Preface: Now that I’ve finally decided to go “old” with the blog, I’m doing it in style with not just a regular “old” film, but two, and two that have ripened with age. For this week’s Midnight Screenings, the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s, ’60s, ’50s, and ’40s wouldn’t do. I’m taking it back to two of the granddaddy’s of filmmaking from the early ’30s, two of the earliest “talkies” and two supreme influences on Midnight Cinema from a time where films could be more openly playful and subversive as filmmakers were still trying to prod and poke at the medium to expose its limits and possibilities.

One of the most controversial films made during pre-Code era Hollywood, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang appears shockingly modern viewed from 2014. It’s blunt, direct, and forthright about its, admittedly very obvious, message, and from its implicatory title to its haunted fade to black it makes no bones about what was then, and still is today, a significant issue with a justice system that favors harsh abuse over human rights. The movie plays things scruffily and with a hound-dog broadness, perhaps for the best; the freed-from-the-shackles primal qualities afford the film a harshness and a blunt edge giving way to a simply told but severely felt indictment of the American justice system. The film, released in 1932 just before the Hays Code, breathes new life into that eternally soulless void of a garishly emotive genre of filmmaking: the message movie. Continue reading →