A Film Canon

 

 

This extraordinary film presents infrastructure as imprisonment, posing the postwar question of what alternative might exist between the monotonous machinery of home and military fronts. For protagonist Allen James (Paul Muni), civil engineering seems to offer a reconfiguration of mass experience from an individuated, aestheticised vantage point, in pursuit of which he finds himself reduced to a penniless drifter, imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit and, finally, placed in a chain gang whose tasks encompass everything he originally sought, including the preparation and foundation of roads and railways. This depressing containment is only enhanced by his release and re-capture, which manages to also reduce marriage to a mere institution, as well as taking the pervasive sense of inescapability to its logical conclusion. However, this emphasis on the porosity of the prison walls belies the striking depictions of chain gang life which, based on the fragmented memoirs of escapee Robert Burns, must have stood in relation to 1930s America as depictions of institutionalised torture do to a contemporary mileu, detailing the punishments, privations and humiliations of the inmates with striking power. This is enhanced by Paul Muni's acting skills - and, in particular, his capacity to generate the most exquisite expressions of despair or disgust without descending to melodrama or hyperbole.