Fugitive Road

Wera Engels and Erich von Stroheim

Frank R. Strayer's Fugitive Road is an independent B production from 1934, a romantic drama with comic elements. The film was made for peanuts on the Universal lot and was released by Chesterfield Pictures during its waning days. The company would soon be taken over by Herbert Yates along with other poverty row studios and merged into Republic Pictures. The film is set in an Austrian town on the Italian border. Presiding over the border is Captain Hauptmann Oswald von Traunsee (Stroheim), a career soldier who has been exiled to this Podunk town because of an affair he had with a Minister's wife. Traunsee lords over his small command and still indulges his roving eye. We see him nab a band of diamond smugglers and shepherd a group of emigres into a boarding house where they await processing. Among them are the two other points of the romantic triangle of the film : a Russian peasant girl (Wera Engels) and an American gangster (Leslie Fenton) who is on the lam. 

It turns out the gangster knew the Russian gal's brother in America. Unbeknownst to her, he died in a fracas and the gangster wants to make amends by marrying her and taking her to the States, even if it means turning himself into the authorities. Stroheim's character, in full vile Teutonic seducer mode, stands in their way. Yet, his character morphs into George Arliss, who was forever uniting star-crossed lovers in his pictures, two thirds of the way through this very short flick and works for a happy ending for his youthful charges. There is not much else to the picture except for some excruciating ethnic humor. The Italian patriarch smells like garlic! Oy!

The spare and cramped sets do provide a fitting sense of enclosure for a tale of confined immigrants. Director Strayer, most famous for directing twelve films in the Blondie series, was a journeyman B director who amassed over 80 credits. There is some notion that von Stroheim directed parts of the picture. Tubi lists him as co-director. Certainly, the scenes where von Stroheim drills and berates his regiment in his native tongue smack of his oeuvre. However, much of the film does not. There are two fairly effective dolly shots, a technique the Austrian born master avoided. In general, the direction is workmanlike and unmemorable. I sense the high percentage of Deutsche spoken is because this film was targeted to show in urban independent theaters in cities with an enclave of German immigrants, like my hometown of Baltimore. The film's view of Austria is pleasant and positive. The Italian patriarch and his large family are welcomed with open arms by the Austrians once the matriarch delivers a son in the boarding house. Soon, Austria and Germany would be less welcoming to immigrants, but there is no sense of doom at the rise of the Third Reich. There would be no glimmer in American films of the coming danger until Three Comrades in 1938. Before then, American films held out laurels of peace and compassion, the odd evil Hun aside,  to our World War 1 adversaries: see for example All Quiet on the Western Front, Four Sons, and Little Man, What Now.

Ms. Engels, a native of Kiel was appealing, but bland. She had no onscreen zing. Her attire doesn't help for she is made to look like a doll. She was out of pictures by 1937. Leslie Fenton fares better, he spars well with Stroheim, but is too soft to be a gangster. He was married at the time to Ann Dvorak and served honorably in World War 2. He directed a few minor Westerns after the war. The primary reason to see Fugitive Road is Herr Stroheim. He is his usual tyrannical self, but there is a winning sense of mischief in his acting as if he was truly tired of playing evil Huns. He is already eyeing his next conquest as the film ends. On with the show! There is a slight pre-Code feel to the film, with shots of a washer woman's rump and a men's room. Unfortunately, the print of Fugitive Road streaming on Tubi is atrocious.