The narrative begins sentimentally when Jim (Paul Muni) returns from the horror of the First War in search of a better world for himself.  Frustrated by the regimen of his hometown, he gets caught stupidly in a robbery and is sentenced to a sadistic chain gang that is supposed to be in an unnamed Southern state but can also stand for all tyranny. The metaphor grows, as the protagonist escapes, rebuilds his life as a wealthy engineer, falls in with a scheming glamorous blackmailer (Glenda Farrell) and then with a decent beauty who loves him, Helen (Helen Vinson).  Tricked to surrendering to the police in exchange for a pardon, he is condemned again to another chain gang, escapes and becomes a haunted fugitive.  The final scene of the film stands today as a jeremiad against the the failure of institutions, leadership, hope during the Depression.   Meeting a damaged, hunted Jim in the dark one evening long after his second escape from Hell, Helen pleads with him, "Can't you tell me where you're going?  Will you write?  Do you need any money?"  Jim mutters "No, no, no," and backs off.  Helen is near hysterical, "But you must, Jim.  How do you live?"  And the final horrifying line, with Jim faded into the blackness, "I steal."  It makes the movie more real and acute than 1932 could admit to or imagine, because the doom of the Depression was just beginning, because the banks wouldn't fail till the following winter, taking everyone into the vortex, because the mass murder that was at the edges of the news, in Manchuria, would spread like a pool across the continents for the next fifty years.  And here we are today, at the edge of what could still become an abyss of bank failures and the wrecked dollar and protectionism and blind appeasement of tyrants, and the last line looks freshly subversive.  What do you tell a family whose life is wrecked by the housing collapse, the joblessness, the abuse of loans, credit, savings by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the Congress in collusion with the billionaire bankers?  Do you tell the family, honesty is the best policy?  Do you tell the family, thievery is only for the smart guys?