AWARDS & HONORS:

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Paul Muni secured a Best Actor mention (He lost to Charles Laughton for The Private Life of Henry VIII), while the film was also recognized for Best Sound. The film lost the Best Picture trophy to Cavalcade (1932).

The Critics' Corner

Variety raved that "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang is a picture with guts...It grips with its stark realism and packs lots of punch."

The New York Times was impressed that its "vehement attack on convict camps" was not tempered with "the usual bowing to popular appeal."

Film Daily named the film as one of 1932's best efforts, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle said it was "a motion picture which not only approaches greatness but captures greatness without a struggle." The New York Sun hailed it as equally tragic and powerful.

The National Board of Review hailed I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang as "not only the best feature film of the year, but one of the best films ever made in this country."

Pauline Kael wrote that "Fugitive is still one of the best of the social protest films - naive, artless, but a straightforward, unadorned horror story. There are moments that haunted a generation (the hero, Paul Muni, trying to pawn his Congressional Medal of Honor), and there is one of the great closing scenes in the history of film."

"...uncompromising...Its style is simple, direct, and forceful, often giving the feeling of being a documentary. It is one of the best American films of social criticism produced in the early sound era, and has a striking performance by Paul Muni."
- Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Film

"The Warner Brothers' approach to movies during the Thirties and Forties is best exemplified in this production, where harsh naturalism is a virtue and the uncompromising, unblinking finale still shocks an audience...No documentary could have conveyed so vividly and so dramatically the pain and brutishness of prison life in the South."
- Peter Cowie, Eighty Years of Cinema

"Seventy-five years after it was made, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is still a slap in the face, exemplary as dramatized journalism, and enough to move any audience to anger and grief. You could redo it today, though the "I" would likely be a black character now...Paul Muni would soon enough earn the reputation of being a ham. But he is as big and human as "I" requires. It is a simple, raw performance, and it soars because of sound - because he can speak and think at the same time. It is a modern film because of that. In fact, it has survived far better than Little Caesar."
- David Thomson, Have You Seen...?

"I quarrel with the production not because it is savage and horrible, but because each step in an inevitable tragedy is taken clumsily, and because each character responsible for the hero's doom is shown more as a caricature than as a person."
- Pare Lorentz

"The prison scenes are blatantly manipulative-and effective-but Fugitive really takes off during an intense escape sequence, including a close shave where a near-doomed Muni hides underwater as his above-water captors are literally inches away from him...The studio portrayal of sex and violence in Fugitive pushes the envelope more than Muni's previous Scarface, perhaps because its so casual...Only with a character as noble as Oliver Twist or David Copperfield are people able to endure such misery, and Paul Muni plays a character so single-minded in his pursuit of freedom, so damned anxious for even the smallest victory, that he makes Fugitive absolutely riveting."
- Jeremiah Kipp, Slant Magazine

Compiled by Scott McGee