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  • On the Hollywood Chain Gang:The Screen Version of Robert E.Burns' I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! and Penal Reform of the 1930s-1940s
  • Irina V. Rodimtseva (bio)

Even as I write this meager description of a Georgia chain gang, I realize words or language cannot give an exact presentation of the malicious cold brutality that we encountered. One was never allowed to rest a moment but must always be hard at work, and even moving in the mass of chain was painful and tiring—yet if one did not keep up his work greater terrors and more brutal punishment was in reserve. . . . And fear and despair clutched my weary heart. Was this a nightmare? Was it the hell I once read of in "Revelations," or was I going insane?

Robert E. Burns, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!

Thus ends Robert E. Burns' first day as a convict (51, 55). Burns' sensational 1932 book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, is an autobiographical account of a World War I veteran and a drifter. In 1921 Burns was convicted of armed robbery in Georgia and sentenced to six years in one of the state's chain gang camps. A year later, Burns managed to escape and start a new, successful life in Chicago, only to be turned in by his wife. In 1929, misled by the Georgia authorities' promise of pardon, Burns voluntarily returned to Atlanta and was put back on a chain gang. In 1930, after his appeal for pardon was denied, Burns escaped again and wrote a book condemning the brutal system of forced labor. I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia [End Page 123] Chain Gang! gives a detailed and vivid account of chain gang camps: unsanitary living conditions, unpalatable and meager food, excruciatingly hard work, and sadistic cruelty of the guards. Burns also exposes the opaque workings and arbitrary decisions of the legal machine whose goal is not justice but punishment.

Burns' memoir, published in January of 1932, attracted the Warner Brothers studio's attention, and the film, directed by Mervyn Leroy and starring Paul Muni, was released only eleven months later. Retitled I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the movie, like the book, focuses on the fate of an individual—a white inmate—and exposes the inhuman treatment of prisoners. To make the protagonist's story more appealing to depression era viewers, the film creates an image of a virtuous hard-working man defeated by hardships and unjust persecution. It establishes a connection between economic conditions and illegal activities and exposes the twisted rhetoric of the vindictive legal system as well as its crushing effects on individuals.

In spite of its relatively narrow focus, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang might be described as an early example of a social conscience movie that inspired later prison films, such as Cool Hand Luke and Escape from Alcatraz. Not only literary but also legal scholars credit the film's role in the reform and "constructive demise" (Glazer 1200) of the chain gang system. The film's visual presentation of a words-defying experience reached out to mass audience and both reflected and furthered a shift in public sentiment, which was, as H. Bruce Franklin states, permeated by the assumption that "convicts were not human beings" (161). When the relative prosperity of the 1920s abruptly ended, the distance between an honest working man and a prison inmate shrank, exposing the former's vulnerability and the latter's humanity. At the time when American society was ready to embrace a more humane philosophy of law, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang takes a strong stand against the retributive model of justice that was operating in the U.S. in the 1930 s. It also resonates with our time when, in the dramatic pronouncement of Randolph Lewis, "the chain gang is back. . . . Of course, the chain gang is also black" (227), and it is with regard to race that Burns' vision is most limited; thrown into the midst of a system that was central to the subjugation of blacks in the segregated South, Burns...

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