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I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
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In a Lonely Place (1950) (***, drama, crime) (D.-Nicholas Ray; Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Robert Warwick, Jeff Donnell, Martha Stewart) In contrast to so many leading men of his time, Bogart masterfully played a lot of memorable marginalized characters. In Lonely, he plays a talented, but believably self-destructive screenwriter who has an affair with aspiring actress Grahame. He is ... on a short list of suspects for the murder of a young woman. Bogart's character is complex and appropriately unpredictable. His character also has eerie similarities with Bogart's own brutal and highly self-destructive life before he married Lauren Bacall.
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Though he started in films around 1924, beefy American character actor Richard Alexander was regarded in studio press releases as a comparative newcomer when he was cast in the 1930 antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front. Alexander played Westhus, who early in the film orders novice soldier Lew Ayres to get out of his bunk. After this promising assignment, Alexander was soon consigned to bit parts, usually in roles calling for dumb brute strength; for example, Alexander is the bouncer at the violent Geneva "peace conference" in Wheeler and Woolsey's Diplomaniacs (33). Though familiar for his dozens of villainous roles in westerns, Alexander is best known for his kindly interpretation of the noble Prince Barin in the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s. Towards the end of his career, Richard Alexander became active with the executive board of the Screen Actors Guild, representing Hollywood extras.
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As he is very hungry, Jim goes with Pete (Preston Foster) to get a hamburger. Pete pulls out a gun and tells Jim to get the money out of the register. Jim takes the $5; but the police arrive. Pete shoots at the police, and they kill him; Jim is caught trying to run away. Jim is sentenced to ten years hard labor. He is chained in the barracks, wears a striped uniform, and is given "grease, pig fat, and sorghum" for breakfast.
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Many prison films continually repeat shots of inmates doing the same tasks which acts both as a link between scenes and as a reminder to the audience of the mundane regime of prison. In San Quentin (1937) for example we are regularly shown the massive exercise yard filled with inmates; in The Pot Carriers (1961) inmates are frequently seen lining up to collect food; and in McVicar (1981) many of the conversations take place as prisoners walk either up or down stairwells or from their cells. This uniformity in movement not only underlines the highly structured routine of the prison but extends the machinery image further. The motion of inmates, in contrast to the solid silence of the walls which contains it, mirrors the workings of a machine - prisoners are the cogs that whir around, driving the huge mechanism of punishment unswervingly onward.
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In the Mouth of Madness (1994) (**1/2, horror) (D.-John Carpenter; Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jurgen Prochnow, Bernie Casey, John Glover, David Warner) Sam Neill is John Trent, a very good insurance fraud investigator. Sutter Cane, an extremely well selling horror writer, disappears, an apparent suicide, along with the only draft of his latest and greatest book In the Mouth of Madness. His books are so disturbing that readers have a nasty tendency to go berserk and commit unspeakable crimes after reading them. No one has seen this current book except in bits and pieces, but the evidence is that Mouth makes his earlier novels look like Winnie the Pooh. Trent knows a rat when he smells one and goes about unearthing what to him is a clear case of fraud; if the books turns up after all this free publicity, think of the sales. Well, perhaps "unearth" was an unwise choice of words, as Trent begins to realize after he reads a couple of Cane's novels and his dreams become increasingly bizzare and frightening.
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The representation of the prison as a machine in cinema is fundamental to the prison movie. For it is from this idea that the other themes flow: escape from the machine, riot against the machine, the role of the machine in processing and rehabilitating inmates and, entering the machine from the free world as a new inmate.
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I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)