by Paul Auster
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.
