1
1957. You are ten years old, no longer a small boy, but not yet a big boy, a person best described as a medium boy, a boy at the summit of his late-middle childhood, still walled off from the world in the year of Sputnik 1 and 2, but less so than you were the year before, with some vague understanding that the Suez Crisis has ended, that Eisenhower has sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in order to stop the riots and help desegregate the schools, that Hurricane Audrey has killed more than five hundred people in Texas and Louisiana, that a book about the end of the world called On the Beach has been published, but you know nothing about the publication of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and even less than nothing about the death of Joseph McCarthy or the expulsion of Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters union from the AFL-CIO. It is a Saturday afternoon in May, and you and a friend of yours from school, Mark F., a new comrade who is also your Little League teammate, are driven to the movies by one of your parents and dropped off to watch the feature by yourselves. The title of the film you see that afternoon is The Incredible Shrinking Man, and in much the same way that The War of the Worlds affected you four years earlier, this film turns you inside out and drastically alters the way you think about the universe. The shock when you were six can best be called a theological shock—a sudden realization of the limits of God’s power, and the daunting conundrum that entailed, for how could the power of the all-powerful one in any way be limited?—but the shock of Shrinking Man is a philosophical shock, a metaphysical shock, and such is the power of that somber little black-and-white film that it leaves you in a state of gasping exaltation, feeling as if you have been given a new brain.1
From the ominous music that plays during the opening credits, you understand that you are about to be taken on a dark and menacing ride, but once the action begins, your fears are assuaged somewhat by the presence of a voice-over narrator, the shrinking man himself, who addresses the audience in the first person, which means that no matter what terrible adventures might be in store for him, he will manage to come through them alive, for how could a man tell his own story if he were dead? The strange, almost unbelievable story of Robert Scott Carey began on an ordinary summer day. I know that story better than anyone else—because I am Robert Scott Carey.
Lying side by side in their bathing suits, Carey and his wife, Louise, are sunning themselves on the deck of a cabin cruiser. The boat drifts languidly over the waters of the Pacific, the sky is clear, and all is well. They are both young and attractive, they are in love, and when they aren’t kissing, they talk to each other with the playful, teasing banter of lifelong soul mates. Louise goes below deck to fetch some beer for them, and that is when it happens, when a dense cloud or mist suddenly appears on the horizon and begins rushing toward the boat, a large, all-enveloping mist that scuds along the surface of the ocean with a strange, clamoring sibilance, so loud that Carey, who is drowsing on the deck with his eyes closed, sits up, then stands up to watch the cloud speed forward and engulf the boat. He raises his arms in an instinctive gesture of defense, doing what he can to protect himself from the vaporous assault, which is nothing, but then the fast-moving cloud is already past him, and within seconds the sky is clear again. As Louise emerges from the cabin, she sees the cloud floating off into the distance. What was that? she asks. I don’t know, he replies, some kind of … mist. Louise turns to him and notices that his torso is covered with flecks of phosphorescent dust, quasi-metallic particles glinting in the light, unnatural, disturbing, inexplicable, but the glow begins to fade, and the scene ends with the two of them rubbing off the flecks with towels.
Six months go by. One morning, as Louise is setting the table for breakfast, Carey calls down to her from their upstairs bedroom, asking if the right pants have been sent back from the cleaners. Cut to the bedroom: Carey is standing in front of a full-length mirror, pulling the waist of his pants out from his body. There are two or three inches of slack, meaning that the pants are too large for him, and a bit later, when he puts on his shirt, his monogrammed white business shirt, that proves to be too large for him as well. The metamorphosis has begun, but it is still early days at this point, and neither Carey nor Louise has the smallest notion of what lies ahead. That morning, in fact, the ever-cheerful, wisecracking Louise suggests that Carey is simply losing weight and that she finds it very becoming.
But Carey is alarmed. Without telling his wife, he goes to a doctor for a checkup, and it is in Dr. Bramson’s office that he learns he is now five feet, eleven inches tall and weighs one hundred seventy-four pounds. Above average on both counts, but as Carey explains to Bramson he has always been six-one and has mysteriously dropped almost ten pounds. The doctor calmly brushes aside these numbers, telling Carey that he has probably lost the weight because of stress and overwork, and as for the missing two inches, he doubts they are really missing. He asks Carey how many times he has been measured. Only three, it turns out, once for the draft board, once in the navy, and once for a life insurance physical. Errors could have been made during all three of them, Bramson says, errors often happen, and results can vary depending on when the exam is held (people are tallest in the morning, he remarks, then they shrink a little over the course of the day as gravity compresses the spinal disks, the bone joints, and so forth), and on top of that one must not overlook the problem of standing too erectly, which can make a person seem taller than he actually is, and so, when all is said and done, a difference of two inches is nothing to worry about. You’ve likely lost some weight due to insufficient diet, Bramson says, but (with a dismissive laugh) people don’t get shorter, Mr. Carey. They just don’t get shorter.
Another week goes by. Standing on the bathroom scale one evening, Carey discovers that he has lost four more pounds. Even more unsettling, when he and Louise embrace a few moments later, she is standing eye to eye with him, an irrefutable sign of his slow diminishment, since in the past she had always stood on her toes when they kissed, stretching up in order to bring her lips against his. I’m getting smaller, Lou, he says—every day. She knows that now, accepts that now, but at the same time she is incredulous—as anyone would be, as you yourself are, sitting in the darkened theater watching the film, for the thing that is happening to Scott Carey cannot possibly happen. A knot of dread begins to form in your stomach. You can already sense where the story is going, and it is almost too much for you to bear. You pray for a miracle and hope you are wrong, hope that some scientific mastermind will step in and figure out a way to arrest the shrinking of the shrinking man, for by now Scott Carey is no longer just a character in a film, Scott Carey is you.
He returns to Dr. Bramson’s office, goes back several times over the next week, and Bramson, who is no longer smiling and confident, no longer the reassuring skeptic who scoffed at Carey after the first exam, is now studying two sets of X-rays, one taken at the beginning of the week and the other at the end, identical shots of Carey’s thoracic region that detail his spinal and rib structure, and as Bramson puts the first plate on top of the second, it is apparent that although the pictures are essentially the same, one skeletal system is smaller than the other. This is the medical proof, the final test that abolishes all doubt about the nature of Carey’s condition, and Bramson is both shaken and bewildered, suddenly in over his head, and therefore grim, almost angry, as he walks over to Carey and Louise and tells them what he has found. It is wholly unprecedented, he says, there is no way to account for it, but Carey is indeed getting smaller.
On Bramson’s advice, Carey goes to the California Medical Research Institute, a West Coast stand-in for a place like the Mayo Clinic, where he spends the next three weeks in the hands of various specialists, undergoing an intensive battery of tests. These probings and inspections are presented in a brief montage, and as one image quickly gives way to another, Carey’s voice returns to explain what is happening: I drank a barium solution and stood behind a fluoroscope screen. They gave me radioactive iodine … and an examination with a Geiger counter. I had electrodes fastened to my head. Water-restriction tests. Protein-bond tests. Eye tests. Blood cultures. X-rays and more X-rays. Tests. Endless tests. And then the final examination, a paper chromatography test …
Dr. Silver, the man in charge of the case, tells Carey and Louise that in addition to a gradual loss of nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, the chromatography test has revealed a rearrangement of the molecular structure of the cells in Carey’s body. Carey asks if he is talking about cancer, but Silver says no, it’s more like an anti-cancer, a chemical process that is causing all of Carey’s organs to diminish proportionately. Then Silver asks two decisive questions. First, has he ever been exposed to any kind of germ spray, in particular an insecticide, a great deal of insecticide? Carey searches his memory and finally recalls that, yes, one morning several months ago, on his way to work, he took a shortcut through a back alley, and while he was walking there a truck turned in, spraying trees. Silver nods. They were fairly certain of that, he says, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough, it was only the beginning, and something must have happened to that insecticide after it entered Carey’s system, something that turned a mildly virulent germ spray into a deadly force. Then comes the second question: has he been exposed to any type of radioactivity in the past six months? Of course not, Carey says, he doesn’t come in contact with anything like that, he works in a— Before he can finish the sentence, Louise interrupts him. Scott, she says, Scott, that day we were on the boat. That mist …
All is clear now. The cause of the horror has been discovered, the effect has been rigorously documented, and as the Careys settle into their car to begin the drive home, Louise fends off her husband’s grim, downcast remarks with a steady, almost cheerful optimism, saying she is certain the doctors will find a way to help him, that it won’t be long before Dr. Silver finds an antitoxin to reverse what is happening. They can look, Carey says, but they don’t have to find. And then: I can’t go on like this—dropping weight, shrinking … And that leaves the question: how long have I got? To which Louise responds, speaking in a firm and passionate voice: Don’t say that, Scott—ever again. He looks away from her and pushes on with his argument: I want you to start thinking about us. Our marriage. Some pretty awful things might happen. There’s a limit to your obligation. Shaken by his words, almost on the point of tears, Louise throws her arms around her husband and kisses him on the mouth. I love you, she says. Don’t you know that? As long as you have this wedding ring on, I’ll always be with you.
Cut to a close-up of the ring on the fourth finger of Carey’s left hand. An instant later, the ring slips off his finger and falls to the floor.
Until now, you have watched the film with utmost attention, you have already decided that it is the best film you have seen, perhaps the best film you will ever see, and if you don’t fully understand the scientific or pseudo-scientific language spoken by Dr. Silver, you feel that words such as chromatography, phosphorus, radioactive iodine, and molecular structure have given an air of plausibility to Carey’s unfortunate condition. Much as you have been engaged so far, however, impressed as you have been by the opening sequences of the film, you are not prepared for the shock of what comes next, for it is only now, as the second part of the film begins, with its simple yet altogether ingenious visual effects, that the story of the incredible shrinking man rises to a new level of brilliance and burns itself into your heart forever.
The action shifts to the Careys’ living room, to their sparely furnished modern suburban house, so denuded of personal objects and intimate touches as to qualify as a generic house, a place without character or comfort, a standard American box dwelling from the 1950s, bland and blank, chilly, even as the California sunlight pours through the windows. There is no indication as to how much time has elapsed since the ring fell off Carey’s finger, but the next scene begins with a new character standing in the middle of the frame. This is Charlie, Scott’s older brother and employer, and as Louise sits on the sofa listening to him, he addresses someone who is sitting in an armchair, but because the back of the chair is turned toward the camera, and because the head of the person sitting in the chair cannot be seen, it is impossible to know who that person is. Charlie is talking about a lost account, about business troubles and money troubles, and then he says: I just can’t afford to send you your paychecks anymore—meaning the person in the chair. It is quickly becoming clear that the unseen person is Scott, but still the camera holds on Charlie, who now reports that journalists have been showing up at the plant and asking questions, no doubt because someone at the medical center leaked word about the case, and according to a man who works for the American Press Syndicate, Charlie says, there’s a good chance that Scott could be paid to write his story. Since the story is bound to break anyway, why not get paid to present it to the public himself? Louise is disgusted by the crassness of the proposal, but Charlie is a practical man, and he tells Scott to think about it. That is when the camera finally turns around to reveal Carey—but only his face, in a tight close-up. He looks haggard and anguished, there are dark circles under his eyes, but it is still the same face, he is still the same person as before. Slowly, however, the camera dollies back, and what you now see jolts you from the crown of your head to the tips of the toes in your socks, a surge of high-voltage current that runs through your body with such speed and such force that you feel you have been electrocuted. There is Carey sitting in the chair, the same Carey who suddenly and appallingly is no bigger than you are, the size of a medium boy, barely five feet tall, dressed in the clothes of a ten-year-old and wearing sneakers on his feet, a diminutive Scott Carey sitting in what appears to be the largest armchair in the world. All right, he says to his brother, I’ll think about it.
You are old enough to understand that Grant Williams, the actor who plays the shrinking man, has not grown smaller, that the effect has been created by a clever production designer who has built an enormous chair, a chair that could easily accommodate a twelve-foot giant, but the impact you feel is nevertheless wondrous and uncanny. There is nothing complicated about it, it is a simple matter of juggling scale, and yet the sensation of surprise and dislocation overwhelms you, thrills you, disturbs you, as if everything you have ever assumed about the physical world has been thrown abruptly into question.
Bit by bit, as you adjust to Carey’s diminished size, gradually feeling the oddness of it turn into something familiar, the action moves ahead. The story has indeed broken, and overnight Carey has become a national figure, the subject of magazine articles and television news reports, his house surrounded by journalists, gawkers, and camera crews, a once normal man transformed into a freak, a phenomenon, hounded so persistently that he can no longer go outside. His sole activity is writing, writing a book about his experiences, a journal that charts the progress of his condition, and you are amazed to see him in his little boy’s body working with a gigantic pencil, amazed by the immensity of the telephone receiver he holds in his hand, each visual trick continues to surprise you and move you, but what touches you even more is the portrait of Carey’s mental state, the tough, unsentimental depiction of a man on the verge of an emotional crack-up, for Carey cannot come to terms with what is happening to him, he will not accept it, and again and again he gives in to his rage, a madman crying out in bitterness, howling forth his contempt for the world, at times even turning on Louise, steadfast Louise, as patient and loving as ever, who still lives with the hope that the doctors will save him. Meanwhile, Carey continues to shrink. On October seventeenth, he is down to thirty-six and a half inches and weighs fifty-two pounds. He is in despair. Then, a sudden, miraculous turn. The medical center calls to tell him that the antitoxin is ready.
Tense, uncertain days as Dr. Silver injects Carey with the potential remedy, warning that there is just a fifty-fifty chance of success, but after a week of torment and waiting, Carey’s measurements continue to hold at thirty-six and a half inches and fifty-two pounds. An overjoyed Louise says, It’s over, Scott. You’re going to be all right … but when Carey asks Silver how long it will take for him to get back to normal, the doctor frowns, hesitates, and finally tells him that stopping the degenerative process of his disease is one thing, but reversing the process is quite another. Carey’s growth capacity is as limited as any adult’s, he says, and in order to help him any further, a whole new set of scientific problems will have to be overcome—meaning that Carey will most likely continue to be three feet tall for the rest of his life. They will go on working, the doctor says, they will push their knowledge as far as they can, and maybe, just maybe, the day will come when they have the answer, but at this point nothing is sure.
The news is both good and not good, then, and although you are disappointed that nothing more can be done for Carey, saddened that he will have to go on in this diminished state, another part of you is vastly relieved, for the shrinking of his body has been arrested, and you will not have to face the horror of watching him melt away into nothing. No one wants to be a midget, of course, but better that, you tell yourself, than to vanish into thin air.
Back home, Carey continues to brood. The worst might be over, but he is still struggling to come to terms with his condition, still angry, still unable to find the courage to act as a husband to Louise, and because he has withdrawn from her in his shame, he knows he is making her suffer, which only augments his own suffering. Louise, he says, so strong, so brave—what was I doing to her? I loathed myself as I never loathed any living creature! Unable to stand it anymore, he rushes out of the house one night, a grown man in his child’s body, still wearing his ridiculous, infantilizing sneakers, a lost and pathetic figure walking down the darkened streets of his neighborhood, not going anywhere in particular, just going for the sake of going. By and by, he comes upon a carnival, the noise and confusion of a honky-tonk fun fair. The noise draws him in, and once he enters the grounds, it isn’t long before he stops in front of the freak show. Yes, sir, folks, the barker is shouting, it’s the big sideshow! See the Bearded Lady, the Snake Woman, the Alligator Boy! See all the freaks of nature! Carey recoils in disgust, sweating and miserable, unable to watch anymore, and then slinks off to a nearby café, where he goes up to the counter and orders a cup of coffee. You note how tiny he looks in that setting, you register the grotesquely large size of the cup and saucer as he carries them over to a booth, you see his isolation in the midst of others, the unremitting pain of being who he is. Just moments after Carey sits down, however, someone approaches the booth, a pretty young woman, very pretty, in fact, who also happens to be carrying a cup of coffee—and is also tiny, also a midget. She asks if she can join him.
Your heart lifts when Carey does not send her away. He looks nonplussed, as if it had never occurred to him that there were other small people in the world besides himself, and yet, shy and awkward as he is with her at first, you also sense that he is intrigued by her, not only because she is beautiful to look at but because he knows he has found a semblable, une soeur. Her name is Clarice. Kind and affable, she slowly wears down Carey’s defensiveness with her friendly manner, they are settling into what promises to be a pleasant conversation, but then he tells her his full name, and she freezes. He didn’t have to do that, of course, he could have given her his first name only, or else have invented a false name, but he has done it on purpose because he wants her to know that he is the notorious shrinking man, for it is already clear to him—even if he doesn’t know it yet—that she is the one person he can confide in. Not understanding, Clarice delicately asks if he would rather be alone. No, no, that isn’t it, Carey says, he wants to talk to her, and suddenly she relaxes again, realizing she has misjudged him. The conversation continues, and bit by bit she tries to lead him into a new way of thinking about himself, explaining that being small is not the worst tragedy in the world, that even if they live among giants, the world can be a good place, and for people like them the sky is just as blue as it is for the others, the friends are just as warm, love is just as wonderful. Carey listens attentively, still dubious but at the same time wanting to believe her, and then she must be going, she can’t be late for her performance, and as he stands up to say good-bye to her, he asks if he can see her again. If you like, she says, and then she adds, looking into his eyes: You know, you’re taller than I am, Scott.
Cut to the living room of the house, where Carey is hard at work on his book. That night I got a grip on my life again, he says. I was telling the world of my experience, and with the telling it became easier.
You are beginning to feel encouraged. For the first time since the opening minutes of the film, something positive has happened, the ineluctable forces of disintegration have been reoriented toward acceptance and hope, and as you watch Carey immerse himself in the writing of his memoir, you prepare yourself for what could be an optimistic conclusion to the story, a possible happy ending. Carey will fall in love with little Clarice and live out the rest of his days as a contented midget. He and Louise will have to separate, of course, but his good and honorable wife will understand that marriage is no longer feasible for them, and they will part the best of friends, for Carey must now live among people of his own kind. That is the crucial point. He will no longer be alone, no longer feel that he has been cast out from society. He will belong, and in that belonging he will find fulfillment.
You cling to that view of Carey’s fate because of the voice-over narration, because the hero of the story is continuing to tell his story to the audience, and now that he is writing his book, you assume the words he is speaking are identical to the ones he has written. In your mind, the book has already been published (why else would he be using the past tense?), which could only mean that he has survived his horrific ordeal and is now living a normal life.
As the next scene begins, it appears that your prediction is about to come true, for there is Carey sitting on a park bench with Clarice, watching her read the manuscript of his book, and if the book has now been finished, if there are no more words to write, would that not seem to suggest that the shrinking part of Shrinking Man is finished as well?
Moved by what she has read, Clarice looks up and tells him what a fine job he has done. Carey takes hold of her hand. He wants her to know how much their meeting has meant to him, what an enormous difference it makes to be with someone who understands,to which she replies: You’re so much better now. They are a picture of two souls in harmony, a man and a woman reveling in a moment of serene companionship, and even if you are just ten years old, it is clear to you that they have fallen in love. All true, everything you have predicted is coming true, but then they stand up, and the joy in Carey’s face suddenly turns to alarm. Two weeks ago, he was taller than she was, but now (horribile dictu) he is shorter. It’s starting again! he shouts. It’s starting! He backs away from her in terror, in panicked revulsion, and then, without saying another word, turns around and starts to run.
This is the last thing you were expecting—a development so unexpected that you never even considered it as a possibility. You thought the antitoxin was infallible, that once it was shown to be effective, it would go on being effective forever, but now that its powers have been exhausted, what is there to look forward to but an agonizing plunge into the void? You brace yourself for something terrible, trying to imagine what will happen next, grimly struggling to accept the fact that all hope is gone now, but even though you think you are prepared for whatever it is that might come, the filmmakers are far ahead of you, and they begin the third and last part of the story with a startling leap forward in time, so far in advance of what your child’s imagination ever could have conceived that the wind is knocked out of you, and from that point on you will be gasping for air, struggling to breathe until the last moment of the film.
The next scene begins with a shot of Carey standing alone in a room. He is wearing what looks to be a loose-fitting pair of pajamas made of some coarse, homespun material, a strange costume, you feel, but not too strange to distract your attention from the furniture in the room, which is perfectly proportioned to the size of Carey’s body. He is no longer dwarfed by his surroundings, no longer out of place in a world that is too large for him, and this confuses you, for it is certain that he cannot have grown bigger since the last scene, which ended with the discovery that he was growing smaller again. And yet everything looks so normal, you say to yourself, as if all the elements of the physical environment have been put back into their proper balance. But how can things be normal when you have just been told they aren’t normal? A few moments later, the answer is given:
Because he is living in a dollhouse. Because he is no more than three inches tall.
Louise comes down the stairs, and her footsteps are thunderous, shaking Carey’s little house so violently that he has to cling to the banister to prevent himself from falling down. When she opens her mouth to speak, her voice is so loud that he covers his ears in pain. He steps out onto the balcony and scolds her for making such a racket, and you understand that he has lost his mind, that he has turned into a tyrant, that this ever-shrinking man rules over his wife with aggressive, ever more vicious acts of mental terrorism. Only I had the power to release her, he tells the audience—if I could find the courage to end my wretched existence. But each day I thought: Perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow the doctors will save me.
Louise goes out to do some errands, and as she opens the door to make her exit, their pet cat slips into the house. The cat has already appeared in a number of earlier scenes, but Carey was larger then, too large for the cat to pose any threat to him, but now he has been reduced to the size of a mouse, and with Louise suddenly out of the picture, the film enters its final, excruciating act.
For the next half hour, you watch in a state of horrified wonder, marveling at each new trick of perspective, each new distortion of scale, the brutal assault of the cat to begin with, who attacks the dollhouse and sends Carey sprinting across the living room carpet, a thumb-sized man running for his life over a floor that resembles an immense barren field, an empty plain stretching for hundreds of yards all around him, the ferocious, Brobdingnagian cat in pursuit, yowling with the force of a dozen demented tigers, who manages to swipe Carey with his claws, ripping off part of his shirt and bloodying his back, but Carey leaps up onto a dangling electric cord, which is attached to the base of a table lamp, and when the lamp comes crashing to the floor, the cat is temporarily frightened off. Carey dashes toward the cellar door, another all-out run across the immense, barren plain of carpet, maneuvers himself behind the door to hide from the now-recovered cat, standing on the top step of the mountainous wooden staircase that leads to the cellar, and just when it looks as if he has wormed his way out of trouble, Louise returns to the house, a draft of air rushes through the room as she opens the front door, and the cellar door slams shut, banging into Carey and knocking him off balance. Without warning, he is suddenly pitching forward into empty space, falling headlong into the depths of the cellar, like a man who has been pushed off the roof of a twenty-story building.
He lands in a wooden crate filled with assorted bits of discarded junk—and (luckily) a thick pile of rags. The rags cushion the fall, but the impact is nevertheless jarring, he is stunned senseless, and some moments pass before he comes to. Meanwhile, upstairs in the living room, Louise has walked in on the disturbing spectacle of the wrecked dollhouse, the presence of the cat, and the absence of her husband. When she discovers the small bloodied fragment of Carey’s shirt lying on the floor, there is only one conclusion to be drawn. Grotesque and unthinkable as that conclusion might be, the chilling sight of the cat sitting in a corner licking his paws leaves no room for doubt in Louise’s mind. She moans in agony, unable to see her way past the evidence. Carey is dead. She has proof that Carey is dead, and before long the news will be reported on television, word of the tragic death of the shrinking man will be broadcast from one end of the country to the other, and Louise will retire to her bedroom in a state of nervous collapse.
But there is Carey down in the cellar, still alive, bruised and shaken but very much alive, sitting up in the wooden box and trying to figure out what to do next. He is certain that Louise will eventually come downstairs to rescue him, and because he believes there is still hope, he resolves to do everything in his power to survive, even as he continues to grow smaller. From this point on, the film becomes a different film, a deeper film, the story of a man stripped bare, thrown back on himself, a man alone battling the obstacles that surround him, a minute Odysseus or Robinson Crusoe living by the force of his wit, his courage, his resourcefulness, making do with whatever objects and nourishment are at hand in that dank suburban basement, which has now become his entire universe. That is what grips you so: the very ordinariness of his surroundings and how each ordinary thing, whether an empty shoe polish can or a spool of thread, whether a sewing needle or a wooden match, whether a lump of cheese stuck in a mousetrap or a drop of water falling from a defective water heater, takes on the dimensions of the extraordinary, the impossible, for each thing has been reinvented, transformed into something else because of its enormous size in relation to Carey’s body, and the smaller Carey grows, the less sorry he feels for himself, the more insightful his comments become, and even as he endures one physical trial after another, it is as if he is undergoing a spiritual purification, elevating himself to a new level of consciousness.
Scaling walls with one-inch nails bent into grappling hooks, sleeping in an empty box of wooden matches, striking a match as long as he is in order to cut off a slender filament of sewing thread that for him is just as thick and tough as a line of hemp, nearly drowning in a flood as water pours out of the defective water heater—saved from slipping down the drain by clinging to an immense floating pencil—scavenging for crumbs of hardened bread, and then, the quest for the most important prize of all, a stale, half-eaten wedge of sponge cake, which has been captured by Carey’s new enemy, his sole fellow creature in that lonely underground world, a spider, a monstrously large and repugnant spider, three or four times larger than Carey, and the combat between them that ensues, with all its delirious shifts in advantage between the one and the other, is even more compelling to you than a similar scene you witnessed in another movie theater a year or two earlier, Odysseus thrusting his sword into the eye of the Cyclops, which was played out in Technicolor in the film Ulysses (with the former Issur Danielovitch in the title role), for the shrinking man does not have the confidence or the strength of the Greek hero, he is the smallest man on the face of the earth, and his only weapons are a pin he has extracted from a pincushion and the brain in his head. From your earliest childhood, you have been a keen observer of ants and bugs and flies, and you have often speculated on how large the world must look to those tiny beings, so different from the way you perceive the world yourself, and now, in the final minutes of The Incredible Shrinking Man, you are able to see your musings acted out on-screen, for by the time Carey manages to kill the spider, he is indeed no bigger than an ant.
Transfixed as you are by these deftly orchestrated sequences, these enthralling visual tropes and inventions, which turn real space into imagined space and yet somehow contrive to make the imagined real, or at least plausible, convincing, true to the geometries of lived experience—in spite of how dazzled you are by the action on-screen, it is Carey’s voice that holds it together for you, his words give the action its meaning, and in the end those words have an even greater and more lasting effect on you than the black-and-white images flickering before your eyes. By some miracle, he is still talking, still telling his story to the audience, and even though this makes no sense to you—where is his voice coming from? how can he be talking about his present condition when his lips are not moving?—you nevertheless accept it on faith, acceding to the givens of the film by reinterpreting the role of the narration, telling yourself that he is not really talking but thinking, that all along the words you have been hearing are in fact the thoughts in his head.
Louise has already come and gone. Carey has watched her walk down the stairs to the cellar, he has called out to her in a frantic attempt to attract her attention, but his voice was too small to be heard, his body was too small to be seen, and she has gone upstairs again and left the house for good. Now, in a final burst of will, summoning every bit of strength that remains in his depleted, still-shrinking body, acting with unparalleled stubbornness and ingenuity, he has captured the one source of food in the cellar, he has killed the spider, and just when you think he has triumphed again, has achieved what is perhaps his greatest victory, his thoughts push him forward to the next stage of understanding, and the victory turns out to be nothing, of no importance whatsoever.
But even as I touched the dry, flaking crumbs of nourishment, it was as if my body had ceased to exist. There was no hunger—no longer the terrible fear of shrinking …
So begins Carey’s concluding monologue, a quasi-mystical interrogation of the interplay between the divine and the human that both stirs you and confounds you, and yet even if you do not fully grasp what he is saying, his words seem to touch on everything that matters most—who are we? what are we? how do we fit into a cosmos that is beyond our understanding?—which makes you feel that you are being led toward a place where you can glimpse some new truth about the world, and as you transcribe those words now, recognizing how awkward they are, how scumbled their philosophical propositions, you must travel back into your ten-year-old’s mind in order to re-experience the power they had for you then, for wobbly as those words might seem to you today, fifty-five years ago they struck you with all the force of a blow to the head.
I was continuing to shrink. To become what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future?
If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?
So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite, but suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.
I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number. God’s silver tapestry spread across the night, and in that moment I knew the answer, the riddle of the infinite.
I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man’s conception, not nature’s.
And I felt my body dwindling into nothing, becoming nothing. My fears melted away, and in their place came acceptance.
All this vast majesty of creation. It had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.
To God there is no zero.
I still exist!
By the end, Carey is no more than a fraction of an inch tall, so puny that he is able to step through a square in a screen window and go outside into the night. The camera then tilts upward, revealing an immense sky thick with stars and the swirl of distant constellations, meaning that when Carey comes to the end of his monologue, he is no longer visible. You try to absorb what is happening. He will continue to become smaller and smaller, shrinking down to the size of a subatomic particle, devolving into a monad of pure consciousness, and yet the implication is that he will never entirely disappear, that as long as he is still alive, he cannot be reduced to nothing. Where does he go from there? What further adventures await him? He will merge with the universe, you tell yourself, and even then his mind will go on thinking, his voice will go on speaking, and as you walk out of the theater with your friend Mark, the two of you battered into mute submission by the ending of the film, you feel that the world has changed its shape within you, that the world you live in now is no longer the same world that existed two hours ago, that it will not and cannot ever be the same again.
2
1961. You can’t remember the month, but you believe it was sometime in the fall. You were fourteen. Adolescence had struck, childhood was well behind you now, and the social whirl that had so consumed you at eleven and twelve had lost its charm. You avoided going to dances and parties, and even though you were mad for girls, ever more involved in the pursuit of your erotic education, you no longer had any desire to fit in, you made a point of going your own way, and as far as the world was concerned, whether the small world of your New Jersey town or the large world of your country, you saw yourself as a contrarian, a person at odds with things-as-they-were. You were still wrapped up in playing sports (football, basketball, and baseball—with ever-increasing skill and intensity of purpose), but games were no longer the center of your life, and rock and roll was dead. The previous year, you had spent hundreds of hours listening to folk music, records by the Weavers and Woody Guthrie, attracted by the words of protest that ran through their songs, but by now you had begun to lose interest in those simple messages, you were moving on, dwelling for a season or two in the kingdom of jazz, and then, by fourteen, fourteen and a half, immersing yourself in classical music, Bach and Beethoven, Handel and Mozart, Schubert and Haydn, drawing sustenance from those composers in ways that wouldn’t have seemed possible just a year or two before, discovering the music that has continued to sustain you through all the years that have followed. You were reading more now as well, the barrier that had once stood between you and what you considered to be first-rank literature had fallen, and off you ran into that immense country that is still your home, beginning with twentieth-century Americans such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and Salinger, but also meeting Kafka and Orwell for the first time that year, camping out with Voltaire’s Candide—which made you laugh harder than any book you had ever read—and shaking hands with Emily Dickinson and William Blake, and before long you would be booking passage to Russia, France, England, Ireland, and Germany, as well as working your way back into the American past. That was also the year when you read The Communist Manifesto for the first time—which was the year of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the year of Eisenhower’s speech about the military-industrial complex, the year of Kennedy’s inauguration, the year of the Peace Corps and the Bay of Pigs, the year Alan Shepard became the first American to be launched into space, the year of the Berlin Wall. You were paying attention now, you had turned into a political creature with opinions and arguments and counterarguments, appalled by the nuclear arms race between America and the Soviet Union and therefore an ardent Ban the Bomb supporter, a young person avidly following every development of the civil rights movement, which all came down to a question of fairness for you, the undoing of ancient wrongs, the golden dream of living in a race-blind world. During the summer, the Freedom Riders traveling through the South on long-distance buses were beaten by mobs of white men, Hemingway committed suicide, and on a summer-camp outing in the woods of New York State, a boy in your group was struck and killed by lightning, the fourteen-year-old Ralph M., who was no more than a foot from you when the bolt shot down from the sky and electrocuted him, and although you have written about this event in some detail (Why Write?, story no. 3), you have never stopped thinking about what happened that day, it has continued to inform how you have looked at the world ever since, for that was your first lesson in the alchemy of chance, your introduction to the inhuman forces that can turn life into death in a single instant. Fourteen, the terrible age of fourteen, when you are still a prisoner of the circumstances you were born into and yet ready to leave them behind, when all you dream about is escape.
Among the films you saw that year were Judgment at Nuremberg, Two Rode Together, and The Hustler, all popular movies that made their way into the suburban theaters of Essex County, but for foreign films and older films one had to go to New York, which was about forty-five minutes away, and since it wasn’t until the next year, as a sophomore in high school, that you started cultivating the habit of slipping off to Manhattan whenever you could, your film education had not yet begun in earnest when you were fourteen. The only place where you could see old films was on television, a useful resource in its way, but the films broadcast on the local stations were often butchered to fit into prearranged schedules and always—maddeningly—interrupted by commercials. Still, there was one televised film series that did better than the others, a program called Million Dollar Movie, which aired on Channel 9 and showed one classic American film every day for an entire week, the same film three times a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once at night, which meant that you could watch the same film twenty-one times in a span of 168 hours—assuming you wished to do that. It was because of Million Dollar Movie that you were able to see I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the next cinematic earthquake of your life, the next film that blasted in on you and altered the composition of your inner world, a 1932 Warner Brothers production directed by Mervyn LeRoy with Paul Muni (born Muni Weisenfreund) in the principal role, one of the darkest American films ever made, a story about injustice that shuns the Hollywood convention of hopeful or happy endings, and because you were fourteen and burning with indignation against the injustices of the world, you were ripe for this story, it came into your life at the precise moment you needed to see it, and therefore you watched it again the next day, and the day after that as well, and perhaps every single day until the week was done.2
The war is over. American soldiers are coming home from Europe, large ships are plowing through the icy waters of the Atlantic, steam whistles are blasting in celebration, and as the Sunset Division pulls into port, the deck is thronged with uniformed men, hundreds of soldiers gesturing wildly to the exuberant crowd that waits for them on shore. It is 1919, and the boys who sailed over there are landing back here, the armistice has been signed, the Great War is history, and down below, in the bowels of the ship, a gang of soon-to-be ex-soldiers is singing loudly while a small group plays craps on the floor. Money is being lost and won, the dice are clattering on the hard surface, and in steps the squad sergeant with an apologetic smile on his face, telling the boys to knock it off because the old man has ordered bunk inspection in an hour. A drawling Texan remarks that if anyone ever says the word inspection to him again, he will gladly plug him with his six-shooter, and moments after that the soldiers are talking about their postwar plans. The sergeant, a stocky and amiable fellow who has clearly won the respect of his men, says that he intends to get some kind of construction job, that working in the Engineering Corps has been a swell experience and he means to make the most of it. One of the soldiers says: We’ll be reading about you in the newspapers, I bet. Mr. James Allen is building a new Panama Canal—or something. To which Allen replies: You can bet your tin hat that Mr. James Allen won’t be back in the old factory.
It is 1919, but the film you are watching was made thirteen years later, which was no doubt the worst year of the Depression, and since you have learned a thing or two about American history by now, you know that just before the film was shot, in the spring and summer of 1932, the Bonus Army was camped out on the Anacostia Flats, in the southern part of Washington, D.C., a group of thirty thousand people, nearly all of them veterans of the war, who had descended on the capital in support of a bill sponsored by Congressman Wright Patman that proposed to allow veterans to cash in their one-thousand-dollar war-bonus certificates that year instead of having to wait until 1945, as the current law then stipulated, and with these desperate, unemployed men lingering month after month in their wretched camp of tents and cardboard shacks, they became an ever-growing embarrassment to the Hoover administration. The Patman bill was passed by the House but voted down by the Senate, which led to some small but angry battles between members of the Bonus Army and the local police, which in turn convinced Hoover that it was time to get rid of this horde of ragged, left-wing beggars, this legion of so-called Forgotten Men. He chose the United States Army to do the job for him, a grotesque political choice—commanding soldiers to use force on other soldiers, an irony so cruel that most of the country was revolted by the action—and it is curious to note that among the principal players in this drama were Douglas MacArthur, the army chief of staff, Major Dwight Eisenhower, MacArthur’s aide, and Major George Patton, the three men who went on to become the most widely known American generals of World War II. Against Eisenhower’s advice (I told that dumb son of a bitch that he had no business going down there), MacArthur took charge, instructing Patton to place a unit of tanks on the outskirts of the camp, and on July twenty-eighth, in full uniform, with every one of his many decorations displayed on his chest, he led the force that evicted the Bonus Army from its miserable shantytown, pushing out the interlopers at gunpoint as dozens of shacks burned to the ground. A little more than a hundred days after that, Hoover became a one-term president, voted out of office in Roosevelt’s landslide victory.
After the postwar parades with the marching bands and the giant American flags, the film cuts to a shot of a speeding train, and for several seconds it is unclear where the train is going, as if the locomotive charging along the tracks is no more than an abstract representation of time in motion, the abrupt and furious passage from Then to Now as the world of Now propels itself into the future. Forget the war. The war is over, and no matter how many died over there in muddy, blood-filled trenches, Now belongs only to the living.
Another cut, this time to the train station in a town called Lynndale, evidently a smallish spot on the map, a nondescript American somewhere, and standing on the platform are four people: a middle-aged woman in somber, conservative clothing, a pretty young blonde, a minister wearing a clerical collar, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a black hat, along with an older man in a suit and tie with a straw boater on his head. The middle-aged woman asks the blonde if she thinks he will be wearing his medal (one assumes that he refers to her son), and the girl responds, Why, of course he will, but a moment later the train comes to a halt and out steps Sergeant Allen, dressed in a standard civilian suit—no medal, no uniform, nothing to suggest he has just fought in a war. After a joyful, welcoming embrace from his mother, Allen shakes the girl’s hand, dispelling any notion that she might be his sister, girlfriend, or wife, saying that he never would have recognized her, and the girl, whose name is Alice, tactlessly replies that he looks different, too, adding that she misses his uniform, which made him look taller and more distinguished, thereby telling him that he has been reduced to the rank of nobody, no matter how many medals he might have won overseas. To make matters worse, the minister, who turns out to be Allen’s older brother, enthusiastically informs him that Mr. Parker, the gent in the straw boater, is going to take him back into the factory, and as Parker pumps Allen’s hand and slaps him on the back, he confirms that Allen’s job has indeed been saved for him. You’ve done your bit, and your boss isn’t going to forget you. All well and good, but after listening to Allen’s remarks on the ship, we already know that he has no intention of returning to his old job at the factory. The film has been running for approximately three minutes, and already you can see the cloud gathering around James Allen’s head.
A homecoming dinner at the old place, a stuffy, nineteenth-century house with cluttered interiors, Alice nowhere in sight, just the three members of the Allen family: weak-minded, indulgent Ma; prissy, sanctimonious brother Clint (a smooth-talking bore with the off-putting habit of folding his hands together while he speaks); and rough-and-tumble Allen, burning with ambition, ready to take on the world. Discord erupts within seconds. Clint mentions Mr. Parker’s kind and generous offer, and Allen immediately tells him that he doesn’t want the job. Both Ma and Older Brother are stunned. Laughing in response, Allen explains that the army has changed him, and he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life answering a factory whistle instead of a bugle call, he wants to do something worthwhile, and he can’t imagine himself being cooped up in a shipping room all day.
Nevertheless, not wanting to disappoint his mother, Allen reluctantly returns to his old job at the Parker Manufacturing Company, THE HOME OF KUMFORT SHOES, but his heart isn’t in it, his mind isn’t in it, and day after day he spends his lunch hour loitering around the construction site of a new bridge, often losing track of the time, often late in reporting back for the afternoon shift. His discontent finally spills out at another family dinner when his brother tells him how disappointed Mr. Parker is by his performance at work and Allen defends himself with an impassioned speech about wanting to make a new life for himself, telling Clint and his mother that the cramped and mechanical routine at the factory is even more stultifying than the army and that he needs to go somewhere, anywhere, where I can do what I want. In an abrupt turnaround, his mother relents, giving him her blessing to strike out on his own, and when Clint objects, she brushes off Reverend Pious with a simple, transparent declaration of maternal support, the anthem of all good mothers: He’s got to be happy, she says, he’s got to find himself.
According to Allen, construction jobs are available in New England, and a moment later a map is displayed on-screen, a map of New Jersey as it turns out (the same New Jersey in which you are watching the film), accompanied by the sound of a fast-moving train, another fast-moving train, and then the map dissolves into an image of that train, which in turn dissolves into another map, showing Connecticut … Rhode Island … and Boston.
Allen is alone in the cab of a heavy construction vehicle, sitting behind the wheel of what appears to be a large steam shovel—indicating that he has found the work he was looking for and all is right with the world. A man comes up to him, the foreman, the crew boss, the person in charge, and tells Allen to knock it off, he has some bad news for him. They’re cutting down, he says, and two men will have to go. Without expressing much concern or surprise, Allen hops off the machine and says, All right. You are impressed by how calmly he takes this setback, this arbitrary dismissal, booted out through no fault of his own, but Allen looks confident, still full of hope for the future, a man ready for anything.
Another map, this one beginning with Boston, then tracing the journey of a ship headed south, steaming down the Atlantic coast and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it finally stops at New Orleans.
Looking a little the worse for wear, clothes shabbier now, a two-day stubble of beard darkening his face, shoulders beginning to droop somewhat, Allen walks into a factory to apply for work. He has traveled north, he has traveled south, and after all those miles he is exactly where he started—or struggling to get back to where he started, for now he is unemployed, and he would gladly accept a job similar to the one he called stupid and insignificant after he came home from the war. Can you use a good man? he asks the boss, and the boss replies: Last week I could have used you, but I’m full up now. Allen shakes his head, bunches his right hand into a fist, and then softly, ever so softly, lowers that fist onto the table, not wanting to lose control of himself, not yet at the point of complete desperation, but that fist is a sign of rapidly diminishing hope, and when he turns around and walks away, he looks like a man who has run out of ideas.
Again the map, and again the sounds of the fast-moving train. Allen is on his way back north, zeroing in on the unlikely town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
There he is, dressed in overalls and a work shirt, driving a logging truck down a road that cuts through a tall pine forest. Allen turns to the man sitting beside him and says he’s just filling in for a few days. Believe me, he continues, I’m glad to be working again. It’s my first job in a long time. Oshkosh is only a temporary reprieve, then, a deceptive pause that has bucked up Allen’s spirits for a little while, but it is clear now that no permanent jobs are to be found anywhere, that no matter how far Allen travels to look for one, he will always come up empty, and indeed, when the next map shows him on his way south again, moving toward St. Louis, with the sound of the locomotive belting forth its now-familiar melody, all has suddenly changed, for when the camera reveals the source of that melody, Allen is not sitting in a crowded carriage with other passengers, the train he has taken turns out to be a freight train, and he is alone, sleeping on the floor of a boxcar. The optimistic war veteran who was going to make his mark building the next Panama Canal has turned into a vagabond who rides the rails, a penniless drifter, a forgotten man. Yes, the action is supposedly taking place in 1919, but in fact it is 1932, and you realize now that you are watching a story about the Great Depression, a story about what it means to live in a country without work.
Allen walks into a pawnshop holding something in his hand, an object too small to be seen. He looks like a bum now. Ragged clothes, unshaven face, a creased and dented hat. The proprietor asks him what he wants, and Allen opens his hand, showing him a military medal. How much can you give me for the Belgian Croix de Guerre? he asks, but rather than name a price, the proprietor gestures to Allen with his finger, beckoning him to have a look inside the glass case sitting on the counter. Allen looks, and what he sees are medals, dozens of medals similar to the one he is holding in his hand, scores of medals, too many medals to count, each one representing the hard-luck story of a future member of the Bonus Army, and without saying a word, Allen nods his head in resignation, looks down at his own medal in the palm of his hand, and leaves. He might have fought for America in the war, but now he is a citizen of the country of Hard Luck.
One more map, following Allen’s progress eastward out of St. Louis, but this time it is displayed in silence, with no accompanying sounds of the ubiquitous train, and as the map fades away in a slow dissolve, Allen is shown walking along a set of railroad tracks, which accounts for the silent map, since he is traveling on foot now, approaching the camera in a full frontal shot, a solitary figure in the middle of nowhere, and you note that his stride remains strong and determined, that in spite of the lumps he has taken the man is not yet defeated, but still, for all his courage, he nevertheless looks tired and hungry, apprehensive, lost, and there is something strange about the expression in his eyes, you feel, something stunned and battered, as if Allen can’t quite believe what has happened to him, as if, somewhere during the course of his travels, he has been struck by lightning.
He checks into a flophouse, fitting accommodations for a castoff in the country of Hard Luck, a large room filled with silent, down-and-out men—beds fifteen cents, meals fifteen cents, baths five cents—and before long Allen is talking to a grizzled customer named Pete, a guy who seems to know the ropes, which Allen candidly admits he does not. Pete decides he is hungry and asks Allen what he would say to a hamburger, to which Allen replies: What would I say to a hamburger? I’d shake Mr. Hamburger by the hand and say, Pal, I haven’t seen you in a long, long time. His sense of humor is still intact—which you take to be an encouraging sign, proof that Allen is far from done. According to Pete, the man who operates the lunch wagon down the road is a soft egg, and chances are they’ll be able to mooch a couple of burgers from him. Off they go to the lunch wagon, and just as Pete predicted, the counterman gives in to their request—reluctantly, perhaps, but the soft egg can’t bring himself to turn away the hungry men, and he tosses a couple of patties onto the grill. Allen’s eyes light up. A joyous, expectant smile spreads across his face, and as he puts a toothpick in his mouth (getting his mouth primed for the food?), he gazes at the sizzling meat as though he were looking at a beautiful woman. Not Mr. Hamburger—Miss Hamburger.
Then, everything suddenly goes wrong. Pete pulls a gun from his pocket, tells the soft egg to put his hands on the counter, and orders Allen to empty the cash register. Allen is aghast. The only word he manages to get out of his mouth is an alarmed Hey!, meaning no, I won’t do it, what the hell is going on? But Pete points the gun at him, threatening to shoot Allen if he doesn’t do what he says. Does Allen have any choice? Not really, not under these particular circumstances, and so he walks over to the cash register and takes out the money, which amounts to all of five dollars. Come on, come on, Pete says to him as the confused Allen dawdles by the cash register, and then Pete is backing out of the lunch wagon, his gun pointed at the soft egg. He yanks the cord of the pay telephone out of the wall, tells the soft egg not to start yelling for the cops, and opens the door, and no sooner does the door open than Pete is firing his gun. A cop bursts into the lunch wagon, firing back at Pete, and a moment later Pete falls down dead.
Allen is terrified, too panicked to think clearly enough to do any of the things he should do now, one of which would be to give the money back to the soft egg, or to sit down and calmly tell his story to the cop, but the first impulse of a panicked man is to run, and that is what Allen does now—he runs for his life, frantically trying to escape out the side door. The cop who killed Pete rushes after him, and once Allen gets outside, a second cop sticks a gun in his belly and tells him to put ’em up. Allen puts ’em up.
The screen fades to black, and a moment later a judge is pronouncing sentence on Allen from the bench. I see no reason for leniency, he says, since the money was found on your person. Furthermore, upon detection, you attempted to escape, which would, of necessity, increase the seriousness of your offense. I sentence you to—(the gavel pounds)—ten years of hard labor.
You find it difficult to watch the next part of the film. Allen has been sent to serve out his time on a chain gang, a form of punishment so barbarous, so savage in its degradations and cruelties, you are tempted to switch off the television and leave the room, and if you persist in following the systematic transformation of once free men into brutalized, frightened animals, it is only because the title of the film suggests that Allen will eventually find a way to slip out of there. The prisoners are no better off than slaves. Legs shackled, randomly whipped and beaten, subsisting on rank, inedible slops (breakfast: a mixture of grease, fried dough, pig fat, and sorghum), they are rousted from their beds at four in the morning and work steadily until eight at night, white men and black men, old men and young men, all of them exhausted, at the limit of their endurance, smashing rocks with sledgehammers in a broiling, barren landscape, and woe to the man who slacks off or falls ill, the whip is the cure for those who don’t work hard enough, and even the innocent act of wiping sweat from your brow cannot be performed without permission from one of the guards, and if you should forget to ask a guard for that permission, a rifle butt will come crashing into your face and knock you to the ground. Such is the world Allen has entered for the heinous crime of looking at a hamburger.
One man is grievously ill. At breakfast on Allen’s first morning in the camp, a medium close-up shows him putting his head down on the table, too weak to lift the spoon to his mouth, and later on, when the gang is outdoors smashing rocks, he can barely hold the sledge in his hands, he is tottering in dizziness and pain, on the point of collapse. A guard says, Come on, come on, get back to work, and the sick man, who is known by the name of Red, answers feebly, I got to quit … My stomach…, to which the guard angrily replies, Work! Or I’ll kick that bellyache around your ears. Red takes a couple of pathetic swings, unable to lift the sledge more than a few inches off the ground, and then keels over, unconscious. The guard throws water on his face, telling him to get up, but Red doesn’t move. That evening, when the trucks pull into the camp with the men aboard, Red is still unconscious, lying inert on the flatbed as the other men jump off. He appears at dinner (another evil concoction, elucidated in a close-up of the prisoner seated next to Allen—scarfing down the food with large chunks of grease and fat dangling from his mouth), but Red can’t take it anymore, he stands up from the table, staggers off to the bunkhouse, and throws himself onto his bed. A bit later, when the other men are in the bunkhouse as well, all of them now lying on their beds, two guards and the warden enter the room. One of the guards is carrying a whip, a nasty-looking instrument with a cat-o’-nine-tails at the end. All right, says the other guard, show us a man who didn’t give us a good day’s work. Someone is chosen. His shirt is torn off his back, and he is led away to receive his lashing. Anybody else? the warden asks. A guard: This guy Red tried to pull a faint on us today. The warden (approaching Red): Pulling a faint, eh? Red: I don’t care what you do to me, it doesn’t matter. The warden thrusts the whip into Red’s face and says: Take a look at that. All the while, Allen has been watching closely from his bed, carefully studying this nightly ritual of arbitrary punishments, and when he sees the warden threaten the dying Red, he is so incensed that he can’t stop himself from muttering: The skunk. An almost inaudible remark, but the warden hears him, and because no one is allowed to talk back, the head man pushes Red aside and turns his attention to Allen. You’re next, he says, pointing at the new prisoner, and then he instructs the guards to take his stinking shirt off. They promptly rip off the shirt, force him to his feet, and push him down the aisle between the two rows of beds—chains clinking as he shuffles forward in his iron shackles. The first man to be whipped is standing behind a sheet or thin curtain, a silhouetted figure with his bare torso exposed as the shadow of a whip cuts through the air, but before the first blow can be struck, the camera turns to Allen’s face, to Allen’s eyes, as he watches the beating in horror, grimacing with each howl that explodes from the man’s mouth. Then it is Allen’s turn, and again the beating takes place off camera, which only makes it worse, for the camera is looking at the other men now, looking at them in a slow traveling shot that moves down the line of beds as they turn to watch Allen’s flogging beyond the borders of the frame, and the unanimous expression on their faces is one of no expression, a blank, indifferent curiosity as their fellow prisoner is nearly skinned alive, men so defeated, so inured to the suffering of others that they scarcely have any feelings left. They are the living dead.
A shot of a calendar: the date reads June 5. Allen and four other prisoners are looking out a window in the bunkhouse. One of the inmates has just been released, and as they watch their friend Barney walk toward the front gate of the camp, the camera narrows in for a close shot of Barney’s ankles and feet. His chains are gone, but the habit of the chains is still inside his body, and therefore he continues to walk with the short, mincing steps of a prisoner—freed at last, but for the moment still not free. They all wave good-bye, and as Barney waves back, Allen says to Bomber Wells, the old-timer who befriended him the day he started on the chain gang: At least it proves something—you can really get out of here. He calculates that he has served four weeks of his sentence, meaning that there are nine years and forty-eight weeks to go, and as he looks down at his chains, one of the men by the window says: Oh, Red’s leaving today, too. Cut to the outside: a bare wooden coffin containing the sick man’s corpse is being loaded onto a wagon. Bomber observes: There are just two ways to get out of here. Work out—and die out. Allen asks if anyone has ever managed to escape. One of the men says there’s too much stacked against you—the chains, the bloodhounds, the guards and their rifles—but Bomber takes Allen aside and tells him yes, it has been done, but you have to work out a perfect scheme: You’ve got to watch, you’ve got to wait. Maybe one year, maybe two, and then (with a shrug), hang it on the limb. As Allen ponders the old man’s advice, the image dissolves into another shot of a calendar. Sheets are falling off and floating through the air: June, July, August, September, October, November …
Is Allen’s scheme perfect? Perhaps not, perhaps it is only an act of grim desperation, an impulsive rush into certain death or capture, but Allen must take the risk, he has been imprisoned for next to nothing, for breaking a law he was forced to break against his will, and even death would be better than nine and a half more years on the chain gang. If not a perfect scheme, Allen nevertheless has a plan, the first part of a plan in any case, which is the most important part, for unless he can find a way to slip out of his fetters and free his legs, he won’t have a chance. One of the prisoners is named Sebastian, a gigantic black man with the strength of five normal men, a man so deft and powerful at wielding his sledgehammer that when Allen saw him on the first morning, Bomber wryly commented: They like his work so much, they’re going to keep him here for the rest of his life. One hot afternoon, a heavy day with too much sun and too little air, when even the guards have begun to wilt, sunk in a torpor of fatigue and inattention, Allen approaches Sebastian and asks him to slam a hammer down on his shackles and bend them out of shape, not so much as to be noticed but just enough so he can wriggle his feet out of them. Sebastian hesitates at first, not wanting to get into trouble, but he soon relents as solidarity wins out over fear, saying he’d sure like to see Allen get out of this misery. They are working next to some abandoned train tracks, digging up the rails in order to clear the ground, and as Allen straddles one of the rails, his chain stretched taut across the iron bar, Sebastian swings into action, pounding the shackles with every ounce of his enormous strength. It is an excruciating operation, one hammer blow of pain followed by another, but Allen grits his way through it, shuddering, almost in tears, stifling the urge to cry out, and such is his determination that even when Sebastian appears to be finished, he asks the big man to bring down the hammer one more time. That night in bed, Allen tests the altered shackles. With much effort, it is now possible to twist his feet out of them. Then he puts them back on and covers himself with his blanket. From the next bed, Bomber whispers: When are you going to do it? Monday, Allen whispers back, and at that point Bomber hands him seven dollars, all the money he has in the world. Allen doesn’t want to take it, but his friend insists, telling him to go straight to Barney once he gets away (he writes down the address on a slip of paper), since Barney can be counted on to give him help. Bomber: Nervous? Allen: A little. Bomber: Well, no matter what happens, it’s better than this.
The sequence has been played out in dozens of American movies since 1932—the prison break, the manhunt, the flight of the lone convict thrashing through woods and swamps as armed deputies run after him with barking, scent-crazed dogs—but this was the first time it was done in talking pictures, or one of the first times, and half a hundred years after you stumbled upon that Million Dollar Movie broadcast, LeRoy’s handling of the action still strikes you as perfect, the best of all such sequences you have seen on film. The prisoners are dismantling more railroad tracks, it is another hot day in the Deep South, and Allen calls to one of the guards, Getting out here, which is the standard phrase for asking permission to relieve oneself, and once the guard says, All right, get out over there, Bomber pats Allen on the hand, silently wishing him luck, and off Allen goes, heading down a small hill toward the bushes. As soon as he is out of sight, he sits down, takes off his shoes, and begins working on the shackles, trying to slip them off his feet, frantically trying, unsuccessfully trying, trying for much longer than it had taken him in the bunkhouse, signaling that the escape is off to a bad start, nothing is going as planned, and suddenly there is a shot of the guard, who turns around to look for Allen. Time is short, ever so short, and as Allen finally gets the shackles off, puts his shoes back on, and begins crawling through the bushes, you are more or less certain that too much time has been lost, that he won’t make it. The guard shouts: All right, Allen, get back to work!—and that is when Allen stands up and starts to run, an open target sprinting through a clearing in the woods. The guard takes aim with his rifle, fires one shot, two shots, three, four, five shots, but now the clearing has come to an end and Allen has disappeared back into the woods. Guards assemble and go after him with barking, scent-crazed bloodhounds, a train whistle pipes in the distance, and Allen is running, still running, running for all he is worth as the images cut back and forth between the hunted man and his pursuers. The camera has become an instrument of panic. The chopped-up rhythms of the spliced pictures are an embodiment of fear, pictures miming the hectic pulse of a man’s heart as it pounds inside his chest: darkness visible (John Milton), for the man’s heart is invisible, and yet the action resembles the pounding of that heart so closely, it is as if one can see the heart, as if one’s entire body has become the heart. Eventually, Allen stops to catch his breath, he leans against a tree to prevent himself from falling down, and there, just a short distance in front of him, is the backyard of a house, and in that yard is a clothesline with fresh laundry on it hanging out to dry. Allen bolts toward the house, snatches some clothing off the line, and then dashes back to the trees. A lucky break, yes, assuming he manages to outrun the guards, but in order to shed his striped prisoner’s uniform and put on the new clothes, he needs some time, time that will shrink the distance between him and his pursuers, but he must get rid of the uniform, it is his only chance, so he strips it off and changes into the other clothes, and when he is finally ready to start running again, the dogs are dangerously near, their frenzied barking has become louder with each passing second, but Allen is still ahead, ahead by just enough to be out of sight, and now he is running through tall weeds, and just beyond the weeds there is a river, a stream, a body of flowing water. Without pausing to question what he should do next, Allen steps into the water, and an instant later, with the water already up to his waist, he snaps off a reed from a cluster of reeds jutting from the surface, blows hard into the reed to unclog it, and then goes down, sinking below the surface of the water, using the reed as a respiration device, and of all the shots in the film, this is the one that has stayed with you most persistently, the one that comes back to you first whenever you think about watching the film, a shot that carries all the weight of something from a nightmare, a haunted image: Allen under the water with the reed in his mouth, everything silent, not a single sound emanating from the film, Allen’s body utterly still, fixed in the horror of what might suddenly happen to him, and as the guards and dogs approach the river, one of the men goes wading in, and for a brief moment his legs are just inches from Allen’s unmoving body, one more step and he will crash into him, but he doesn’t take that step, and when he and the other guards decide to continue their search elsewhere, Allen can at last stand up and cross to the other side of the river. A quick glance behind him to see if he is still being followed—but there is no one, nothing but earth and sky and water. The screen fades to black.
A large city at night. A brightly lit boulevard with traffic streaming in all directions. Clamor and crowds. Cut to a pair of shoes, the shoes of a man walking with slow, shuffling steps. The camera tilts upward, and there is Allen—dirty, unshaven, and exhausted, an anonymous no one drifting along the sidewalk. He stops in front of a men’s clothing store, and seconds later he is inside, looking at himself in a full-length mirror as he examines his new suit. After that, a visit to a barbershop for a shave, which turns out to be a close shave, a near disaster when a cop walks in, sits himself down in an empty chair, and begins chatting with the barber about an escaped convict named James Allen—about five foot ten, heavy black hair, brown eyes, stocky build, around thirty years old—saying that he’s bound to be caught fairly soon, since they’re always caught before they can sneak out of the city. When the shave is finished, Allen starts rubbing his cheek to keep his face hidden from the cop, but the barber misreads the gesture for a comment on his work and asks: How was it? Close enough? Allen (nodding as he opens the door): Plenty. Cut to Allen walking down another street, the same night, seconds or minutes after leaving the barbershop, studying a piece of paper in his hand: Barney’s address, which is not a house or an apartment building but a small, run-down hotel. Allen’s ebullient, streetwise friend from the chain gang greets him warmly, offering to hide him, to fix him up, to do anything he can to help. The nature of Barney’s business is obscure, but it appears that he is running a whorehouse of some kind, or a bootleg operation, or perhaps both, since his alcohol supply is abundant (Allen, very tense, turns down the drink Barney has just poured for him, saying he has a heavy day ahead of him tomorrow) and women are available at a moment’s notice. Barney has to go out that night, he has work to do, but before he leaves he tells Allen that he’ll get somebody to see that you’re comfortable, and in walks Linda, an attractive girl in her mid- to late twenties, sad and languid and sympathetic, clearly a fallen woman. Barney introduces her to Allen, blithely telling her that his pal has escaped from the chain gang (which makes Allen wince), and then, as Barney heads for the door, he instructs her: Take good care of him, babe; he’s my personal guest. An awkward silence after Barney leaves the room. Allen is unprepared, out of his depth, too distracted by the pressures of the moment to let down his guard in front of this woman. You’ve got plenty of what it takes to escape from that place, she says, expressing admiration for his courage, wanting him to understand that she is on his side. When she makes a move to kiss him, however, he turns her down. There’s nothing you can do, Allen says, but when Linda walks over to the table to pour herself a drink, he scrutinizes her body, appraising her legs and waist and hips, feeling himself being pulled toward her, unable to resist her sweet and melancholy goodness. She lifts her glass to toast him. A guy with your guts has the breaks coming to him, she says, and then she approaches him again, sitting down on the arm of his chair and stroking his shoulder. She says: I know what you’re thinking. I understand. You’re among friends … The tact and grace of a fallen woman talking to a fallen man. One assumes they wind up sleeping together (the Hollywood production code was not yet in force), but the power of this scene has little or nothing to do with sexual desire. It’s about tenderness, and given the rough road Allen must travel throughout the story, this brief exchange with Linda is probably the most tender passage of the film.
The next day, Allen finally gets his hamburger. It is morning or early afternoon, and he has just bought a ticket for the train that will carry him across the border of the state, beyond the reach of the law and into a new life, but the train is running behind schedule, and with nothing to do but kill time until it is ready, Allen treats himself to a hamburger at an outdoor food stand, polishing it off quickly, so quickly that he orders a second. Needless to say, he never gets to eat that second hamburger, for by now it is clear that hamburgers serve as bad omens in this story, a prelude to the worst kind of luck, and before Allen can take a bite out of hamburger number two, the chief of police shows up. He and his men are searching for someone, a criminal is on the loose, and because Allen has no doubt that he is the criminal they are after, he puts down his hamburger and backs away from the food stand. The train is nearly ready to depart. Taking no chances, Allen walks around to the other side, intending to board from there to avoid being seen by the cops, but just as he is mounting the steps of one of the cars, a voice calls out: There he is!—and suddenly the lawmen are running in Allen’s direction. It appears that he has been caught, that his escape has come to nothing, but it is only a false alarm, for the criminal in question turns out to be a bedraggled hobo, a forgotten man cowering under the train just a few feet from where Allen is standing, and as the detectives haul this unknown miscreant off to the squad car, Allen hops onto the train. Another close call—followed by yet another one just a minute later. As the conductor punches Allen’s ticket, he tells him that the police are still looking for the escaped convict. The conductor then sits down next to another conductor, and before long the two of them are eyeing Allen and whispering into each other’s ears, almost certainly asking themselves if he fits the description of the missing man. A quick cut: a close-up of Allen’s dusty shoes. He has left the train and is walking. Another cut, this time to a speeding car. A map is superimposed on the car, the car turns into a train, and the train is heading north on the map, zeroing in on a final destination of Chicago. The map and the train then melt into nothingness, and there is the city. Tall buildings, flashing lights, tumult, and freedom.
As Allen’s life begins again, he is first seen standing outdoors in front of the employment office of the Tri-State Engineering Company. In the near distance, a bridge is under construction, and a sign posted on the wall to Allen’s left reads: MEN WANTED. This is the kind of work he wanted to do when he came home from the war, the work he looked for and couldn’t find, and you are fully expecting him to be turned down in Chicago as well, for the simple reason that you have come to look upon Allen as cursed, as a man for whom things will always go wrong. To your immense surprise, the man behind the counter at the employment office says: I guess we can use you, all right—and hope suddenly flares up in you, you begin to think that perhaps Allen’s luck has finally turned. What’s the name? the man asks, and without thinking Allen says Allen, but when the man asks if that’s his first name or last name, Allen hesitates for a moment, realizing that he has just been given a chance to reinvent himself, to take on a new identity, and he says the first name, his full name is Allen James. Not terribly clever, you think at first, anyone could see through that obvious reversal, but then, as you go on thinking about it, summoning up various people whose full names consist of two first names, you wonder if it might not do the job, after all. If you turned Henry James into James Henry, would anyone think about Mr. James if he were introduced as Mr. Henry? Probably not. Still, you would have preferred a more radical transformation, something akin to the rebirth of Edmond Dantès as the Count of Monte Cristo, for example, another story about an unjustly imprisoned man who escaped (you have read the novel and are familiar with the count), but Dantès had the implausible good fortune to discover a treasure, and when he returned to the world of the living he was the richest man in France. Allen is dirt poor, a man with nothing. Dantès wanted revenge, but all Allen wants is to build bridges.
The man behind the counter tells Allen to report at eight o’clock the next morning. The scene ends with a full-frame close-up of Allen’s employment card. DATE: 1924. CLASS OF WORK: LABORER. SALARY PER DAY: $4.00.
Time has passed, how much time is unclear, but Allen is next seen outdoors, toiling with a crew of men in the heat of the afternoon sun, digging ditches, the tool in his hands now a pick, not smashing rocks anymore, not working with a sledgehammer, but except for the absence of chains, the scene is depressingly familiar to you, it is prison labor in a new form, no whips or rifles, no malevolent guards, but miserably paid, backbreaking work, and you begin to despair that Allen will ever be able to lift himself out of the mud. That is what the film seems to be telling you: the world is a prison for those who have nothing, the have-nots at the bottom of the pile are no better than dogs, and whether a man works on a chain gang or is gainfully employed by the Tri-State Engineering Company, he has no control over his existence. So it would appear from the first moments of the scene, but you quickly discover that you are wrong, that the setup is a ruse, for a moment after you come to this grim reading of events, the foreman walks over to Allen and says: Hey, James. That’s a swell idea you had about that bend over there. I told the boss it was your suggestion. Allen: Yes? That’s very nice. Foreman: I don’t think you’ll be swinging a pick much longer. Cut to a close-up of Allen’s next employment card. DATE: 1926. CLASS OF WORK: FOREMAN. SALARY PER DAY: $9.00.
He is moving up in the world. By the next year, 1927, he has been promoted to surveyor and is earning twelve dollars a day, by 1929 he is assistant superintendent at fourteen a day, and at some point after that (date and salary unspecified) he is one of the top officials of the company, the general field superintendent, a man with his name and title written in gold-embossed letters on the door of his private office. From rags and degradation to fashionable clothes and universal respect, a builder of bridges at last, a pure example of the American success story, living proof that hard work, ambition, and intelligence can propel you into a world of meaningful accomplishment and wealth. This is where the story should end—virtue rewarded, the quivering scales of justice now becalmed in perfect equipoise—but Allen’s past will always be his past, and consequently there is a problem, an impediment to happiness caused by Allen’s too-trusting nature (why shouldn’t he have gone out for that hamburger with Pete the stick-up man?), and therefore trouble is gathering around him, there is always more trouble, this time in the form of a woman named Marie, a sex-hungry, grasping blonde who rented him a room in 1926 and quickly became his bedmate, for Marie knows a good thing when she sees one, and the handsome, industrious Allen is nothing if not a good bet. The affair lasts for three years as Allen works his way up the ladder at Tri-State, but he feels nothing for her anymore, neither love nor affection, the flames of physical desire have long since burned out, and the day finally comes when he decides to move to another address. She walks in on him as he is packing his bags, and although Allen is too soft-hearted to tell her that he wants a definitive break, he nevertheless has the courage to remind her (again) that he doesn’t love her: I can’t change my feelings toward you any more than I can change the color of my eyes. Marie (hands on hips, looking at him with hostility): And that’s your only reason for leaving? Allen: It’s a pretty good one, isn’t it? Marie: Not very. Of course, when a guy wants to ditch a girl, he’ll do most anything. Providing it doesn’t land him back in the chain gang—where he probably belongs.
The secret is out. Impossible to comprehend—but the secret is out, even if Allen is in Illinois now, hundreds of miles from the state where he was imprisoned, in the North, where for five years he has never breathed a word about his past to anyone, but the secret is no longer a secret, and the spurned Marie is the one who has found him out. How? Because she owns the boardinghouse where he lives, because she has access to his mail before he does, and because his brother, Clint, the melon-headed Reverend Pious, has written him a letter—I thought you should know that the police are still trying to find you. When I think that your capture would mean eight more terrible years on that chain gang, my blood runs cold. I’ll keep in touch with you. Devotedly, Clint—and now that Marie has intercepted the letter, Allen’s fate is in her hands. Has she turned against him so thoroughly that she would be willing to expose the truth? Not if she had a reason to protect him, she says. What does she mean by that? he asks. That she wouldn’t tell—if he were her husband. Before he can respond to this threat of blackmail, Marie walks out of the room. Without lifting a finger, she has punched him into submission, and Allen staggers for a moment, back-pedaling as if he has truly been punched, and as he gropes his way into a chair, the look in his eyes makes you think of a man who has just watched a city burn to the ground. His expression is both strange and horrible, he is almost smiling, but strangely and horribly, the smile of someone who has been crushed, smiling because he knows it was inevitable that he should be crushed, and then the smile vanishes and he is on the verge of tears, his resolve has utterly collapsed, he is about to break down and cry, for he knows that he is trapped, trapped for the rest of his life, and no matter how desperate he becomes, there will never be any escape.
The marriage is of course a miserable sham. His wife cheats on him, lies to him, overspends his money, and Allen is powerless to stop her. He is thriving at his job, his reputation has grown, he is now considered one of the best engineers in the city, but his private life is no life, and when he returns home to his new apartment, his first task is to empty the overflowing ashtrays and toss out the empty gin bottles from Marie’s latest party. Then, at a chic gathering organized by the head of Tri-State (which Marie does not attend, since she is out of town visiting her “cousin”), Allen meets a woman named Helen, another lost and lonely soul, a bit too insipid for your taste, alas, but well-bred, soft (as opposed to Marie’s hard), and companionable. Months go by (more pages fluttering off the calendar, superimposed on an image of a construction site, accompanied by the sounds of drilling), and now that Allen has fallen in love with his new woman and his life has taken an unexpected turn for the better, he feels emboldened to confront Marie and ask for a divorce. He promises to give her anything and everything she wants, but she calmly tells him (sprawled out on the couch smoking a cigarette, perhaps a little drunk) that she’s satisfied with the way things are, she’s happy, and there’s no chance of letting him go. Marie: You’re going to be a big shot someday with plenty of sugar, and I’m going to ride right along. Allen: But I’m in love with another woman. Marie: That’s ju-u-u-u-st too bad. Allen: Why don’t you play the game square? Marie: Square! So you and your sweetheart can give me the grand go-by, huh? Allen: If you don’t listen to reason, I’ll find some way. Marie: You do, and you’ll serve out your time. Allen: It’s no worse than serving out my time with you. Marie (furious): You’ll be sorry you said that! Allen (grabbing her): Now, listen. You’ve held that sword above my head long enough. It’s about time we called it quits. You’ve been pulling a bluff on me, and I’ve been fool enough and coward enough to go along with it. Marie: Oh, you good-for-nothing filthy convict. Bluffing? You’ll see.
So begins the final chapter of the Fugitive’s Tale. The detectives arrive at Allen’s office just as he is meeting with a delegation from the chamber of commerce, which wants to invite him to be the principal speaker at its next banquet because of his marvelous work on the new bridge. All the way to the top—and now the long fall to the bottom again as Marie makes good on her heartless promise. It is not a simple matter of sending Allen back into the clutches of the Dixieland penal system, however, there are established protocols for arranging such a transfer, laws of extradition that must be adhered to, and the Illinois governor and Chicago district attorney refuse to let him go. Newspaper headlines fill the screen. CHICAGO FIGHTS TO KEEP ALLEN FROM CHAIN GANG, followed by the Southern response—LOCAL CHAIN GANG OFFICIALS IRATE AS CHICAGO REFUSES TO AID THEM—which elicits an editorial in Allen’s defense, “Is This Civilization?”—“Shall we stand by while a man who has become a respected citizen of the community has the shadow of medieval torture creeping over him? Must James Allen be sent back to a living hell?”—which, in turn, provokes yet another response, WHAT HAS BECOME OF STATE RIGHTS?: “It is, indeed, a sad state of affairs when the governor of one state refuses to recognize the rights of another.” If only Allen would stand firm, the controversy would eventually die down and be forgotten, he could remain in Illinois as a free man, marry Helen, build more bridges, but the Fugitive is too honorable, too good for his own good, and when the Southern officials offer him a compromise deal, he accepts it in order to clear his name once and for all. They pretend to want him back for just ninety days, supposedly the minimum amount of time he must serve in order to be granted a pardon, and no, of course he won’t have to return to the chain gang, they assure him, he will be given a clerical job in some prison instead. You are just a fourteen-year-old boy, but even you can see through these lies, you can sense the doom that is settling upon him, but Allen is determined to go ahead with it, and so you glumly watch as the Fugitive says good-bye to Helen and boards a train heading south. Once there, he meets with the local lawyer handling his case, a certain Mr. Ramsay, who is first of all concerned that Allen pay an immediate advance on his large fee, and it is only after Allen has written a check that Ramsay informs him that this is a funny state, and the governor is a little peculiar, meaning that the clerical job isn’t so definite and they might want him to work for about sixty days. The hapless Allen smiles one of his small, ironic smiles, the smile of a man who has been backed into a corner, who has no choice but to accept another defeat. Sixty days. He can do that if he has to. As long as it puts an end to this gruesome business, sixty days will be worth it.
Bit by bit, by slowly mounting increments over the next days and weeks and months, every one of the promises made to Allen in the North is broken in the South. Step one: he is put in the Tuttle County Prison Camp, the harshest camp in the state—violently pushed into the bunkhouse by one of the guards as the warden tells him he’ll be shot if he tries to escape again. The only solace is that his old friend Bomber Wells is one of his fellow prisoners, but when he tries to explain the pardon deal he has worked out with the prison commission, Bomber tells him flatly: These boys here ain’t ever heard that word. Allen: They just want to make it tough on me, I guess. I’ll get the pardon, all right. Bomber: Listen, kid. They ain’t thinking about handing out pardons when you land in here. This is the last word. You might say—it’s it.
A wide shot of the hills. Scores of men are working in an immense landscape of stone and sky, swinging their hammers as a spiritual is sung by a chorus of black male voices, and for the first time since the film began, the story is no longer just about Allen and his sufferings, it is about an entire system of barbaric punishment and brutality, and with the words of the black spiritual rising up from the hills, it is impossible not to recall the fact that the Civil War ended just sixty-seven years earlier, that for more than two and a half centuries men and women worked as slaves in the New World, and now that twenty-nine more years have passed and it is 1961, you think about the fact that Hitler came to power just months after the film was released, and therefore it is impossible for you to look at this prison camp from 1932 America and not think of it as a precursor of the death camps of World War II—for this is what the world looks like when it is run by monsters.
Step two: the prison board hearing. Lawyer Ramsay and brother Clint present Allen’s side of the case. As Allen’s virtues are extolled, there is a brief cutaway to the chain gang, where Allen is shown working with his sledgehammer as the chorus of black male voices starts again. Then, some seconds later, back to the hearing, where the judge vigorously defends the institution of the chain gang, arguing (with nightmare logic) that the discipline it imposes on the prisoners can be a builder of character—as, for example, in the case of one James Allen. Step three: the pardon is refused. When Clint comes to report the decision to his brother, Allen, standing on the other side of a barred cell, explodes in a burst of uncontrollable anger, raging against the liars and hypocrites who have stolen his life from him. Clint, ever calm and reasonable, ever the man of the cloth, tells his brother that the commission voted to let him go if he conducts himself as a model prisoner for one year. One year, minus the three months he has already served, which would come to only nine more months. Allen: Nine months! This torture—I won’t do it! I won’t do it, I tell you! I’ll get out of here—even if they kill me for it! Step four: he does it. Having no other choice, he agrees to hang on for nine more months. Once again, pages fall from the calendar as the months pass, and behind those pages are the hills, the wide shot of two hundred men breaking stones with their hammers, and the chorus of black male voices continues. Step five: another prison board hearing. Ramsay (to the judge): And finally, not only has James Allen been a model prisoner for a whole year, but I have presented letters from countless organizations and prominent individuals beseeching you to recommend his pardon. Cut to the bunkhouse. The warden enters and says to Allen: Just had a final report on your new hearing. Allen sits up in bed, looking devastated, half dead, half insane, no more than two heartbeats from oblivion: Well? Warden: Suspended decision. Indefinitely.
Allen’s face. What happens to Allen’s face at that moment. A close shot of the face as it crumples up and disintegrates, as tears begin to gather in his eyes. His mouth twitches. His body shakes. He lowers himself onto the bed with clenched fists, no longer seeing anything, no longer a part of this world. Jabs his fists into the air. Feeble, spasmodic jabs—aimed at nothing, hitting nothing. The screen goes black.
This time, he and Bomber escape in tandem. Bomber will be shot and killed, but not before he helps Allen steal a dump truck, not before he drops dynamite on the road to impede the advance of pursuing cars, not before he has one last laugh, and after the old man dies, Allen frees himself by cutting through his chains with the gears that control the back of the truck. Then, with another bundle of dynamite, he blows up a bridge and ends the chase. You are so caught up in the action that you do not stop to consider that Allen, the builder of bridges, has blown up a bridge in order to save his life.
A sequence of newspaper headlines and articles, with more calendar pages falling in the background. The last headline reads: WHAT HAS BECOME OF JAMES ALLEN? IS HE, TOO, JUST ANOTHER FORGOTTEN MAN? “A little more than a year ago, James Allen made his second spectacular escape from the chain gang. Since that time, nothing has been heard of him…”
You imagine he is living in comfort somewhere on the East Coast or West Coast, perhaps in some South American country or Europe, reestablished under a new, more deceptive false name, a survivor of the injustices that have been committed against him, for however cruelly he has been knocked around, he has shown himself to be brave and inventive, an exceptional man who has done the impossible by escaping twice from the lowest circle of hell. If not an out-and-out hero, he is nevertheless heroic, and in your limited experience so far the heroic men in movies always triumph in the end. But now it is black again, the last newspaper article has faded from the screen, and when the action resumes it is night, a dark night somewhere in America, and a car is pulling into a garage. A woman gets out, and as she walks forward in the dimly lit driveway, you see that it is Helen. She hears a sound and stops. Someone is hiding in the shadows, a man has been waiting for her, and now he is softly calling out her name—Helen, Helen, Helen—and then the camera turns on him, and it is Allen, ragged and unshaven, no longer close to oblivion but obliterated, another man from the one last seen escaping from prison a year ago. Helen rushes over to him, touches him, speaks his name. Why haven’t you come before? she asks. Because he was afraid to, Allen answers. But you could have written, she says. The camera moves in on Allen’s face, which is no longer the despairing, shattered face of a prisoner but the face of a hunted man, a fugitive, all nerves and jitters now, his eyes showing nothing but fear. It isn’t safe, he says. They’re still after me. I’ve had jobs, but I can’t keep them. Something happens, someone turns up. I hide in rooms all day and travel by night. No friends, no rest, no peace. Forgive me, Helen. I had to take a chance to see you again—to say good-bye. He falls silent. She throws herself into his arms, sobbing. It was all going to be so different, she says. Yes, Allen says, different—and then, with savage bitterness in his voice: They’ve made it different.
Suddenly, a noise is heard in the dark. A car door slamming? One of the neighbors walking toward them? Allen disentangles himself from Helen’s arms, looks up, looks around, his eyes ablaze with panic. He whispers to her: I’ve got to go. Helen: Can’t you tell me where you’re going? Allen shakes his head. He is backing away from her now, disappearing into the shadows. Helen: Will you write? Again, Allen shakes his head, continuing to back away. Helen: How do you live? By now, he has been swallowed up by the darkness—still there, but no longer visible. His voice says: I steal.
Nothing now except darkness, and the sound of his steps as he runs into the night.
Hard to forget those last two words—
Hard to forget, and because you were so young when you first saw the film, it has been many years now since you haven’t forgotten.