I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

Rosenberg’s complete analysis of this as Cool Hand Luke leaves nothing to be said, except to point out some small particularities.

Aboard ship, a Texan in the Sunset Division returning home from France remarks, “if anybody says ‘inspection’ to me, he’s gonna be S.O.L.,” an early record of this slang term.

At the depot in Lynndale, after James Allen has expressed his idea of a homecoming, LeRoy sets up his shot so that a building is partially obscured in the background, with only the letters “MOOT” visible on its signboard.

Hitchcock said to Truffaut, “Do you remember, in The Man Who Knew Too Much, there’s a scene in the dentist’s office? At first I had intended to do it in a barbershop, with the hot towels masking the men’s faces. But just before the shooting I saw Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, with Paul Muni, which has a scene just like it. So I transposed it to a dentist’s office, and while I was at it, I changed a few other things I didn’t like.”

The later depot scene, after Allen has escaped and bought a new suit of clothes, is remarkably like The Great Escape.

Oil for the Lamps of China

The title might be (as will appear) Lamps for the Oil of China.

A Cosmopolitan Production; “by Alice Tisdale Hobart,” says the main title. LeRoy goes still further and half-a-dozen times interposes quick shots of the book being read as transitional dissolves, a rare practice significantly remembered by Robert Stevenson in Jane Eyre.

At the opening, you are amidst the cream of the 1935 crop: a series of dissolves takes you into the Atlantis Oil Co. of New York, where an executive is giving a pep talk to the new men sitting in tiers around a Chaplin-sized globe. The ideal, he says, is to bring light to China after centuries of darkness, and this is “the ideal of a man.” Pat O’Brien’s face in close-up tells a whole story in the suggestion of a sigh.

And it’s off to China, with the look of Von Stroheim’s Greed and the feel of Sjöström’s The Wind, for a brittle introductory scene that starts numerous threads running through the film. LeRoy then takes off into an ascending series of episodes that lift the weight of the novelistic apparatus from his delicate theme; the first is set in Yokohama (Teru Shimada is the teahouse proprietor), with a Butterfly effect from the musique de fond, a subtle distinction in O’Brien’s view of the sophisticated Japanese, and a foreglimpse of The Night of the Iguana.

Gradually the theme is revealed to be very similar to and almost a prefigurement of Satyajit Ray’s in Company Limited, which may be stated as the power of inspiration in a corporate structure.

Office politics in New York are described as dictating company policy in China. O’Brien’s loyalty is shown in a difficult scene evoked by George Stevens for Penny Serenade. O’Brien’s savoir faire is a natural rapprochement based on study and appreciation of the Chinese and their culture. Josephine Hutchinson rounds out the trinity of thought: “Two things matter to a man—the woman he loves and the work he does.”

Even in drought, famine and cholera, O’Brien must fill his quota, but “God was good to us, even if China wasn’t.” O’Brien’s Chinese counterpart Ho says, “the company is to you what my ancestors are to me.” O’Brien tells his wife, “it’s my identity, it’s my work, it’s me!”

The Communist onslaught brings on an amazing gag when a staff car knocks a mule-cart off the road. Tony Gaudio’s lustrous cinematography (he shot The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Letter and The Red Pony, among other notable films) has a few beautiful effects, like Ho racing to the rescue in a rickshaw, floating swiftly through the scene.

Ho is shot down. O’Brien (briefly contemplating a laughing God) rescues the office monies from expropriation and is wounded, without benefit to his prestige. The company’s new regime opposes a tyranny of “the highest bidder” to O’Brien’s recognition of “face and tradition,” and he is passed over for promotion as “not progressive enough for the new regime.” The practice of forcing out senior staff to avoid paying pensions is shown to have been commonplace even then. But, says Hutchinson, “happiness is bought—and we’ve paid for ours.” O’Brien’s invention of a low-cost kerosene lamp given away to the local population has been appropriated by a higher-up, but she reveals the patent is his, and the company president reinstates him as the most qualified man for the job, anyway.

“So you see, honey,” he says, “the company does take care of its own.” “Yes, dear,” she answers.

The New York Times complains that “it presents the Chinese Communist movement as a vulturous gangsterism,” which aside from proving Gore Vidal’s point about the Times (“a bad newspaper”) misses the beauty of Keye Luke’s swift performance as the British-trained Communist officer sent to confiscate company funds. “We’re in a time of social changes,” he says, “and social changes cost money.”

Escape

LeRoy directs this for the significance of it, rather than to dramatic effect. This accounts for the discrepancy between reviewers then and now.

Cukor is supposed to have been dropped after filming with Paul Lukas, then Hitchcock refused, and LeRoy hired Conrad Veidt. This requires clarification.

Most of the film is handled as described, with a flatness tempered by commentary from a barman or a waiter, until the great café scene initiates LeRoy’s involvement, with a complex camera movement. His two “political policemen” enter the café and question Taylor extensively, and this is the first effect sought by LeRoy after establishing the general uneasiness of a police state. “This isn’t a country, it’s a Coney Island madhouse. A door looks like a door, until you try to walk through it. People look like people, till you try to talk to them, then something squirts in your eye.” The essential characteristic of the situation is the domination of the individual by the state, as revealed in the scene with the police commissioner. The door to his office has three lines elegantly set above the lintel, “One People, One Realm, One Leader”. If questioned on state policy concerning the arrest and murder of a citizen on factitious charges, the commissioner demands to know the source of the questioner’s information.

The second effect was sought in the first place. Nazimova’s coffin is carried in darkness with her inside it still alive, the sequence laying the political police over an image of Poe’s “The Premature Burial “ or “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

Cukor’s sequence, which must be the Countess’s palace immediately following (despite Conrad Veidt’s presence), is a beautiful piece of moviemaking that shows the cast and settings to best advantage and removes all doubt as to the abilities of Taylor and Shearer. Mayer probably fired Cukor for just this reason.

LeRoy knocks the whole film into a cocked hat. “I’ve had it up to here,” says Taylor, making the salute of the One Leader. There is a monstrous story to be told, he tells it monstrously.

René Clément’s Is Paris Burning? has something of the same idea, and the ending is modified to serve in J. Lee Thompson’s The Passage.

Kipling is cited. “We meet in an evil land / That is near to the gates of hell.” The title anticipates Casablanca in a way by its secondary reference to the love affair of the Countess and the General.

Million Dollar Mermaid

Méliès is directly invoked for the underwater ballets, but the overall image is one devised by Hans Richter and given to Busby Berkeley’s choreography.

It opens with the awful, tragical news that New York’s Hippodrome is a thing of the past. These wastrel times—as if maintaining a building were less than constructing it! A sequence of shots follows the credits which unfolded for Ken Russell, François Truffaut and Federico Fellini. The spirit of Charles Dodgson is invoked for the passage down the Thames. 2001: A Space Odyssey remembered Kellerman’s first press conference.

Attenborough replicated the Hollywood scenes for Chaplin. Consequences remained for Hockney and Godard.