Have you ever noticed that in a thriller involving a wrongly accused (or even convicted) protagonist, it is a common device that all the subsequent crimes the hero commits to prove he was innocent of the first one are free of consequences?

So, for example with the 1993 Harrison Ford The Fugitive consider the crimes Dr. Richard Kimball commits after he’s wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife:

• Escaping from custody in the first place – the train hits the prison bus, the bus breaks open, Ford is able to loosen his chains and so forth – you don’t get to walk away from custody – this is an escape and it is a crime (even if you do heroic doctor stuff to save some of the other prisoners and guards injured in the bus crash)
• inside the big dam spillway tunnel as he’s being chased down by Tommy Lee Jones, the dogged federal marshall Gil Gerard, Dr. Kimball ends up holding a Glock, pointing it at Marshall Gerard, insisting “I didn’t kill my wife.” This is assault with a deadly weapon and given that the gun is being pointed at a federal marshal, this is assault on a peace officer, interference with a peace officer, and resisting arrest. Again, these are crimes, in and of themselves.

We can find more (e.g., several instances of theft (taking clothing and medications to aid in his escape)) but the point is, he-was-just-trying-to-prove-he-was-framed.  And we just know by the end of the movie that everything is going to be ok, he will be “cleared” of murdering his wife and he won’t ever be charged with any of the subsequent crimes because, after all, they’re free when you’re innocent of the original one.  In the last scene of the movie, we see Kimball being driven away in the back of the federal marshals’ car, his handcuffs being taken off him, Tommy Lee Jones smiling at him, the marshal on Dr. Kimball’s side now.  We just know that he’s not going to be prosecuted for escaping, for assault on a peace officer and so on.

Saboteur (Hitchcock 1942)  early on in the story, Robert Cummings escapes from police custody by punching and knocking out an officer who has tried to take him into custody.  But, after all, he was just trying to help run down the vicious Nazi saboteur ring spread across the country, and we can be sure after the climactic confrontation with the actual criminal on the Statue of Liberty that he won’t be prosecuted for battery on a peace officer.

Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock again)  Farley Granger’s character, tennis champion Guy Haines, also escapes from police custody (or at least police supervision) at a tournament in Forrest Hills in order to go back to the Maryland amusement park to prevent Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony from dropping his cigarette lighter and implicating him in his wife’s murder.  (Guy had begged the cops to let him play and had essentially promised to behave and stay put – but he did not.)  But, again, by the end of the movie, the gruff police detective, Captain Turley, is clearly accepting of Guy’s version of events.

I have always found this to be an amusing aspect of so many movies in the thriller genre, worth pointing out for its own sake.  But, I also wonder, assuming that movies are thought experiments, what are we trying to work through, discover, prove, when we make and watch these movies of the-man-unfairly-framed-so-entitled-to-ommit-crimes-to-free-himself?