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 11^th, 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 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!, 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 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
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 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 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 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
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 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, 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.

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 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 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.

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 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]

… 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, 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 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.

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 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
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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
________________________________

[1]           New York Times, May 4, 1932.  Reprinted in David A. Shannon, ed., The Great
Depression (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1960), p. 89.

[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

[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 Fugitive from a Chain
Gang (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 21-3.

[7]           Time, August 8, 1932, reprinted in Maitland A. Edey, ed., Time Capsule, 1932, (New
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.

[9]           Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German
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.

[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

[13]          Peter Baxter, Just Watch!: Sternberg, Paramount and America (London: British Film
Institute, 1993), pp. 148, 142.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[24]          Joy to Hays, March 25, 1932, PCA File, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

[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.

[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.’”

[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.

[33]          Einfield to Zanuck, quoted in O’Connor, p. 37.

[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.

[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
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.