It seems fittingly ironic that the star of Scarface (1932) and the director of Little Caesar (1931), two criminally-oriented pictures whose protagonists never serve the hard time they undeniably deserve, would join forces to make a film about a man who is unjustly serving it in their place. Clearly anti-establishment and concerned with social equality, Chain Gang portrays the justice and penal systems as abusive, unreliable and spiteful; responsible for creating criminals rather than rehabilitating them. Left broke and hungry in his search for construction work with hopes of being an engineer, WW I veteran James Allen (Paul Muni) involuntarily gets mixed up in a restaurant hold up that lands him 10 years of hard labour on a roadside chain gang. Less than a year in, Allen successfully escapes, leaving bad food and the guards' abuse behind. While plagued with blackmail and a wanted face, he finally becomes a engineer and a respected citizen, his risk for capture escalating as he increasingly has something to lose. Explicit in its denunciation of government dishonesty, the representation of prison-life in Chain Gang is anything but glamourous, the contrast of dark shadows and bright lights amplifying the feeling of confinement already established by shots obstructed by prison bars. Its suprisingly pessimistic ending clearly supports the film's contention that when it comes to the American dream, crime might just be the result of squashed good intentions.
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