Report from the Interior (16 page)

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.

The next day, Allen finally gets his hamburger. It is morning or early afternoon, and he has just bought a ticket for the train that will carry him across the border of the state, beyond the reach of the law and into a new life, but the train is running behind schedule, and with nothing to do but kill time until it is ready, Allen treats himself to a hamburger at an outdoor food stand, polishing it off quickly, so quickly that he orders a second. Needless to say, he never gets to eat that second hamburger, for by now it is clear that hamburgers serve as bad omens in this story, a prelude to the worst kind of luck, and before Allen can take a bite out of hamburger number two, the chief of police shows up. He and his men are searching for someone, a criminal is on the loose, and because Allen has no doubt that he is the criminal they are after, he puts down his hamburger and backs away from the food stand. The train is nearly ready to depart. Taking no chances, Allen walks around to the other side, intending to board from there to avoid being seen by the cops, but just as he is mounting the steps of one of the cars, a voice calls out: There he is!—and suddenly the lawmen are running in Allen’s direction. It appears that he has been caught, that his escape has come to nothing, but it is only a false alarm, for the criminal in question turns out to be a bedraggled hobo, a forgotten man cowering under the train just a few feet from where Allen is standing, and as the detectives haul this unknown miscreant off to the squad car, Allen hops onto the train. Another close call—followed by yet another one just a minute later. As the conductor punches Allen’s ticket, he tells him that the police are still looking for the escaped convict. The conductor then sits down next to another conductor, and before long the two of them are eyeing Allen and whispering into each other’s ears, almost certainly asking themselves if he fits the description of the missing man. A quick cut: a close-up of Allen’s dusty shoes. He has left the train and is walking. Another cut, this time to a speeding car. A map is superimposed on the car, the car turns into a train, and the train is heading north on the map, zeroing in on a final destination of Chicago. The map and the train then melt into nothingness, and there is the city. Tall buildings, flashing lights, tumult, and freedom.

As Allen’s life begins again, he is first seen standing outdoors in front of the employment office of the Tri-State Engineering Company. In the near distance, a bridge is under construction, and a sign posted on the wall to Allen’s left reads:
MEN WANTED.
This is the kind of work he wanted to do when he came home from the war, the work he looked for and couldn’t find, and you are fully expecting him to be turned down in Chicago as well, for the simple reason that you have come to look upon Allen as cursed, as a man for whom things will always go wrong. To your immense surprise, the man behind the counter at the employment office says: I guess we can use you, all right—and hope suddenly flares up in you, you begin to think that perhaps Allen’s luck has finally turned. What’s the name? the man asks, and without thinking Allen says
Allen,
but when the man asks if that’s his first name or last name, Allen hesitates for a moment, realizing that he has just been given a chance to reinvent himself, to take on a new identity, and he says the
first name
, his full name is
Allen James.
Not terribly clever, you think at first, anyone could see through that obvious reversal, but then, as you go on thinking about it, summoning up various people whose full names consist of two first names, you wonder if it might not do the job, after all. If you turned Henry James into James Henry, would anyone think about Mr. James if he were introduced as Mr. Henry? Probably not. Still, you would have preferred a more radical transformation, something akin to the rebirth of Edmond Dantès as the Count of Monte Cristo, for example, another story about an unjustly imprisoned man who escaped (you have read the novel and are familiar with the count), but Dantès had the implausible good fortune to discover a treasure, and when he returned to the world of the living he was the richest man in France. Allen is dirt poor, a man with nothing. Dantès wanted revenge, but all Allen wants is to build bridges.

The man behind the counter tells Allen to report at eight o’clock the next morning. The scene ends with a full-frame close-up of Allen’s employment card.
DATE: 1924. CLASS OF WORK: LABORER. SALARY PER DAY: $4.00.

Time has passed, how much time is unclear, but Allen is next seen outdoors, toiling with a crew of men in the heat of the afternoon sun, digging ditches, the tool in his hands now a pick, not smashing rocks anymore, not working with a sledgehammer, but except for the absence of chains, the scene is depressingly familiar to you, it is prison labor in a new form, no whips or rifles, no malevolent guards, but miserably paid, backbreaking work, and you begin to despair that Allen will ever be able to lift himself out of the mud. That is what the film seems to be telling you: the world is a prison for those who have nothing, the have-nots at the bottom of the pile are no better than dogs, and whether a man works on a chain gang or is gainfully employed by the Tri-State Engineering Company, he has no control over his existence. So it would appear from the first moments of the scene, but you quickly discover that you are wrong, that the setup is a ruse, for a moment after you come to this grim reading of events, the foreman walks over to Allen and says: Hey, James. That’s a swell idea you had about that bend over there. I told the boss it was your suggestion. Allen: Yes? That’s very nice. Foreman: I don’t think you’ll be swinging a pick much longer. Cut to a close-up of Allen’s next employment card.
DATE: 1926. CLASS OF WORK: FOREMAN. SALARY PER DAY: $9.00.

He is moving up in the world. By the next year, 1927, he has been promoted to surveyor and is earning twelve dollars a day, by 1929 he is assistant superintendent at fourteen a day, and at some point after that (date and salary unspecified) he is one of the top officials of the company, the general field superintendent, a man with his name and title written in gold-embossed letters on the door of his private office. From rags and degradation to fashionable clothes and universal respect, a builder of bridges at last, a pure example of the American success story, living proof that hard work, ambition, and intelligence can propel you into a world of meaningful accomplishment and wealth. This is where the story should end—virtue rewarded, the quivering scales of justice now becalmed in perfect equipoise—but Allen’s past will always be his past, and consequently there is a problem, an impediment to happiness caused by Allen’s too-trusting nature (why shouldn’t he have gone out for that hamburger with Pete the stick-up man?), and therefore trouble is gathering around him, there is always more trouble, this time in the form of a woman named Marie, a sex-hungry, grasping blonde who rented him a room in 1926 and quickly became his bedmate, for Marie knows a good thing when she sees one, and the handsome, industrious Allen is nothing if not a good bet. The affair lasts for three years as Allen works his way up the ladder at Tri-State, but he feels nothing for her anymore, neither love nor affection, the flames of physical desire have long since burned out, and the day finally comes when he decides to move to another address. She walks in on him as he is packing his bags, and although Allen is too soft-hearted to tell her that he wants a definitive break, he nevertheless has the courage to remind her (again) that he doesn’t love her: I can’t change my feelings toward you any more than I can change the color of my eyes. Marie (hands on hips, looking at him with hostility): And that’s your only reason for leaving? Allen: It’s a pretty good one, isn’t it? Marie: Not very. Of course, when a guy wants to ditch a girl, he’ll do most anything. Providing it doesn’t land him back in the chain gang—where he probably belongs.

The secret is out. Impossible to comprehend—but the secret is out, even if Allen is in Illinois now, hundreds of miles from the state where he was imprisoned, in the North, where for five years he has never breathed a word about his past to anyone, but the secret is no longer a secret, and the spurned Marie is the one who has found him out. How? Because she owns the boardinghouse where he lives, because she has access to his mail before he does, and because his brother, Clint, the melon-headed Reverend Pious, has written him a letter—
I thought you should know that the police are still trying to find you. When I think that your capture would mean eight more terrible years on that chain gang, my blood runs cold. I’ll keep in touch with you. Devotedly, Clint
—and now that Marie has intercepted the letter, Allen’s fate is in her hands. Has she turned against him so thoroughly that she would be willing to expose the truth? Not if she had a reason to protect him, she says. What does she mean by that? he asks. That she wouldn’t tell—if he were her husband. Before he can respond to this threat of blackmail, Marie walks out of the room. Without lifting a finger, she has punched him into submission, and Allen staggers for a moment, back-pedaling as if he has truly been punched, and as he gropes his way into a chair, the look in his eyes makes you think of a man who has just watched a city burn to the ground. His expression is both strange and horrible, he is almost smiling, but strangely and horribly, the smile of someone who has been crushed, smiling because he knows it was inevitable that he should be crushed, and then the smile vanishes and he is on the verge of tears, his resolve has utterly collapsed, he is about to break down and cry, for he knows that he is trapped, trapped for the rest of his life, and no matter how desperate he becomes, there will never be any escape.

The marriage is of course a miserable sham. His wife cheats on him, lies to him, overspends his money, and Allen is powerless to stop her. He is thriving at his job, his reputation has grown, he is now considered one of the best engineers in the city, but his private life is no life, and when he returns home to his new apartment, his first task is to empty the overflowing ashtrays and toss out the empty gin bottles from Marie’s latest party. Then, at a chic gathering organized by the head of Tri-State (which Marie does not attend, since she is out of town visiting her “cousin”), Allen meets a woman named Helen, another lost and lonely soul, a bit too insipid for your taste, alas, but well-bred, soft (as opposed to Marie’s hard), and companionable. Months go by (more pages fluttering off the calendar, superimposed on an image of a construction site, accompanied by the sounds of drilling), and now that Allen has fallen in love with his new woman and his life has taken an unexpected turn for the better, he feels emboldened to confront Marie and ask for a divorce. He promises to give her anything and everything she wants, but she calmly tells him (sprawled out on the couch smoking a cigarette, perhaps a little drunk) that she’s satisfied with the way things are, she’s happy, and there’s no chance of letting him go. Marie: You’re going to be a big shot someday with plenty of sugar, and I’m going to ride right along. Allen: But I’m in love with another woman. Marie: That’s ju-u-u-u-st too bad. Allen: Why don’t you play the game square? Marie: Square! So you and your sweetheart can give me the grand go-by, huh? Allen: If you don’t listen to reason, I’ll find some way. Marie: You do, and you’ll serve out your time. Allen: It’s no worse than serving out my time with you. Marie (furious): You’ll be sorry you said that! Allen (grabbing her): Now, listen. You’ve held that sword above my head long enough. It’s about time we called it quits. You’ve been pulling a bluff on me, and I’ve been fool enough and coward enough to go along with it. Marie: Oh, you good-for-nothing filthy convict. Bluffing? You’ll see.