If there’s one thing of which the movies simply cannot get enough, it’s outlaws. And how better to really turn the narrative screws against them than to put them on the run, having recently escaped from some overbearing force that desperately wants to get ahold of them. While this naturally takes the form of the escaped-convict film (as it does for Jason Reitman’s Labor Day, opening wide this Friday), I expanded it somewhat to include those one step ahead of other, equally (if not more) dangerous organizations, in films that similarly represent themes of purgatory, paranoia, palpable perspiration, and other alliterated matters.

10.) Talk of the Town

While the life-and-death stakes of the life of a prison escapee naturally lend themselves to drama, the basic set-up can, too, be the very essence of screwball comedy. You’ve got a protagonist (here, Cary Grant, falsely accused of course) trying to live under a false position (as Jean Arthur’s gardener) in order to slip past some potentially damaging forces (Arthur’s summer tenant, a law school dean soon to be appointed to the Supreme Court) and on his way towards love (with Arthur, who else). And a great many hijinks ensue, all the while raising some questions about mob mentality and the innumerable problems inherit to the justice system.

9.) I Love You, Phillip Morris

For those who suffered through Crazy, Stupid, Love. and swore off any more work by anyone involved, I cannot say I blame you for disregarding directors Glen Ficarra and John Requa’s debut feature, which they also wrote. Thankfully, unlike their follow-up, I Love You, Phillip Morris wildly departs from the expectations created by the logline “con man escapes prison to reunite with his beloved,” and is instead a wildly debauched comedy about a man (Jim Carrey) who, following a near-death experience, refuses to live falsely one more day. He comes out of the closet, flamboyantly so, moves to Miami with his boyfriend, and starts running a series of cons to keep them both living the high life. Once captured, he falls in love with a fellow inmate (the titular Morris, played, sadly, rather blandly by Ewan McGregor), and, unable to live without him, escapes prison several times over several years in order to constantly reunite. Carrey absolutely owns the picture, perfectly meeting the aesthetic call for an extremely heightened representation of a man’s inner self constantly being unleashed.

8.) Raw Deal

As stripped-down and barebones a prison break film as they come, Anthony Mann’s 1948 film opens with Dennis O’Keefe hopping the prison wall to his girlfriend (Claire Trevor), ready and waiting in a car, and does not let up. Certainly not by the time they kidnap social worker Marsha Hunt, who, wouldn’t you know it, falls for the big lug as well, and, in the great war of affections between accomplice and honest citizen, only one can win in the age of the Code. More pertinently, only one can lose. As one comes to expect from Mann in this period, it’s a no-nonsense kind of picture, breathtakingly tense and, thanks to frequent cinematographer John Alton’s moody shadows, achingly atmospheric.

7.) O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Given that Joel and Ethan Coen have done virtually every side of the criminal enterprise with tremendous aplomb, it only stands to reason that such skill would be similarly applied to the prison break picture. George Clooney talks chained compatriots John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson to hop the tracks with him, promising a buried treasure on the other end, when really there’s nothing more than the ringleader’s ex-wife, about to be hitched to another man. Along the way, they assume the identities of folk singers, bank robbers, salesmen, Ku Klux Klan members, and accidentally a toad as they try to make a quick buck or just slip by undetected. The Coens keep things as off-balance and cheery as such a premise might suggest, with a good deal of sentiment picked up from that filmmaker to whom they owe their title, Preston Sturges.

6.) Out of Sight

Is it any wonder Clooney can play such a good criminal? Here he stars again as one, and this time, it’s very much his show. But rather than drag along a couple of fellow ne’er-do-wells, he has to keep a U.S. Marshall (Jennifer Lopez) at bay just long enough to make his next getaway. Clooney is one of the rare modern movie stars easily capable of the kind of charm his roles demand; it only works if we fall for him, too.

5.) Phantom of the Paradise

To refer to any specific picture as Brian De Palma’s “truly twisted” tour-de-force would perhaps be underselling the rest of his catalogue, but it’s hard to think of one more demented than this. Let’s see if I can set up the story as quickly as he does – escaped musician-turned-prisoner seeks revenge on the producer who framed him and stole his music, so he terrorizes the producer’s newly-opened concert hall, the titular Paradise, hoping to attain the fame that was robbed from him. With original music written by Paul Williams (who also stars as the producer), the result is a thrilling, terrifying, totally gonzo musical that’s as singular as it is accomplished, the kind of beautiful perfection that comes only from something culled from a half-dozen influences yet completely pure and unvarnished.

4.) Down by Law

When you’re putting together a film that has to rest largely on how compelling the audience finds the actors, you could do a hell of a lot worse than to pull in John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni. Hell, once you’ve got those guys, you could make almost any movie. Jim Jarmusch put them in jail together. Then he let them escape. As with most of Jarmuch’s films, the sketch of a plot follows naturally, not out of a sense of character motivation, as such, but almost inevitability. They follow rivers and roads, occasionally on detours but mostly trying to follow the path laid before them; what better representation of the film as a whole?

3.) Port of Shadows

Marcel Carné made the kind of lasting impression of which most directors could only dream with 1945’s spectacular Children of Paradise, but it was his 1938 film that left the strongest impression…on my heart. Jean Gabin plays an army deserter that falls in with a small community in the port city Le Havre, most often regrouping at a small bar that seems to be literally on the edge of the world, cloaked in fog and offering only good conversation and one incredibly attractive girl with plenty of trouble all her own. This, and the following film on this list, represent probably better than anything else the purgatorial feeling that accompanies the fugitive state, knowing there are two definite sides surrounding you yet feeling as though you’re completely isolated. Not many films were written by poets, and the combination of Jacques Prévert’s exquisite dialogue and Carné’s innate ability to find the fantastic in the everyday turns a fairly routine premise into a rich, rapturous expression of morbid beauty.

2.) Dogville

Lars von Trier holds off revealing from what Grace (Nicole Kidman) is running, so I won’t give away the game here, either. Suffice to say that hers is a familiar, archetypical American story of a person seeking refuge in a small town, and finding it…but only to a point. Eventually whatever drives them there will come back to haunt them, either literally or figuratively or, in this case, both. Like Carné, von Trier isolates his community, though he takes that idea all the way, setting the entire film on a bare stage with only a handful of props and some lines to delineate specific settings. While it becomes very easy by film’s end to regard the film as a rather damning portrait of American ideals, such a method is as restrictive as it is illuminating. Dogville is every place that holds all the power.

1.) I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang

It could be nothing else. This is the ultimate, the everything of the escaped-prisoner movie, the one that shows the harsh circumstances of the Great Depression, to the wrenching terror of getting wrapped up in a crime you didn’t want to commit, to the horror of the chain-gang prison camps, to the equally scary prospect of trying to reinvent yourself while on the run from the law to, ultimately, the total injustice of a system promising the exact opposite. Mervyn LeRoy could work magic with these sort of archetypal stories that appropriate and recontextualize American iconography, expressing the potency of a single image while calling into question if the dynamism we see in it is really so noble a thing. Even more so than most Pre Code films, which delighted in the amount of sex, violence, and other sordid material with which they could get away, this is so institutionally groundbreaking and upsetting that you really have to marvel it exists at all, if you can step away long enough from being so damn caught up in it.