The Monochrome Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Abstract

The Monochrome Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (1967) James Emmett Ryan Historically speaking, the chain gang has been largely an instrument with which to terrorize, torture, and exploit Negroes. It was adopted on a grand scale at the end of the Civil War and was one of the devices consciously developed by the former slaveholders to put the newly “freed” Negroes back into bondage. —Walter Wilson (1933)1 According to the Pensacola Journal, on July 17, 1967, a flash fire the previous night had killed 37 of the 51 chain-gang men incarcerated at the rural stockade in Berrydale, an hour north of Pensacola, Florida. The prison had been home to all-black inmates until two weeks before the fire, when the state brought in 15 white prisoners.2 According to the guard on duty (an account that was later angrily challenged by inmate family members), prisoners rioted, and both black and white inmates independently set fire to the bunkhouse, purportedly to force the transfer of certain men. Leg irons, disciplinary flogging, and sweat boxes for Florida prisoners—common punishments into the 1920s—had been mostly eliminated, but conditions were still severe, and a solitary armed guard controlled all inmates from behind a locked chain-link fence.3 Inmates needed his permission to make any movements. On July 17, the guard was either unable or unwilling to unlock the wooden bunkhouse, which was rapidly consumed with flame. Some newspaper accounts commended the guard on duty, who had a hand in rescuing a few of the prisoners while receiving a minor burn. Left out of newspaper accounts was his decision, upon hearing the stockade disturbance and apparently fearing the release of the prisoners, to delay rescue by throwing his keys over a fence to another guard, with instructions to bring additional weapons and more guards to the burning barracks. By 1967, American movie audiences had been hearing regularly about penitentiary life for more than 30 years. The prison-genre film was brought into prominence by the actor [End Page 44] Robert Montgomery in The Big House (1930), a successful Hollywood release in which a stylish but dissolute young man is sentenced to 10 years in a squalid penitentiary for a drunk-driving homicide. As the legal scholar Mel Gutterman has observed, the box-office success of The Big House paved the way for high-profile actors in subsequent decades to try their hand at prison movies, including Paul Muni in the screen version of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).4 Serious dramatic prison movies would remain a staple Hollywood product throughout the 20th century, as evidenced by Spencer Tracy’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and Burt Lancaster’s two popular films based on penitentiary inmates, Brute Force (1947) and the Oscar-nominated Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). Following the success of these early examples of the prison-exposé genre, a subsequent generation of important actors stepped in, including Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in the Papillon (1973), Clint Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman in Brubaker (1980), and Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in the critically acclaimed Shawshank Redemption (1994).5 The success of such American films was perhaps unsurprising for, as Michel Foucault has shown, actual European chain-gangs had, for centuries before the cinema age, served as living entertainment, subject to print and image representation and theater adaptations, skillful or otherwise, as ordinary communities became audiences for troupes of itinerant, laboring criminals.6 Audiences remained keen to learn about the prison demimonde and its shadow portrait of American society. Low-budget exploitation films, such as Chain Gang (1952) and Girl on a Chain Gang (1966), set in male and female American prisons and highlighting the purported and actual rampant sexuality and violence endemic to these institutions, also proliferated throughout the twentieth century and became widely popular beginning in the 1930s. [End Page 45] So it was that holiday-season audiences in 1967 watched actor Strother Martin deliver one of the most memorable lines in twentieth-century American film: “What we have here is failure to communicate”—a statement delivered without a trace of emotion by “Captain...