I want to begin with a story, and a coincidence.
On May 4, 1932, a 44-year-old man called Langlan Heinz was arraigned on a
charge of vagrancy in a court in Flatbush, New Jersey. Heavily bearded and
dressed in a faded brown suit, Heinz appeared a typical victim of the
Depression, in a typical, unremarkable Depression incident. But Langlan
Heinz had a story to tell: according to the New York Times, “such a dramatic
and straightforward story of his experiences that he held the attention of the
crowded courtroom for nearly an hour.” He was not just a hobo down on his
luck. Heinz was a graduate in engineering from the University of Colorado,
and had worked as a civil engineer in the United States, China, Panama and
Venezuela. Returning to the US from Egypt and Italy in 1932, he had been
unable to find work, and when his savings were used up he started walking
the streets of Brooklyn.1
Six months later, almost to the day, another engineer – Herbert Hoover, the
Great Engineer of the previous decade, also found himself suddenly
unemployed.2
On November 11th
, three days after the election, New Yorkers
and the citizens of more than 200 other cities could celebrate Hoover’s defeat
by going to the opening performance of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, a
1
New York Times, May 4, 1932. Reprinted in David A. Shannon, ed., The Great
Depression (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1960), p. 89.
Dokument2 2 of 27
Warner Bros. movie about the rise and fall of an engineer in the 1920s.
Critics and historians alike identify Fugitive as particularly emblematic of the
nadir of the Depression. In his book The Great Depression, for example,
Robert McElvane argues that Fugitive “was the perfect expression of the
national mood in 1932: despair, suffering, hopelessness.” Its protagonist,
James Allen “symbolizes all Depression victims … [The] film was 1932:
hopelessness.”3
Similar comments recur in the critical literature on the movie,
and along with Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and three gangster movies,
Fugitive is conventionally held up as evidence of what Robert Sklar
evocatively called Hollywood’s “Golden Age of Turbulence” in the early
1930s.4
Although Sklar refers to this period as "an aberration, a surprise even
to Hollywood itself,” he also implies an element of intent on the part of
"Hollywood's moviemakers."5
The aberration may, however, lie more in the
interpretation than in the event, and I shall spend some of this paper
examining questions of methodology in writing the cultural history of
Hollywood. But first I should note that none of the accounts making claims
about the significance of this movie symbolizing or reflecting the immediate
moment of its release have drawn attention to the coincidence of its release
date, or to the decision by the movie’s scriptwriters to make James Allen an
engineer. In most respects, the movie is a noticeably faithful adaptation of
Robert Burns’ autobiography, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!,
2
For a discussion of the image of Hoover as heroic engineer, see Cecelia Tichi,
Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 169-70.
3
Robert McElvane, The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (New York: Times
Books, 1984), pp. 208, 213.
4
“It was the absolute nadir of hopes and possibilities as depicted in the movies. The
national landscape seemed like and empty lot.” Andrew Bergman, p. 96.
5
. Sklar, op. cit., p.176
Dokument2 3 of 27
but one of the more substantive changes it makes is to the protagonist’s
career. When Burns settled in Chicago after his first escape in 1922, he
eventually became the publisher of The Greater Chicago Magazine, a
magazine styled after The New Yorker. No production documentation
discusses the decision to make James Allen an engineer; while it obviously
provided more photogenic opportunities, the symbolic force of those images
of bridges being built and blown up derived in part from the cultural resonance
that had accrued to the figure of the engineer in the 1920s, a resonance that
had been politically charged by the Republicans’ deployment of its
connotations.6
SYNOPSIS AND EXTRACTS
EXTRACTS:
• “I want to be an engineer” — rejecting brother’s
advice
• The montage of travel
• Chain gang conditions
• Montage: 1924-29 and the bridge
• News of the pardon’s rejection
• Escape, montage of newspapers, final scene
There is, I think, a continuing need to address fundamental methodological
issues in writing about movies and politics, or historical accounts of cinema
6
The change was made in the first draft of the script. It is conceivable that this change
was politically motivated, since the first draft also contains some early scenes critical
of businessmen who had profited from the war. See John E. O’Connor, ed. I Am a
Dokument2 4 of 27
and society. If Fugitive is what McElvane suggests, it is so by means of
metaphor and allusion, since the only explicit verbal reference the movie
makes to any wider context is the final newspaper headline asking whether
Allen is “another Forgotten Man”. After his first arrest, there is no
representation of a world external to the personal narrative: the Crash, and
the Depression itself, are missing from the movie. They take place off-screen,
present only in the passage of time indicated via the calendars. The movie
may make visual references through its shared iconography with
contemporary images of the unemployed and Bonus Marchers. Its adverts
provide the best evidence for that connection: see illustrations, compared to
main illustration for Fortune’s “No-one has Starved.” — but no critic has to
date proposed this argument. Iconographically, Fugitive may be one of the
movies’ most charged representations of the crisis of capitalism: if James
Allen might stand for Langlan Heinz, the fallen engineer of the previous
decade, he might also stand for William Hushka, one of the “forgotten men” of
the Bonus Army encamped in Washington that summer, whose brief moment
of public attention came on July 28 when, as Time magazine put it, his “Bonus
of $528 suddenly became payable in full when a police bullet drilled him dead
in the worst public disorder the capital has known in years.”7
The problem is where and for whom might he represent these people? The
methodological problem is, in part, that we always begin with the movies,
understood as texts available for interpretation. The movies draw us (those of
us who find them interesting) because they are interesting objects in
Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 21-
3.
Dokument2 5 of 27
themselves, and we then begin to ask interpretative questions and develop
interpretative frameworks in which to place them. The critical tools of those
interpretative frameworks are drawn, in the main, from the interpretative
strategies of criticism directed at low-circulation cultural goods (High Art), and
are primarily concerned with the production of cultural objects, and with issues
of intention and agency underpinning the process of cultural production,
usually at the level of the individual.
Some of these critical frameworks are also concerned with questions of
history or society: with placing the cultural objects in an historical context.
Because the cultural objects are positioned for interpretation, it seems to
follow that they should be understood as themselves being interpretations of,
or commentaries on, their historical, political or social context, and this
interpretative paradigm is validated be a long tradition of literary and art
history.
Alternatively, these accounts proceed through a largely undeclared application
of an idea of reflection, which has proved to be the most persistent metaphor
for understanding cinema’s relationship to the society it forms part of.
Aesthetic assumptions about the camera’s reflection of the optically real are
easily transformed into expectations that the artefacts of popular culture must
reflect a social reality connected to their production. How this relationship
functions is seldom a matter of concern, but while the word “reflection” is itself
often avoided, the talismanic powers of the term “ideology” are frequently
invoked. The terminology of ideological analysis has complicated and
obfuscated what is usually a fairly straightforward analytical procedure relying
7
Time, August 8, 1932, reprinted in Maitland A. Edey, ed., Time Capsule, 1932, (New
Dokument2 6 of 27
on an often concealed metaphor of reflection. Theories of ideology
encourage acts of interpretation as necessary to the process of decoding an
encoded text. Ideology, understood as a set of relations or a system of
representations, becomes the dark glass through which the critical historian
looks at artefacts in search of truth. Once a symptomatic reading of a text has
identified its codes and its structuring absences, the artefact will reveal both
ideology and truth: ideology as the revealed system of encoding, and truth in
the artefact’s now clarified reflection of the historical real. The metaphor of
reflection also maintains the relationship between base and superstructure,
since it requires a unidirectional causality – in the opposite direction, of
course, to that presumed by those concerned about the effects of media on
their audiences. Accounts that rely on an idea of reflection—for instance Colin
Shindler’s Hollywood in Crisis—are commonly organized according to a
scheme in which a statement of base political and economic conditions is
followed by a textual analysis of a superstructural object.
Through the devices and practices of interpretation, we thus have a
methodology by which two discrete objects, an historical condition (for
instance, the social conditions of the early Depression) and a cultural object
(for instance, a movie about “one particular miscarriage of justice”8
) are
brought into the kind of juxtaposition proposed by McElvane. Where and
when this juxtaposition takes place seems to be unclear. It is not, apparently,
being claimed (certainly it is not being documented) that this is how audiences
understood and interpreted Fugitive at the time of its release. Rather, we
York: Time Life Books, 1968), p. 35.
8
Joy to censor boards in Chicago, Toronto, New York, October 17, 1932, PCA File, I
Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Dokument2 7 of 27
remain close to the ideas elaborated by Siegfried Kracauer in the late 1940s,
that some movies, or some “pictorial or narrative motifs” reiterated in them,
may be understood as “outward projections of inner urges … those deep
layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimensions
of consciousness.”9
Some periods of Hollywood’s history are understood as
being particularly zeitgeistig. Curiously, these periods tend to be ones of
economic uncertainty in Hollywood, in which audiences declined sharply, and
previously existing patterns of, for instance, the relationship between
production budget and predictable rental income were destabilized
These periods are also, not coincidentally, periods of “turbulence” in
Hollywood’s conventions of representation. Conventions of representation are
something of a problem in understanding Hollywood as a source of cultural
history. While the operation of conventions in Hollywood—of genre, stars,
and narrative—is widely acknowledged, critical attention is far more frequently
directed to the unconventional, to the exceptional rather than the typical. The
critical attention paid to Fugitive is a case in point: the movie is perceived as
having acquired its resonance substantially because of its apparent
unconventionality, and particularly that of its conclusion. But it is, on the face
of it, difficult to see why movies produced during periods of falling audiences
and uncertain conventions should be regarded as more zeitgeistig than those
produced in periods of larger, more stable audiences and under more stable
representational regimes.
One of the attractions that periods of “turbulence” have for critics is that they
are often seen as giving rise to new forms. The early 1930s is conventionally
9
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German
Dokument2 8 of 27
understood as the birth of the gangster film, and Fugitive is itself sometimes
seen as marking the invention of a genre: “Warner Brothers [sic] Presents
Social Consciousness,” as Andrew Bergman entitles it.10
So this period is perceived to be doubly rewarding for study: its innovative
movies were also zeitgeistig. This version of history is much more appealing
than it is rigorous. The real problem with it lies in the insistence on the
primacy of the movie-as-text as a piece of historical evidence: in Andrew
Bergman's claim that "the most compelling evidence ... lies in the films
themselves."11
But which films?
Why do we see Fugitive as more representative of its historical moment than
Prosperity, (“not around the corner but here ...”) released in the same week
and distributed by the same, then highly unusual mechanism of saturation
release, and with a far more direct address in its advertising to the immediate
political and economic circumstances of the moment of these two movies’
release – the week after the 1932 Presidential election?
Images from advertising, and Will Rogers
I don’t necessarily want to argue that the conclusions that some of these
accounts of Fugitive come to are wrong (sometimes they are — e.g. gangster
movies — but that’s obviously not necessarily the case). I certainly don’t want
to deny that many movies of the period contain symptoms of a cultural crisis,
or that a significant number of the films of the early 1930s, including many of
Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 6,8.
10
Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money: Depression America and its Films (New York:
Harper, 1971), p. 92.
Dokument2 9 of 27
those discussed within conventional histories, were themselves accounts of
the events of the previous decade, reflecting on how those events of that
decade had led to the Crash.12
I do, however, want to point up the
deficiencies and undeclared assumptions in the methodology by which they’re
arrived at — primarily that these critical interpretations offered as historical
commentaries are not themselves historically situated. And it’s important to
point this out because these objects of mass culture now assume an
increasingly common place in the discourse of history textbooks. The history
of entertainment is always expected to be entertaining, and even as they are
incorporated into a larger version of social history, the movies remain under
the obligation to entertain. Thus you will find accounts of Fugitive or Scarface
appearing as diverting boxed features on “social realism in the movies” to
alleviate the statistical tedium of histories of the early Depression.
To establish the cultural significance of Hollywood, we need to construct two
different histories. One is notoriously difficult: the history of its audience—
[difficult both because of the relative paucity of sources and also because
such a history requires us to abandon the relatively simplistic causality
involved in studying production, and examine instead the coincidental
juxtapositions of cultural products with other objects from the existing pool of
available social experience in any individual viewer’s experience, in, let us
say, Columbus Ohio in mid-December 1932.]
The other history is more manageable: a history of Hollywood’s institutions of
representation. By the institutions of representation I mean both the
11
. Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films, New York:
Harper, 1971, xxiii.
12
. e.g. I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Public Enemy
Dokument2 10 of 27
organizational structures that produce, distribute, police and regulate that
mode of representation, and the systems of generic, narrative, performative
and formal convention in operation at the time of its production. Debates over
the meaning of cultural artefacts take place within and between the institutions
of representation. However, these institutions are seldom in alignment with
each other, and their divergences can create variant and even opposing
interpretations of the same object. This history is, I think, less ambitious but
more demanding than the accounts that I have been criticising.
The question that lay behind much of the internal discussions of Hollywood’s
representation in the early 1930s was: how could the motion picture industry
represent the crisis of capitalism entertainingly? Fugitive is one instance
among many in this period in which the documentation of discussions within
the studio and between the studio and the trade association officials
responsible for implementing the Production Code explicitly deal with this
issue, if not in quite those words.
It is, of course, important to remember that the majority audience Hollywood
addressed were not themselves unemployed, any more than were the readers
of Fortune magazine addressed in the second person in “What do you do?”
They were, rather, the urban middle class, still able to afford admission to the
first-run theatres, still with something to lose and something to worry about
losing. Peter Baxter argues that the movies of the early 1930s did not
address working-class anger or despair so much as middle-class fear: the
anxiety that they “might be plunged into unemployment and penury, placed in
the same position as … the veterans in Washington,” or “The Man in the
Street,” described in Edmund Wilson’s the American Jitters, or Langlan Heinz,
Dokument2 11 of 27
or James Allen.13
So we can, perhaps, state Hollywood’s problem in the early
1930s more precisely: how to entertain a jittery middle-class audience with
escapist representations of the crisis of capitalism?
Nowhere in the surviving documentation concerning the movie’s production
and distribution is there any evidence to suggest that it had grand social
ambitions to “represent” 1932. The extent to which it was a protest against
penal conditions, rather than an exploitation of current interest and concern in
them, is also open to question.
So why would Warner Bros. make this movie when they did?
We’re used to thinking of Hollywood making films in genres, but the genres of
American cinema are substantially a critical invention. In fact, the industry
had a number of interrelated production strategies that determined the types
of movies they produced, which can be imagined as a map of production
decisions, on which it should be possible to locate any individual movie.
1. Budget:
In the early 1930s, the major companies produced movies in three budget
bands: Superspecials, Specials, and programmers. The amount budgeted for
each category varied from studio to studio, and in all cases fell steadily during
the early 1930s. These categories also represented different production
planning cycles, different marketing strategies, distribution patterns and
theatre outlets.
13
Peter Baxter, Just Watch!: Sternberg, Paramount and America (London: British Film
Institute, 1993), pp. 148, 142.
Dokument2 12 of 27
2. Production types
Different production types were aimed primarily at particular sectors of the
market, the most obvious instance being the “woman’s film.” Trade press
reviews assessed the likely appeal of a movie for different market areas: “the
carriage trade” of “educated” or “sophisticated” clientele, the “Saturday
afternoon trade,” and so on.
These audience-oriented categories were related to budget banding according
to the size of the audience sector, and some of what we now identify as
genres fitted into these categories. For instance, in the early 1930s Westerns
were either Superspecials or programmers, and the resultant two kinds of
movie were very different in narrative and thematic concerns.
One production type was “topical” movies: these are now most commonly
called “social problem” films, but the term “social problem” was actually used
at the time to identify a larger grouping. Similarly, this type is now most
commonly identified with Warner Bros., but in fact all studios made them.
3. Cycles
Production cycles determined the routine production of specials and
programmers. A cycle might last over one or two production seasons, usually
beginning with the imitation of a commercial success and lasting until the
specific content or formula had been played out. The use of “pre-sold”
material adapted from theatrical or literary sources meant that, in terms of
content, innovation in the movies usually came through imitation of an
external source. Producers maintained that subject matter was determined by
Dokument2 13 of 27
a combination of audience preferences and the industry's reliance on
published material for adaptation. Jesse Lasky argued "We are really in the
hands of men and women writing the current fiction, the literature of the day.
They are our reporters; and they are the ones that set the standards for the
present type of entertainment."14
The cycle was particularly important for the content of topicals: in the 1930-31
production season, for instance, there are cycles of gangster movies and
newspaper movies, each of about two dozen movies.
Fugitive was a typical Warner Bros. Special, budgeted around $200,000, a
star vehicle designed, from the outset, for Paul Muni, for whom it was the first
production in a four-picture contract with the studio. Muni had a substantial
reputation as a Broadway actor. He had made his first movie, Scarface, in the
summer of 1931, but censorship difficulties delayed its release until May
1932, after he signed his Warners contract. In hiring him, the studio was
adding to its stable of urban ethnic males.
On September 29, 1931, the Association of Motion Picture Producers passed
a resolution prohibiting their members from the further production of motion
pictures with a gangster theme, in response to the considerable hostility they
had received from a wide assortment of civic groups and increasing exhibitor
resistance.15
The studios thus abandoned one representational territory on
which they had represented disorder as criminality, and they began looking for
others in topical subject matter. They briefly found one in the Southern chain
14
Reporter's transcript, p. 96.
15
For further discussion of this decision, see Richard Maltby, “Tragic Heroes?: Al
Capone and the Spectacle of Criminality, 1948-1931,” in Screening the Past: VI
Australian History and Film Conference Papers, eds. John Benson, Ken Berryman
and Wayne Levy, (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1995), 112-9.
Dokument2 14 of 27
gang system, which was the focus of media attention in the winter of 1931-2
following the death of a white chain gang prisoner in Florida during a
punishment known as the “Sweat Box.” Public interest was sustained in 1932
by press reports of the ensuring trial of two guards, and by the publication of a
book by John L. Spivak, “America’s Greatest Reporter,” called On the Chain
Gang.16
In early 1932 there were two literary properties dealing with chain
gangs available for purchase. Both Warner Bros. and MGM were interested
in Robert Burns’ book, which had been serialized in True Detective Magazine
in January-June 1931 and was published as a book by Vanguard early in
1932, just before Jack Warner bought the rights.17
A month later, Universal
bought the rights to Laughter in Hell, a novel set on a chain gang by Jim Tully,
former hobo, prize-fighter and “literary bum,” protégé of H.L. Mencken, writer
for American Mercury and author of a half-dozen “realist” novels. At about the
same time, David O. Selznick, head of production at RKO, initiated a project
variously called Chains, Chain Gang, Liberty Road and eventually Hell’s
Highway.
The cycle can also be situated as a subset of a cycle of prison movies,
including The Big House (1930), The Criminal Code (1931), and 20,000 Years
in Sing Sing, released by Warners less than two months after Fugitive. The
prison cycle provided the basic narrative formula, constructed around the
excessive punishment of an innocent or almost innocent character (not
necessarily the protagonist), for the chain gang movies.
16
John L. Spivak On the Chain Gang, International Pamphlets Series, No. 32 (New
York, 1932), quoted in William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America
(New York: OUP, 1973), p.34.
17
Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
(New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 143.
Dokument2 15 of 27
The Studio Relations Committee, the body responsible for administering the
Production Code, which had sought to dissuade both Warner Bros. and MGM
from the Fugitive project, expressed some concern that the chain gang
pictures were developing into a cycle “which may create another censorship
problem of major proportions” comparable to the gangster cycle of the
previous year, and SRC Director Jason Joy warned studio heads of the
dangers he foresaw.18
Although he did not dissuade any of the three
companies from developing their projects, he may well have discouraged
others from adding to the cycle. His attempts to persuade the producers of
the three films to meet to discuss an amalgamation of their projects or a
common approach to the problems they posed also met with failure. Both
Carl Laemmle Jr. and Darryl Zanuck declined.19
But Joy’s activities had
contributed to a shared belief that there would probably be only one
successful movie in this cycle. Zanuck was convinced that he owned “the only
legitimate chain gang story on the market and, incidentally, the property that
started the interest.”20
Selznick pressed ahead to bring Hell’s Highway to
market as far ahead of Fugitive as possible. Universal was persuaded, either
by Joy’s arguments or by the need to differentiate their product, to set
Laughter in Hell in 1880, “thus removing the suggestion that [the brutality of
the chain gang system] is a current problem.” Universal also agreed to a
rearrangement of the plot elements to emphasize the personal enmity
between the central character and the brutal head guard, who was to be
contrasted with more humane officials “thereby, to a certain extent, removing
18
Interoffice Memo from Lamar Trotti, March 31, 1932. Production Code Administration
Case File, Laughter in Hell. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California (hereafter PCA)
19
Interoffice Memo April 4, 1932. PCA File, Laughter in Hell.
Dokument2 16 of 27
the full blame from the state.” 21
Their intention was to make Laughter in Hell
a “story of an individual brutalised by the system through the machinations of
one man, with results comparable to those obtained in Les Miserables. In fact
they have the Hugo character of Jean Valjean very much in mind.22
Joy continued to express his anxieties about the cycle, and about I Am a
Fugitive in particular, in a series of letters and memos written in the spring of
1932:
… There also is the very important consideration of the Southern
reaction to such an exposé. Even though you did not place the
story in Georgia as such, obviously you would want to use the
southern scene for local colour, for contrast of whites and blacks,
etc., and Southerners, who are oversensitive on all matters
pertaining to their manners and customs, will regard the story as an
unfair incitement, deliberately brought against them … Though to us
these methods may seem barbarous relics of the Middles Ages, still
from a business standpoint we ought to consider carefully whether
we are willing to incur the anger of any large section by turning our
medium of entertainment to anything which may be regarded as a
wholesale indictment.23
20
Letter, Darryl Zanuck to Joy, March 30, 1932.
21
Interoffice Memo from Lamar Trotti, March 31, 1932. PCA Case File, Laughter in
Hell.
22
Report, Joy to Hays, April 1, 1932, PCA Case File, Laughter in Hell.
23
Joy to Irving Thalberg and Darryl Zanuck, February 26, 1932, PCA File, I Am a
Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Joy’s argument was echoed by both Warner Bros.’ legal
and story departments, which had recommended not purchasing Fugitive because
“all the strong and vivid points in the story are certain to be eliminated” by censor
boards. Memo from Warner Bros. story department, February 19, 1932, quoted in
Schatz, p. 143.
Dokument2 17 of 27
… Not that I think we need dodge this type of story, for if brutality
persists on in these days and systems are wrong, I see no reason
why we should not be permitted to say so. A greater worry is to
make them entertainment and yet within usable bounds.24
What constituted the “usable bounds” of entertainment was, of course, the
crucial issue for the SRC not only in this case but throughout this period. The
chain gang pictures presented three main problems: the hostile representation
of the South; “gruesomeness”; and an issue that centred around balancing the
dramatic requirement of having the protagonist appear sympathetic, and
therefore innocent, against the political requirement to minimize the movies’
indictment of state authority as dishonest and vengeful. In this last point the
chain gang pictures restaged some of the problems encountered but not
resolved in the gangster cycle, where the problem emanated precisely from
the anxiety that audiences would, inappropriately, find the central character
sympathetic.
In dealing with the two other topics, the burden of the SRC’s work lay in
ensuring that the movies conformed to conventions of inexplicitness and
imprecision, which involved both generalizing and individualizing the narrative.
Gruesomeness was straightforwardly handled, by informing the studios of
what censor boards were likely to delete: for instance, “Certainly the censors
will not permit you to show a whipping in a two-shot, and I doubt if they will
permit you to show the lash actually striking the men's bodies.”25
In Fugitive’s
Final shooting script, a number of details of the chain gang, including the
Sweatbox, were removed, and in October, Joy’s successor, James Wingate,
24
Joy to Hays, March 25, 1932, PCA File, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Dokument2 18 of 27
reported to Will Hays that in Fugitive, “the element of brutality has been
handled fairly well, with the exception of the lashing sequence which can be
trimmed to suit local taste”26
Within both Warners and RKO, there were
debates about whether what Warner’s director Roy Del Ruth called the
movies’ “morbid” tone should be relieved by more obvious box-office appeal.27
RKO had already decided to lighten Hell’s Highway with several comedy
scenes. After three previews in August, studio head B.B. Kahane decided,
against Selznick’s advice, to lighten the ending: originally the protagonist had
attempted a prison break that was bound to end in his death; in the released
version, he shares a joke with a fellow prisoner.28
The trade reviews found
these ameliorations of tone unsuccessful, and the unenthusiastic response to
Hell’s Highway may well have helped Zanuck in his insistence on not diluting
Fugitive’s brutal sequences.
In representing the South so as to minimize offensiveness to Southern white
sensibilities, the principal strategy was imprecision. The clearest instance of
this occurs in Fugitive’s montage sequence of Allen’s journey around the
country, where the map reaches St. Louis, heads south and then dissolves.
Obviously, the word “Georgia” was removed from the title and similarly not
mentioned in any of the movie’s publicity. In all three movies Joy drew the
producers’ attention to the importance of avoiding “any distinguishing feature
that might be identified, even with a stretch of the imagination, as belonging to
25
Joy to Laemmle, August 30, 1932, PCA Case File, Laughter in Hell.
26
James Wingate to Hays, October 21, 1932, PCA File, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain
Gang.
27
Warner Bros. interoffice memo, Roy Del Ruth to Hal Wallis, n.d. (probably May or
June, 1932), Warner Bros. Production File, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
28
August 18, 1932, David O Selznick to B.B. Kahane; August 19, Kahane to Ned
Depinet, RKO Production File, Hell’s Highway.
Dokument2 19 of 27
any one state.”29
In the light of the publicity given to the trial of the two Florida
prison guards for the “Sweat Box” killing before the movies’ release, Joy
assumed that “the average motion picture fan will probably think” Fugitive was
set in Florida, but he anticipated, correctly, that such vagueness would not
appease the officials of Georgia.30
The third problem was, however, intransigent. It was a Code requirement
that, if Allen was to remain unpunished at the end of the movie, he be
innocent. Moreover, since the story was allegedly true and the author’s
veracity relied on his innocence, Allen had to be represented as an innocent
victim. But because the story was allegedly true, the fictional option adopted
in Laughter in Hell, of making the protagonist the victim of an evil individual,
could not be followed lest some individual Georgia prison official took litigious
objection to his misrepresentation as a figure of evil. Thus, the authority of
the unnamed state is held responsible for Allen’s fate, while audience
sympathy remains with Allen because he is represented as pure victim, a
naive innocent continuing to trust in the essential honesty and decency of the
world around him despite the accumulating evidence that such trust is badly
misplaced. He also remains oddly unaffected by his experiences of injustice
and brutality, until his final escape, when the tolerant innocent abruptly
becomes the paranoid, nihilistic criminal, and the emotional energy the plot
has developed in the audience is not dispersed by a conventional resolution.
29
June 13, 1932, Selznick to C.D. White, RKO Production File, Hell’s Highway.
30
Joy to Zanuck, July 26, 1932, PCA File, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. The
press book for the movie explicitly advised exhibitors that “the picture also affords a
timely tie-up with the recent Maillefert trial in Florida of the two guards who were tried
for the killing of young Maillefert in the Florida Chain Gang ‘Sweat Box.’”
Dokument2 20 of 27
Fugitive’s reputation as a particularly powerful representation of the early
Depression rests heavily on the absence of a resolution, which has permitted
a significance to escape the chains of entertainment in which the process of
regulation sought to contain it. But it is also its inconclusiveness, its
irresolution and its evasions, that leave it open – as so many movies of the
period were deliberately left open – to interpretation. While the movie’s press
book and advertising campaign sought to stage this as the escape of truth –
“They can’t let me go now! I’ve seen too much! And I’ve dared to tell the
whole hideous truth about it! … They’ve got to shut me up because they know
I’ve lifted the lid off hell!” – the SRC offered, as they frequently did for
potentially troublesome movies, an alternative, official interpretation for the
consumption of censor boards:
it is important to remember that, in essence, it is not a preachment
against the chain gang system in general, but a strongly
individualized story of one man's personal experiences arising
from one particular miscarriage of justice, and attended by later
circumstances so unusual that in no sense can it be considered a
general indictment of this form of legal punishment. We feel
therefore that, with due respect to whatever pros and cons there
may be over the vexed question of the chain gang system,
nevertheless the picture industry is thoroughly justified in making
pictures like the present, provided they are based on fact and are
presented dispassionately, free from propaganda and sectional
Dokument2 21 of 27
prejudice, and with a proper consideration for the requirements of
entertainment.31
Fugitive’s release pattern, of simultaneous exhibition in over 200 locations,
was strikingly unusual, and certainly sufficiently so for the movie’s publicity
campaign to draw attention to it. Normally, a movie would be released first in
New York and Los Angeles, with a delay before it opened in other cities.
Simultaneous release across the country was an unusual distribution practice
before the industry began using national television advertising in the late
1960s. Before that, “saturation booking,” as this practice was known, was a
strategy mainly used by exploitation filmmakers hoping to make quick profits
before word-of-mouth discouraged audiences. Given the financial situation of
the major companies, who were primarily concerned to maintain the viability
of their first-run theatres, if necessary through the quick turnover of product, a
similar motivation may be assumed in this case. This interpretation is
supported by the uncertain preview it received from Variety, which suggested
that “Tied in with the current chain gang abolition activity, it may draw
attention, but its chances of getting into the important money are slim”; from
the Hollywood Filmograph, which thought that “the public would never want to
see such a picture — that people wanted escape from depressing things”32
;
by the commercial failure of its RKO rival, Hell’s Highway, and by the Warner
Bros.’ Sales Department’s evident nervousness about the marketability of a
movie with this much “gruesomeness” (which, according to the Variety
31
Joy to censor boards in Chicago, Toronto, New York, October 17, 1932, PCA File, I
Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
32
Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Co., 1939), p. 522.
Dokument2 22 of 27
previewer, had caused walkouts at the preview), and with an evident lack of
“femme appeal.”
It was, however, an early financial success. In the week after its release,
Zanuck triumphantly circulated to production staff the texts of two telegrams
received from Charles Einfield, head of Sales:
“Fugitive biggest Broadway sensation in last three years. … Can’t refrain from
wiring you tonight as Warner prosperity turns corner in 209 other cities where
Fugitive opened.”33
… must admit you people were right when we asked you
to cut down on blood and brutal sequences and you refused. Audiences
throughout America have vindicated your decision.”
Perhaps people were celebrating the downfall of the Great Engineer, but there
is little evidence of such celebrations.
Foreign success
The preceding account of Fugitive’s production, release and its treatment by
the SRC may seem like an attempt to dismiss or derogate the movie’s cultural
significance. It is actually an attempt to re-situate it. Hollywood was in the
business—literally—of representing its audience with an existing system of
conventions, which certainly included character types provided by specific
actors, featured players as well as stars. If we look at what was typical about
Fugitive, a different pattern emerges.
Fugitive’s narrative shares with the gangster cycle of 1930-1 and the “fallen
woman” cycle problems of resolution emanating from the moral status of their
protagonists. To take the most graphic instance, the gangster protagonist
33
Einfield to Zanuck, quoted in O’Connor, p. 37.
Dokument2 23 of 27
dies at the end of the movie not, as Robert Warshow suggests, because he is
“is punished for success,”34
but because the then-operating interpretation of
the Production Code’s third principle that “Law, natural or human, shall not be
ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation,”35
insisted that
criminals and wrong-doers be seen to be punished for their sins and
misdeeds. That, of course, is the reason that so many innocent men go to
prison in the Classical Hollywood movies
The trend toward unhappy endings can be interpreted metaphorically — as a
precursor of the noir sensibility appropriate to the cultural conditions of the
period — but it can also be explained as a feature of a production policy with a
number of clear commercial goals. Studios, forced by their financial position to
seek immediate returns on their investment in production by concentrating on
appealing to the first-run market, were using material as provocative as the
SRC would allow. In fallen women movies studios devised plots in which the
heroine chose between "her life [and] her virtue," the choice ensuring that the
movie remained just within the letter of the Code, but did not end well for the
heroine. Fugitive seems “bleaker” (the adjective used most often by critics) in
its ending than the gangster movies because the protagonist is given
characteristics closer to those of the heroines of the fallen women cycle, and
the same is true of the movie’s conclusion. It might constitute a one-movie
“Forgotten Man” cycle, a male melodrama in parallel with the fallen women
cycle of the same period.
34
. Warshow, pp. 87-8.
35
"A Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures,"
MPPDA, 1930, reprinted in Moley, p. 241.
Dokument2 24 of 27
There are a number of other narrative features that we can identify as
commonly recurring across this group of movies — certain loosely Proppian
functions —: the mother, the well-intentioned but ineffectual older brother
failing to perform adequately in place of the absent father, for instance.
Certain stories, certain plot devices, and certain characters apparently
became unavailable to movies during the worst years of the Depression.
Most notable, and perhaps least surprising, was the absence of the
patriarchal hero. During the three production seasons from 1930 to 1933,
there were few successful businessmen and few successful fathers in movies.
The family without a father was a commonplace; it was almost a sine qua non
of the gangster movie. The Oedipal trajectory of The Public Enemy (1931) is
an oft-told early-Depression tale: the younger son of a fatherless family is led
astray; the elder son fails adequately to fill the restraining patriarchal role.36
The movies represented the crisis of capitalism as a crisis in other social and
cultural institutions, and particularly in the institutions of patriarchy, displacing
economic anxieties into emotional terms.37
Hollywood's history of the
previous decade was not a history of speculation on Wall St. and insecure
construction in the fortresses of finance capital, but rather a history of
speculation about sexual difference and insecure construction in that other
fortress, the American home.
36
. Tom Powers’ policeman father makes one appearance in The Public Enemy, when
he beats the child Tom. It is established that the father is dead immediately after the
first crime Tom commits, which ends in the death of a cop. I Am A Fugitive From A
Chain Gang (1932) provides another example of the role of the elder brother.
37
. David N. Rodowick, "Madness, Authority and Ideology: The Domestic Melodrama of
the 1950s," in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's
Film, ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI, 1987, 271. The essays by Thomas
Elsaesser, Nick Browne and Richard de Cordova in the same volume provide
discussions of the patriarchal family as social metaphor. For an instance of such
representation in the early 1930s, see Richard Maltby, "Baby Face, or How Joe
Dokument2 25 of 27
Parallel with the failures of the patriarchal hero was a crisis in the
representation of romantic heroism. The passionate, melodramatic male
sexuality of Rudolph Valentino and John Gilbert proved vulnerable to the
dictates of a sound cinema intolerant of its feminization of the male as erotic
object.38
Joel McCrea, John Boles, Lew Ayres and Robert Montgomery were
hindered by an absence of assertiveness often attached to an effete
aristocracy in the "drawing room" genre borrowed from Broadway. In an
article on Clark Gable in Modern Screen, Faith Baldwin suggested that "the
feminine public is wearying of rather pretty and too polished young men," but
few acceptable alternatives emerged. The three top male box-office stars of
the early 1930s were Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor and Wallace Beery.39
Warners' urban ethnics - Cagney, Muni, Robinson - were seldom more than
peripheral romantic leads. Baldwin went on to complain that:
Since the world war there has been a demand for charm, for
romantic charm. It is beginning to lessen. There are far too
many young men of romantic charm and not much else, in life
as well as on the screen. There seems to be something of a
reaction against them. The average fan is beginning to call for
men of action, men whom the old trite term, "he-man," fits like a
glove.
Breen Made Barbara Stanwyck Atone for Causing the Wall St. Crash," Screen 27.2
(March-April 1986) 22-45.
38
. The myth of John Gilbert's "feminine" voice is the most obvious instance of this; see
Kevin Brownlow, Hollywood: The Pioneers. London: Collins, 1979, 192-194 for an
account of Gilbert's career decline. Miriam Hansen, "Pleasure, Ambivalence,
Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship," Cinema Journal 25.4 (Summer
1986), 8-10 provides a theoretical basis for the discussion of sexual mobility and the
temporary slippage between gender definitions. See also Gaylyn Studlar, In The
Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.
39
. Motion Picture Herald, January 6, 1934.
Dokument2 26 of 27
But like Victor McLaglen and Gary Cooper, Gable's representation of
masculine sexuality was tainted with a disturbing brutality, comparable with
Cagney's more celebrated treatment of Mae Clarke in The Public Enemy.
Fugitive’s advertising makes it clear that it was directed at a male or male-led
audience. The press book advocated: “Sell the picture as a big show – one
with a lot of guts – showing a stark realism that it took a lot of guts to make! It
is loaded with Box Office values and can best be sold on those values, rather
than by over-emphasis of a woman appeal in your copy. Because of the
topic, and the facts revealed, the picture will arouse the sympathy of all for
“the Fugitive,” and will have a great appeal for the women.” Variety’s positive
review, on November 15, observed, “That it’s a man’s picture essentially is
apparent from the title. The women will shudder at its gruesome realism but
they’ll not be bored … regardless of its shortcomings on the romantic angle,
[it] should get some big grosses, particularly in the bigger keys.”
The movie’s release pattern indicates that there was some uncertainty about
the commercial viability of this strategy. It succeeded in translating the fallen
woman cycle’s structure of sympathy into a male melodrama, but this proved
difficult to repeat, since the protagonist-as-victim was not easily integrated into
audience expectations of masculine narrative assertiveness.
Fugitive is typical of Hollywood’s problems in providing acceptable images of
masculinity in this period—particularly images that would appeal to men. The
star system of the late silent period had been largely constructed to appeal to
the predominantly female audience, and its deficiencies were revealed by the
post-1930 decline in audiences as much as by sound.
Dokument2 27 of 27
I think that the cultural resonances of Fugitive lie in the iconography it shares
with other graphic representations of men. What is missing from the period
are images like that of the Relief Organization advertisement: images of the
engineer, the provider of practical solutions, with his sleeves rolled up.
My conclusion is that if we look at Fugitive not as an exceptional object—
exceptional because critics and historians can claim that it ventures into the
territory of social comment and they can therefore appropriate it for their
disciplines and their textbooks—but if instead we look at it symptomatically, as
a source of evidence about representation, we discover that it can speak to us
of early Depression conditions: in a variety of ways, of the failure and disarray
of patriarchal structures, of the exclusion, at least in the latter part of the
previous decade, of men from participation in the mass culture of
consumption, and of the unresolved search, in 1932, for positive, stable and
culturally acceptable images of masculinity.