Roffman and Purdy describe the social problem film as politically rather tame, arguing that “there is no direct relationship between the problem film and social change” (304). However, they posit as an exception to this paradigm “examples of isolated reforms—in chain-gang regulations after Fugitive” (304). Chain Gang’s lack of narrative closure at the end, which suggests the failures of a malfunctioning society, approaches, they argue, a sincere and radical criticism of Great Depression politics and culture.

Roffman and Purdy’s reading of the film demonstrates a counter-argument to my own. Despite Chain Gang’s uniquely bleak ending, historical evidence refutes Roffman and Purdy’s claims. Warner Brothers, who enjoyed a longstanding political collaboration with President Roosevelt, released the film a week after FDR’s election to office. In a production context, I group Chain Gang with other films that propagandize the New Deal Administration. Its criticism of Depression society condemns Hoover’s failures thereby aligning a potentially desperate viewer’s political energies with subsequent New Deal propaganda campaigns.

Chain Gang’s historical misreading of the southern penal system, which Roffman and Purdy also overlook, reinforces its function as New Deal agitprop. By depicting the South’s cultural backwardness as antithetical to modernity (epitomized by industries like Hollywood), Chain Gang fosters a dichotomized interpretation of malfunctioning Depression American society. According to the film’s logic, anti-modern Georgia opposes modern Chicago, whereas evidence suggests that the South’s convict labor and subsequent chain gang penal systems evolved in with Northern industry. The film annihilates the chain gang’s profound complexities framing it as purely antagonistic in a typical codified Hollywood good-cop/bad-cop conversation.

In other words, I strongly disagree with Roffman and Purdy’s historical reading of the film’s politics.