Heroes for Sale (1933)

[moira finnie]

Heroes For Sale (1933) airs Thur. Dec. 6 at 3:45 AM ET on TCM.
Director William Wellman's work is being featured this month on TCM, and, while I've seen several of his pre-code films, this Richard Barthelmess and Loretta Young film is one that I'm particularly looking forward to seeing for the first time.

Why? Barthelmess is an especially interesting actor in several of his early talkies when, as his career was on a sharp descent, he chose roles that were decidedly challenging, dealing with themes such as the devastating aftermath of WWI, and, in this film, addiction, economic displacement and political and very human responses to the Depression. I'd also like to see Loretta Young in another Wellman movie from this early stage of her career after seeing her unusually gritty work in Midnight Mary, (also being shown on (Thur., Dec. 13th at 1:15 AM ET on TCM).

I realize that all may sound dry as dust, but as Wellman demonstrated in several of his early '30s films at Warner Brothers, such as Wild Boys of the Road, (showing on Wed. Dec. 5th at 9:00 PM ET on TCM), his ability to transfer the hard facts of life in this period onto the screen in a visceral, still affecting manner is still worth a look. I hope that others will post their impressions of this particular film here after it airs later this week. Btw, Richard Barthelmess is an interesting part of our December Guest Star, Mick LaSalle's discussion in the book, Dangerous Men, about the male figures in Pre-Code films.

If you'd like a rundown of all of Wellman's Pre-Code and later films being shown this month, you can view an overview article here:
http://tinyurl.com/38ackx

[Jezebel38]

I have this one circled in my Now Playing guide to record & watch, as well as Star Witness with Walter Huston which airs right before. I'm not sure I've seen either one of these, but I sometimes forget the movies I've seen untill I watch my recording and have that "Oh I've seen this before" moment.

Two other William Wellman Pre-Codes I am really looking forward to, that I know for certain I've never seen, are Lilly Turner and Frisco Jenny which play on Wednesday Dec. 12th. Both star Ruth Chatterton and were featured in the documentary Complicated Women that TCM put together based on Mick LaSalle's book.

[Dawtrina]

I hadn't even heard of Richard Barthelmess until I read Mick LaSalle's book a few years ago, which also introduced me to Warren William and Lee Tracy. Now all three are firm favourites, but it seems a lot easier to track down Warren William movies than those of Barthelmess or Tracy, so I see any new opportunity as a treat.

I found Heroes for Sale fascinating, especially through its treatment of communism but also because it managed to cram so much into little over 70 minutes. I appreciated the delicious irony of effectively calling un-American those who shouted loudest about un-American activities, especially given that the film was made in 1933, a year before there even was a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which was more anti-Nazi at that point than anti-Communist anyway.

You asked for our impressions of the film, so I hope you don't mind me posting the review I wrote for my blog:

Any new Richard Barthelmess film I can find is a good one and a precode Barthelmess is even better. Here he's Tom Holmes, a soldier fighting in the trenches in World War I, and he accomplishes a difficult mission when his superior officer freezes with fear, bringing back an enemy officer as a prisoner. Unfortunately he gets shot in the process and so his boss Roger Winston gets the credit, and plenty of credit too: a distinguished service cross and a promotion to Major. Winston takes the credit even though he feels terrible about it, through fear.

And then back comes Tom. He survived and spent the rest of the war as a POW in a German hospital to be freed after the armistice on a prisoner exchange with steel splinters in his spinal column and an addiction to morphine to kill the pain. What makes it worse is that he bumps into Winston on the boat back and once he gets out of an American hospital he goes back to work for Winston's father's bank, but loses his job pretty quickly through his addiction amidst some heat of the moment mudslinging.

His life changes once he gets out of the state narcotic farm, cured and discharged. He meets Mary Dennis, who puts him up at her boarding house and fellow boarder Ruth Loring who gets him a job at the laundry she works at. Before long he's climbing the ranks and he and Ruth are married, with a kid on the way. Life is pretty good, but as quickly as things can get better they can get worse and the plot takes us down a number of turns that are as believable as they are surprising.

Beyond great performances from Richard Barthelmess and Aline MacMahon, what makes this film such a powerful precode are the issues it addresses, most of which wouldn't have stood a chance under the code. Beyond the drug issues early on, there's a political angle too involving communism, that great pariah of Americans. It's no red propaganda picture, with the first radical we meet converting to purest capitalism as soon as he has money and the first red mob being simply people bitter at losing their jobs. It's not propaganda the other way either though, exposing the injustice of the red squads and demonstrating how once you get onto a blacklist you stay there, even when you didn't deserve to be there in the first place.

It's easy to interpret this as just the middle ground of common sense, especially from a perspective of hindsight, but it's really an astonishing approach. Tom Holmes is depicted as the real American here: hard working, and courageous, yet decent enough to share what he has with those less fortunate than himself. That's a Christian outlook, not an un-American one. Yet he still becomes an easy victim of the red squads, who a couple of decades later would be the very people defining what counted as 'un-American activities', making this a polemic against the hypocrisy of a name that hadn't been created yet. Fascinating.

The director is William A Wellman, who I really need to start paying more attention to. He seems to be one of the key precode directors, making some interesting and influential films. He made The Public Enemy, for one. What seems surprising to me is that as a confirmed precode fan, I prefer his later work. This is my twelfth Wellman, two thirds of which are precodes, but it's Nothing Sacred, Track of the Cat and especially The Ox-Bow Incident that have impressed me so far.

This is the best of the precodes I've seen, beating out The Public Enemy and Barbara Stanwyck's So Big!, and it's packed with issues. It's only just over 70 minutes long but covers drug addiction, the plight of returning servicemen, communism, the rise of automation, red squads, blacklisting, the Depression, food lines, soup kitchens and the sweep of men across the nation. What amazes most is that none of it seems rushed, at least until the end which like many Warner Brothers movies of the era comes very quickly indeed, as if the filmmakers ran out of film and had to wrap things up quickly.

[Mr. Arkadin]

Did anybody record it. If so--can you make me a copy?!