Based on the true story of Robert Burns, who twice escaped from Georgia chain gangs.

Cast:
    Paul Muni as James Allen
    Preston Foster as Pete
    Glenda Farrell as Marie
    Helen Vinson as Helen
    Noel Francis as Linda

The film begins on a troop ship returning from WWI. James Allen is an Army sergeant: "Get me some kind of construction job." He doesn't want to work in a factory again.

When he arrives at the Lynndale train station, he is reunited with his family and Alice, who has "grown up." Mr. Parker is ready to give him his factory job back. Jim tells his family he's not going back to the factory. He wants to get out, "away from routine." He's been doing engineering work, wants to build and create. ("We'll be reading about you in the newspapers," one of the soldiers says.)

Jim goes into the shipping room at the Parker shoe factory. A new bridge is under construction nearby. He starts hanging around the construction site. He tells his family: "I've changed. I'm different now." He has grown. His mother encourages him to try a new job. His clergyman brother wants him to stay put.

Jim goes to work in Boston, gets laid off, goes by freighter to New Orleans, up to Wisconsin, then back to St. Louis, looking for steady work. Tries to sell his war medal: pawn shop has a boxfull. He walks into a small town in the South. Meets Pete, who takes him to a lunch wagon for a free hamburger. Pete pulls a gun on the cook and tells Jim to get the money from the register. The police come in and shoot it out with Pete (17:40). Pete is killed, and Jim tries to run away. He is caught immediately.

The judge gives Jim 10 years at hard labor. He is sent to (Merritt County) Camp #2 and fitted for leg irons--a 13-link chain. Roll call is at 4:20 a.m. Chained through a ring attached to their leg chain at night.

Jim eats breakfast at the table: bad, greasy food he can't eat. Going out to ride on the wagons to work: striped suits, blacks and whites working together. What's his crime, the triple murderer wants to know: "Looking at a hamburger."

Busting rocks on a rock pile, Jim is knocked down by a guard. Another con tells him: "You got to ask permission to wipe the sweat off your face." They are returned to the prison at 8:20 p.m. (29:00). They clean up and eat. Jim is very hungry and eats the food now. The warden comes in with a leather strap to punish a man for not working. When Jim mouths off, he gets whipped instead.

The convict Barney is discharged four weeks later, walking as if he still has his chains on. Red goes out in a box. "There's just two ways to get out of here: work out and die out."

Jim begins to think about escaping--"hang it on a limb," in the convict phrase. Working on the railroad tracks, Jim gets Sebastian, a black inmate, to loosen his shackles with his sledgehammer. The guards don't notice. That night in camp, Jim makes sure he can slip the shackles off his feet. Another old convict gives him seven dollars and tells him to look up Barney. On the rails again, Jim gets a toilet break, slips the shackles off, and makes a run for it (41:20).

Jim's luck is good. With the bloodhounds on his trail, he steals laundry off a line and changes clothes. Then he hides out in a marsh, breathing through a reed underwater. He eventually gets to the city (45:00). Gets a suit. "You look like a new man." While he's getting a shave, a cop comes in with news of the escaped convict. Jim decides to find a room and get off the street for the night.

Jim meets up with Barney in the rooming house. Barney brings in Linda to keep Jim company--a tall blonde in a black dress. She tells him, "You're among friends," as she sits on his lap.

Next day, at the train station, Jim has a scare. The chief of police shows up with his men, but goes off chasing a hobo. Jim rides the train all the way to Chicago.

Jim gets a job as "Allen James" doing labor for Tri-State Engineering at $4.00 a day. He starts off as a laborer, but soon gets a promotion to foreman paying $9.00 a day, then surveyor at $12.00 a day. He rents a room from a gap-toothed blonde for $20.00 a month; she obviously has her eye on him (57:00). He studies engineering at night while the blonde, Marie, chases after him in a negligee. When he rebuffs her, she promises that "some day you're going to be sorry."

Jim is promoted to assistant superintendent, at $14.00 a day. He is ready to move out and leave Marie behind. But somehow she learns of his past (intercepting his mail?); she shows him a letter from his brother that refers to the chain gang. She says she won't tell on him, if he becomes her husband (1:01:00). So Allen James and Marie Woods get married, in Chicago. He is promoted to General Superintendent at Tri-State.

Jim discovers that his wife is running around on him. He already knew that she was overspending his bank account. At a nightclub, he meets Helen, yet another pretty blonde, who leaves with him. She tells Jim she is "free, white and twenty-one." She offers to pull Jim out of his doldrums. Months later, he asks Marie for a divorce. It means nothing to her that Jim is in love with another woman: he is her lifetime meal ticket. They have a big argument, and she storms out.

Soon after, Jim is meeting with businessmen who are inviting him to be the featured speaker at the Chamber of Commerce banquet. Two detectives arrive with a warrant for his arrest. He is put in jail and becomes a celebrity denouncing chain gang conditions. The Governor of Illinois puts off a decision on extraditing him.

A legal official from the Southern state arrives to offer a deal: pay legal expenses and get a pardon after 90 days back in custody. He's promised a job as a clerk in one of the camps (1:11:00). His lawyer asks: "Why mete out punishment to a man who has proved himself a useful and honorable citizen?"

Jim has to decide whether to go back. "Can they be trusted?" Helen asks. He wants to be morally free, with nothing hanging over his head, and he wants to get married when he returns. With Helen's consent, Jim decides to go back.

The train takes him south. Jim meets with his Southern lawyer, who starts making noises that the governor may not be too happy with him for calling so much negative attention to the state's chain gangs. The agreement has been unilaterally changed: no clerk's job, maybe 60 days on the chain gang.

In the new prison camp, Jim is told by Bomber Wells, an old convict buddy, that this is the end of the line--the worst camp in the system. He goes to work with his pick again. At the Pardon Board hearing, Jim's brother and his lawyer extol his virtues. The board's chairman rises to defend the character-building qualities of the chain gangs, using Jim as a prime example.

His brother meets with Jim after (1:22:00), to tell him his pardon is denied. He has to serve nine more months, to prove he is a model prisoner. Jim is angry, but he says he'll be a model prisoner, if it kills him. At the end of the year, his lawyer makes another appeal to the Pardon Board, which suspends its decision indefinitely. Jim knows he will never get out.

The convicts are working putting rock on a road. Jim distracts the truck driver and steals the truck. He and Bomber make a break, the guards in hot pursuit. Bomber is shot but manages to set off dynamite that blocks the pursuing car. Jim blows a bridge a few minutes later to cut off the chase.

For almost a year he is a large. The headlines read: "What has become of James Allen?" Then Helen finds him waiting for her one night. He is obviously paranoid: changing jobs, traveling at night. Helen wanted it to be different. "It is different," he points out.

Jim backs away into the darkness. "Do you need anything?" Helen asks. How do you live?"

Jim's last words from the darkness: "I steal." (1:33:00)

The End.

Commentary:

Is Jim Allen a criminal? Or only a victim of an unjust legal system?  Is his first escape less justified than his second?

Mistreatment of veterans was commonplace after World War I. Does Jim's military record have anything to do with his legal status at any point?

The relationship of Jim and Marie is critical to the plot. Is Marie a cheap tramp? How does he treat her?

Compare the difference between what Jim wanted to be in 1919 and what he was in 1930. What are the most important signs of the transformation?

Robert Elliott Burns, the author of the book, was an accountant in New York City in 1917. He served in a medical detachment in World War I, returning with a profound sense of wanderlust. He wandered into Georgia, where he was arrested for a robbery and given a six- to ten-year prison sentence. He escaped on June 21, 1922. Burns went to Chicago and started in real estate, later building up The Greater Chicago Magazine from 1924 to 1929. When he filed for divorce, his wife turned him in as a prison escapee. When he voluntarily returned to Georgia in 1929, he was denied a pardon after the prosecutor objected. On September 4, 1930, Burns escaped again in a hired car (not a stolen dump truck, though this is a classic scene). He wrote his story as a serial for True Detective Mysteries from January to June 1931. The book was published to great acclaim and made into a film almost immediately. Burns was living in New Jersey in 1932 when the film came out. He enjoyed celebrity status and began making public appearances, only to be arrested as a fugitive once more. But the governor of New Jersey refused extradition to Georgia. Georgia abolished its system of local work camps employing chain gang labor at the end of the 1930s. Burns's sentence was finally commuted to time served in 1945; he was no longer a fugitive from a chain gang (which no longer existed).