74
PARTISAN REVIEW
way down, into life's pratfalls and social embarrassments, was the way
out.
The kinds of protest movies Sturges had in mind stretch from the
Warner Brothers problem movies of the early thirties, such as
I Am a
Fugitive From a Chain Gang
and
Wild Boys oj the Road,
to the grand
summation of the decade's social consciousness, John Ford's remarkably
faithful 1940 adaptation of
The Grapes oj Wrath.
Significantly, all three
of these films are road movies, not about observers doing research on the
poor but about ordinary people uprooted from a stable life, forced to
wander in search of something better, only to find more hellish condi–
tions among other displaced, unwanted, or viciously mistreated people.
The social disintegration, violence, and human isolation in these films are
akin to the atmosphere in the gritty gangster films from which they
emerged (often made at the same studio, Warner Brothers) .
Like some of the gangster films,
I Am a Fugitive
traces the roots of
social turmoil back to the Great War, which had exposed the men who
fought in it to violence and carnage but also to a wider world than the
one they came from. Based on a controversial magazine serial that was
turned into a novel,
I Am a Fugitive
shows us how James Allen (played by
Paul Muni) returns from the war to confront a different world, and a
family that can't understand what he's been through or how he's
changed. This is exactly what happens in Hemingway's great story
"Soldier's Home." Just as Hemingway's returning soldier, having seen
what he's seen, can no longer summon up the will or purpose to do
anything, Muni finds his old factory job too confining. After so much
Army regimentation, he recoils at the rigid industrial routine. He doesn't
want to be a "soldier of peace," a soldier of anything. He wants to be
creative, an engineer who can work with his hands and build projections
of his own dreams. Instead he's chained to a desk job he can do with his
eyes closed. "I've changed ... been through hell," he tries to explain.
So he leaves his steady job, crisscrosses the country, gradually becom–
ing a hobo as he's unable to find work. He tries to pawn his war medals
but the pawnshop already has a case full. The time-frame is vague but
we're still in the early twenties, a relatively prosperous period. We soon
understand that the film is projecting the social crisis of the Depression
onto the earlier decade, thinking about the twenties in thirties terms:
scarcity of work, a mobility born of ambition but soon fueled by des–
peration, the disruption of social bonds and promises embodied in the
discarded medals, which speak to us of discarded values, dreams, and ide–
als.
Soon, caught up in another hobo' s stick-up attempt, Muni is rail-
