76
PARTISAN REVIEW
promise didn't mean anything.... Their crimes are worse than mine."
The bedrock faith in the system, which brought him through the war,
which survived impoverishment, injustice, and physical torture, has now
disintegrated, leaving him a haunted and a haunting man.
The last lines of the movie are a famous exception to the
Hollywood cult of the happy ending. James Allen appears in the shad–
ows, a shadow himself, for a furtive goodbye to his second wife. "How
do you live?" she asks him. A hollow, frightened voice hisses, "I steal."
His crazed eyes tell us that his second escape, for all its reckless bravado,
didn't really work. He is a wreck of a man, unable to function except as
the criminal and fugitive he was falsely accused of being. Quite literally,
society has made him what he is: a man who, in his half-demented, half–
realistic fears, sees through society, sees the lie of its official values. The
unusual title of the film, like the last line of dialogue, places this man in
an ongoing, open-ended, unresolved present: I am a fugitive, I still am.
He points a finger at us, for he is the homeless, shadowy outcast who
haunts our world, whom we would all prefer to forget. The movie ends
but his flight continues. It would be a long time before another
American film would end on such a hopeless, accusing note.
I can't discuss in detail the other side of thirties culture, the suppos–
edly escapist side. In contrast to proletarian novels, radical documentaries,
and films like
I Am a Fugitive,
the popular arts in the thirties were leg–
endary for their lightheartedness and frivolity. Sometimes the fun was an–
archic in a way that bordered on savagery. From the first half of the
decade, think of the zaniness of the Marx brothers and their scenarist, S.
J.
Perelman, the black humor fiction of Perelman's brother-in-law,
Nathanael West, the snidely insinuating comedy of W.
C.
Fields and
Mae West. At other times this popular culture was buoyant and
sophisticated, as in the witty lyrics and clever patter songs of Cole
Porter, Rogers and Hart, and the Gershwins, the screwball humor of the
Thin Man
series,
It Happened One Night,
and the many breakneck
romantic comedies that followed. The same period that produced the
histrionic Paul Muni, who clumped through
Scarface
like a childish,
menacing oaf, also gave us as one of its icons the lean, lightfooted,
whimsical figure of Fred Astaire, who embodied the grace and filigree of
the era as definitively as Muni conveyed its heavy, brooding seriousness.
Thus the conventional picture we get from
The Purple Rose
of
Cairo
or even
Sullivan's Travels,
of people going to the movies or listening to
the radio to escape their troubles - to daydream and fantasize - is seri–
ously inadequate. The relation of the arts to the social mood was far
