I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, based on a true-life story, is the film most responsible for Warner Brothers' reputation as the social conscience studio. As in Heroes for Sale, the Depression forms the background for a man's life, as well as an explanation for his misfortunes. After World War I, James Allen, played by Paul Muni with characteristic intensity, is unable to find satisfactory work and becomes a drifter. Wrongly convicted of another man's crime, he is condemned to imprisonment on a Georgia chain gang, a nightmare existence which is realistically depicted in striking images--men in striped uniforms chained together, backs striped with whip marks--which have lost none of their power with time. Escaping this unbearable life, he becomes a model of rehabilitation, building a new, productive life for himself. His past, however, catches up with him and he returns to the chain gang to pay a debt to a society he doesn't owe. Shocking in its depiction of both the chain gang and the legal system as unjust, this film led to reforms in the prison (but not the legal) system. As Nick Roddick observes in A New Deal in Entertainment, “It is the chain gang which is the target of the film, not American society as a whole.”