Plus ça change…

Heroes for Sale 1933 Warner Brothers/First National (71 minutes) directed by William A. Wellman; screenplay by Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner; Howard Bretherton, editor; James Van Trees, cinematographer.

An injured veteran’s addiction to painkillers, smug and craven upper-income bracket swells, workers downsized to maximize corporate profits, homeless ex-servicemen, and heavy-handed government treatment of ‘undesirables’: all are part of this classic story which resonates today.

William A. Wellman directed this Warner studios epic which follows its hero from the trenches of the Western Front through the irrationally exuberant 1920s to the breadlines of the Great Depression in the first 100 days of the Roosevelt Administration.

Thomas Holmes (Richard Barthelmess), a soldier assigned to a ‘suicide mission,’ is left for dead on a rainy nighttime battlefield by his panicked platoon leader. This officer, Roger Winston (Gordon Westcott), is a wealthy acquaintance from Holmes’ home town. Taken to be the sole survivor of what turned out to be a successful mission due to Holmes’ unsung initiative, Winston becomes a decorated war hero.

But German soldiers found Holmes alive and he got medical treatment as a prisoner of war. His injuries lead to a dependency on painkillers which interfere with his readjustment to postwar civilian life, particularly his new employment back in his home town at the Winston family bank.

Holmes’ ‘disgrace’—his morphine addiction exposed—puts him in inpatient treatment, during which time his widowed mother died. ‘Cured and discharged’ after six months’ treatment but with nothing to go home to, Holmes makes a new start in Chicago.

The young man’s verve, imagination and charm get him back on track in a new home, with a girlfriend (Loretta Young) and salt-of-the-earth friends, and a job at an industrial laundry. He finds a purpose in life and the chance to make a difference. He convinces the laundry owner (Grant Mitchell) to install a labor-saving device which improves efficiency and the company’s bottom line, though on the condition that none lose their jobs. He marries and starts a family.

Richard Barthelmess, Robert Barrat, Loretta Young and Aline MacMahon in Heroes for Sale.

But everyone does not live happily ever after.

A national chain takes over the laundry. The new owners adopt the plant’s labor-saving innovations nationwide and lay off the redundant work force. Holmes’ efforts to help the workers lose him his job and his wife; he gets a five-year prison term for a crime he did not commit from a society jittery about ‘anarchists’ and political radicals. After his release from prison, the local police ‘Red Squad’ run him out of town among the army of homeless unemployed veterans.

This broad sweep of early twentieth century American history takes place in little more than an hours’ running time. The story spoke to the heart of audiences during the most severe period of the Great Depression, and has a folksy ‘Joe Hill’ ending.

Wellman slipped memorable devils in the works, such as Holmes’ drug dealer (Tammany Young) and the surly pair of snap-brimmed Red Squad officers (Robert Elliott and Charles C. Wilson). 

In the establishing scene before Holmes is forced to leave town, an eight-column RED RIOT WRECKS MACHINE SHOP headline splashes across the screen and the Red Squad grab several Italian-speaking men unrelated to Holmes’ story from their homes and off the street: mustaches were the old turbans.

The craven Winston and his sanctimonious bank president father (Berton Churchill) are less devils than weak characters in a low circle of hell.

Barthelmess’ Holmes leads the angels as a Tom Hanks-like character, with the lovely Loretta Young as his wife Ruth. Character actor Robert Barrat’s ‘Max’ Brinker is a stereotypical comically overbearing German immigrant who vents his disapproval with a clicking tongue—a ‘Red’ until his revolutionary invention makes him a white spats-wearing, cigar-smoking capitalist. 

The real treat is the wise-cracking Aline MacMahon as Mary Dennis who, with her old codger father, Pa Dennis (Charley Grapewin, Dorothy’s Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz and Grandpa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath), runs the Chicago diner with rooms upstairs where Holmes gets his second start—homely, lonely places that could be Edward Hopper subjects.

MacMahon has great comic timing. Her Mary takes to the appealing Holmes from the moment he first appears in her diner, but he sees in her only a reliable older friend. A short scene that flows like an eloquent pause says in a minute everything about Mary’s loneliness and disappointment beneath her salty, ironic surface.

Holmes gets a promotion and offers to take Mary and girlfriend Ruth to dinner; he won’t hear of Mary’s polite decline. Mary rushes excitedly into her adjoining room to change, and then opens the door to see the couple standing close together with their backs to her. She holds for a beat, silently closes the door, and shouts to Mary from behind the door that she won’t be ready in time. Then she turns to the camera for a long beat.

In general, the framing, editing and pace are as crisp and snappy as Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner’s script. Wellman did not have to search far for images of a country and people out of work. Many of his extras in the crowds and breadlines reportedly were the real thing, hired for the movie. And when it rains, it literally pours.

Though Wellman never shuffled through a breadline, he had been a combat flyer during the war who sustained serious injuries when he was shot down over France. (He also crashed a SPAD fighter aircraft while shooting his classic Wings in 1928, after he which never flew again.)

Heroes for Sale is among the early Hollywood talkies released before the motion picture industry began to enforce its self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so until directors like Otto Preminger started testing the limits in the late 1950s. There was plenty of sex of all kinds, substance abuse, left wing politics, and moral failings among the grand and good in the United States before the 1960s, just not at the movies and on television.

Turner Classic Movies reissued this movie among several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films on DVD as its Forbidden Hollywood Collection. Despite ‘blue movie’ cover art, the moral, social, and political subject matter make for the more controversial parts.

            This DVD includes Wellman’s classic Wild Boys on the Road (1933), a socially conscious drama about economic hard times breaking up families, with teenagers riding the rails seeking work and adventure in the Depression-era United States.

Illustrated men

The Mark of Cain 2000 U.S./Russia (73 minutes) directed and co-produced by Alix Lambert; cinematography Anastasi Mikhailov.

This documentary works within the context of the barbaric conditions of the Russian prison system to tell the stories of two dozen men and women inmates who have illustrated their lives in tattoos.

The legend is that ‘traditional’ Russian criminal society, the so-called vóry v zakóne, or ‘thieves who follow the code’ (the literal cardboard rendering ‘thieves-in-law’ suggests in English the agency of a spouse’s family), has a hierarchical structure, and that its members’ lives and careers are memorialized in elaborate nakólki, or tattoos, which identify them like a resume, passport, or military badges, rank and insignia.

Their stories are bleak and intense; the illustrations are elaborate. The scariest-looking subjects often seem calm and philosophical; some of the friendlier ones give off a vibe that makes one feel it would be better not to meet them in a crowded, day-lit street, much less alone in a dark alley. Several camera-curious, genuinely frightening-looking characters drift occasionally through the background. Russian criminal society may be male-dominated, but women appear to hold their own throughout the ranks.

Prison rules prohibit tattooing, but the visual evidence indicates that officials do not strictly enforce them. The pain the procedure can cause lends to its mystique.

We see stars on pecs and knees (‘I don’t bow or kneel to authority’), torso-covering churches for which each cupola stands for a conviction, spiders on webs (thief, or drug addict), and heavily muscled, hooded executioners or Christs on the cross (‘I follow the thieves’ code’). Sailing ships indicate a ‘roving life.’ German and Nazi symbols display disdain for conventional social norms and authority, as with 1950s American bikers, not pro-Nazi or racist views.

During the Soviet period, prisoners facing death sentences sometimes tattooed images of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin over their hearts, chests and backs, on the theory that guards would not dare mar such sacrosanct images with bullets.

However, any ‘tradition’ of tattooing and what the images mean seem open to a variety of interpretations. Several subjects said there are serious consequences for not being able to ‘answer’ for one’s markings. But among younger inmates, tattooing would work more along the line of creating a criminal Facebook page. As in other things, the more display suggests the less actual play.

According to Colonel Anatoli Teryokhin of Perm Central Penitentiary, tattoos fell from fashion among an element in prison and in the military among whom certain symbols and images once held specific meanings. Like everything else in the New Russia, tattooing is not what it used to be.

One of the most interesting details Lambert records is not a ‘what’ but the ‘how.’

Aleksandr Borisov, a career criminal doing nine and a half years for robbery, was the tattoo artist-in-residence at Perm Central Penitentiary, a high-security facility where Lambert and her crew appear to have done most of their interviews.

Borisov improvised a rotary tattoo machine from a hand-held mechanical wind-up razor. His ‘needle’ is a five-inch (13 cm) section of metal guitar string with one sharp end, mounted on the razor housing. The blunt end attaches to a lug on the razor motor and the sharp end trains through a repurposed ballpoint pen tip fixed to the other end of housing. The razor motor agitates the needle quickly up and down.

For ink, Borisov used the finely sifted soot of burnt boot sole dissolved in urine—preferably a client’s own. ‘I use only soot,’ Borisov said. ‘It turns out darker, doesn’t fade over time, and everything comes out bright.’

Lambert could not have picked a better time to make this film. She shot it in the late 1990s. Her subjects disparage the post-Soviet, moneyed New Russia of Boris Yel’tsin, Russian president from 1991-1999. This phase ran roughly from the last geriatric gasp of the Soviet Union in the failed 1991 August Coup to the dawn of the age of Vladimir Putin, who became president in 2000.

The result is a living document of an important transitional period in the country’s history, as well as in the history of the penal system that came out of the 1917 Revolution, which former political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicled extensively as the GULag Archipelago. (GULag is a Soviet-era acronym for Glávnoe Upravlyénie ispravítel’no-trudov‎ykh Lágerei, which means Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps.)

‘The GULag still exists,’ said Valerii Abramkin of the Center for Prison Reform and a former prisoner at the notorious Byélyi Lyébed’, or White Swan, Prison in Solikamsk in Perm Oblast’. ‘The GULag is not only a system of camps. It is an unscrupulous, abundant, and incredibly cruel “repression”.’

Lambert shot footage inside White Swan but did not interview any then-current inmates. The prison was set up and run on Soviet state security founder Felix Dzerzhinsky’s principle that ‘prisoners could be made to eradicate each other all by themselves,’ said former inmate Slava Yermanov. The institution’s original task was to ‘break’ clergymen. Since the Khrushchev era thaw, the Interior Ministry has used it to ‘soften’ the hardest vory and ‘to solve unsolved crimes,’ Abramkin said.

Abramkin and Yermanov described the most notorious and effective method that White Swan authorities employ, called press-kámera, or ‘cell press.’ They place an inmate they want to break in a crowded cell with other inmates—‘crocodiles in a hole.’ The result is a free-for-all in which the other inmates may do as they like with him, which usually turns the hardest case into an ‘amoeba,’ Abramkin said.

Lambert tells an incredible tale. It is hard to imagine any Russian government before Yel’tsin’s, and certainly not Putin’s afterward, allowing a foreigner, especially a curious American woman, such open access to so unvarnished an aspect of Russian life.  

What's the meta?

Zen 2011 U.K. BBC Masterpiece Theatre (three 90-minute episodes: Vendetta, Cabal, and Ratking). Directed by John Alexander (Vendetta), Christopher Menaul (Cabal), and Jon Jones (Ratking); screenplays by Simon Burke, based on Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen mystery novels.

The ‘meta’ here is doughty middle class Brits playing the Edward Gibbon-flavored noble and ignoble Romans they learned about reading classical authors, in a miniseries of modern-day police thrillers set in Rome. 

Aurelio Zen (Rufus Sewell)—his surname is Venetian, he reminds people, not a New Age confection—is a homicide detective and a ‘good cop,’ the son of a policeman killed in the line of duty when he was seven years old. He is separated from his wife and lives with his mother (the former pop singer Catherine Spaak). Not to worry, though: Zen’s love interest is a new secretary at work, Tania Moretti (Caterina Murino), whom everyone in the section would like to bed.

Zen is the center of the action because he is recognized as a straight shooter in a world in which most self-respecting people give every appearance of operating as players with something up his sleeve or down her cleavage. Picture Daniel Craig’s James Bond in the midst of I, Claudius or the BBC/HBO series Rome, in finely tailored Italian suits.

It works like a charm, and Sewell is ideal in the role.

Each episode involves a murder that quickly involves political implications in which a certain ministry (presumably the interior ministry, because it exercises control over police personnel and the agency budget) takes a special interest.

The unnamed Minister (Eduardo Guerchini, played by Anthony Higgins, according to imdb.com), through his aide, Amadeo Colonna (Ben Miles, in a Robert Vaughn-like role), summons Zen to the ministry to receive his missions impossible. Colonna closely monitors Zen’s progress as each case proceeds. Due to the extremely ‘sensitive’ nature of his assignments, not to mention the often questionable legality of obtaining the desired result, Zen, sensibly wary of his associates, generally works alone, intuitively, through his street contacts, informants and former cops.

The episodes, based on Michael Dibden’s complexly plotted novels, move quickly and efficiently. A farrago of sexy circumstantial information involving money, sex, politics, and celebrity gets chopped in a blender, as in Raymond Chandler’s classic The Big Sleep. Little is what it seems to be. The solutions come out in the wash. 

Vendetta—a business executive and two prostitutes are slain at his Abruzzi villa; his business partner who fled the scene is the prime suspect. The partner confesses, but there are too many loose ends and prying eyes to make the case go away quietly. Another man wrongly convicted of murder, released from prison with a terminal illness, seeks to even scores with those whom he holds responsible for his conviction, including Zen.

Cabal—the gay black sheep of an aristocratic Roman family takes a nosedive off a bridge. Is it suicide or murder? If murder, was the motive personal or a move to prevent exposure of an Opus Dei-like cabal of the well-connected? An ambitious female prosecutor senses old-boy blood in the water. Zen’s office romance with Moretti blooms as he works this case, but her estranged husband is opposing the divorce she seeks.

Ratking—an enormously wealthy industrialist and political contributor with a playboy son and an unstable daughter married to an ambitious parvenu, is kidnapped and held for five million Euro ransom. His lawyer is murdered and the ransom stolen en route to the kidnappers, who demand another five million Euros. Meanwhile, Zen must deal with a new chief who is a stickler for the book and resents his ‘special relationship’ with the Minister.

There are many moving parts to each story, lovely details and great camera shots, and good individual performances from a variety of British character actors within an entirely Italian milieu, from Miles’ Colonna to Stanley Townsend as Zen’s dyspeptic chief Moscati.  

The haunting series theme music helps to set the atmosphere of threat veiled behind the bright surfaces of this famously beautiful city, giving the work the feel of a throwback to crime and espionage stories of cold war era television.

Midnight Mary

Midnight Mary 1933 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (74 minutes) directed by William A. Wellman; story by Anita Loos, screenplay by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola; cinematographer, James Van Trees; editor, William S. Gray.

This beautifully cut and polished William Wellman gem is a romance set in the late dusk of the pre-censorship, pre-noir era and wrapped in a courtroom drama.

The protagonist Mary Martin (Loretta Young) shared a chronic problem with a lot of the American film audience in 1933—not to mention 2012: she was young, single, out of work and could not find a job.

Mary tells her life story in flashbacks, reminiscing in a clerk’s office adjacent to the courtroom where she awaits a jury verdict in her ‘sensational’ murder trial. Her eye first catches the year she was born—1910—on the back of a volume of court proceedings on a shelf in the clerk’s office; she moves apace through the key events.

She is a ‘good gal’ at heart, though she has a knack for turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It did not take her long to fall in with the wrong crowd, even the wrong Mr. Darcy—Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez), a dapper thug, and his gang—not exactly Jane Austen’s paragon Fitzwilliam Darcy.

On the other hand, Mary gets great mileage out of being a strikingly beautiful wrongster, especially after she turns the head of Thomas Mannering Jr., Esq. (Franchot Tone), son of a judge and scion of a wealthy family with a Park Avenue address.

Ricardo Cortez, Loretta Young and Franchot Tone in Midnight Mary

The writing is crisp and sharp. The studio lighting, editing and montage are reason enough to see this gem. An early sequence follows Mary wearing holes in her shoes and runs in her stockings as she pounds pavement looking for work. At the end of the day, advertising signs in lights speak to her disheartenment in a manner similar to details in Bruce McCall’s covers for The New Yorker magazine:

A sign advertising ‘Coco Facial Soup’ becomes ‘No Jobs To-Day’; a sign for ‘Tires: More Miles’ becomes a rotating ‘No Help Wanted’; the sign for the Riverside Drive subway station reads ‘No Jobs; No Help Wanted’; and the ‘Capitol’ and ‘Joan Crawford’ of a picture palace marquee flash ‘No Jobs’ and ‘No Jobs To-Day.’ The superimposition of this collection of images in a single frame crowns her disappointment and frustration.

Cortez was an Austrian expatriate who changed his name and modeled his look on the classic Latin lover popular in films of that time. He played the first film Sam Spade in Warner Brothers’ 1931 Dangerous Female, a well done but not well known adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s pulp detective novel The Maltese Falcon, directed by Roy Del Ruth. (John Huston made his classic version with Humphrey Bogart for Warner Brothers in 1941.)

Incidentally, the great character actress and comic Una Merkel, who plays Mary’s lifelong friend Bunny in Midnight Mary, was Sam Spade’s secretary Effie Perine in Del Ruth’s Dangerous Female.

Several references in this movie to William Randolph Hearst publications movie relate to recondite details of newspaper history. When we first see Mary at the defendant’s table in court during her murder trial, her eyes appear above a copy of Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan magazine she is reading as the District Attorney (Frank Conroy) gives his closing argument.

At the end of the movie, a series of New York Journal headlines and subheads brings the story arc to a clean, three-point landing. The New York Journal was the newspaper Hearst brought out in 1896 to take on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World by emulating and amplifying Pulitzer’s ‘yellow journalism.’

Midnight Mary is among the early Hollywood talkies released before the industry began to enforce its self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so for nearly three decades.

Turner Classic Movies reissued this movie among several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films on DVD as its ‘Forbidden Hollywood Collection.’ Despite the ‘blue movie’ cover art, the moral, social, and in some instances political subject matter make for the raciest parts.

Horse sense v. horses’ asses

Demony wojny w/g Goi (Demons of War [according to Goya]) 1998 Poland (93 minutes) written and directed by Władisław Pasikowski

This is a good war movie about the problems that politicians with legal training leave to professional soldiers to clean up, often with unpredictable consequences.

These narratives typically come down to the conflict between the horse sense of the boots on the ground and the nonsense of horses’ asses making Big Decisions in government ministries far from the landmines and cracking bullets.

In this story, a tough-as-nails Warsaw Pact-trained Polish airborne officer commands a battalion of Poland’s elite 6th Air Assault Brigade (Airborne) working with NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Polish battalion and a co-assigned Norwegian army unit are part of IFOR, the ‘Implementation Force’ tasked to implement the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords.

Major [Edek/Edward] Keller (Bogusław Linda) is the kind of maverick military hero politicians and his own higher-ups find it as difficult to live with as to go without. An airborne unit under Keller’s command was the best-trained in the Warsaw Pact, and he had peacekeeping experience in the Lebanon. He also was relieved of a command for pushing post-Cold War era troops too hard.

There is an additional spotlight on this unit because the action takes place in the late 1990s when Poland was pending NATO full membership.

The film opens with Keller leading a patrol that rolls into a town square in Srebrenica in two armored vehicles, moments after a violent crowd captured three men in military fatigues whom it clearly intends to execute. 

Without harming anyone or getting involved in the who-shot-Ivan politics, Keller and his men take charge of the three captives, drive them 15 kilometers out of town and turn them loose on a bridge. Keller strikes one of the three men, a mercenary who has the temerity to suggest that ‘we are all just soldiers doing someone else’s bidding.’

The next thing Keller knows, the Polish defense ministry sends Lieutenant Czacki (Olaf Lubaszenko) a staff lawyer from the military procurator’s office, to investigate his part in the ‘incident in Srebrenica’—the intervention which resulted in the rescue and release of the three captives about to be shot. Keller apparently was accused of executing the men himself. The ministry also assigns Major [Czesiek/Czeslaw] Kusz (Tadeusz Huk) to take over Keller’s command.

The man Keller punched on the bridge (Christophe Rex-Jarnot), identified throughout the film only as ‘a mercenary,’ is in the hire of Skija (Slobodan Custić), a ‘bandit’ with a multi-national gang more interested in personal gain and ‘sport’ than ethnic politics.

Skija’s bandits give Czacki and Kusz a hot welcome. They and the driver, Corporal ‘Houdini’ Moraczewski (Zbigniew Zamachowski), are rescued by a passing patrol, led by Cichy (Mirosław Baka), one of Keller’s equally tough platoon leaders. 

The drama and characters develop during the film’s set piece, in which Keller and Cichy lead a patrol of well-trained but not battle-tested paratroopers to rescue an IFOR task force Norwegian helicopter downed by Skija’s bandits. Kusz and Czacki accompany the team ‘to observe.’

The story ‘got personal’ when Keller hit the mercenary on the bridge. The stakes go up after Keller liberates two of Skija’s hostages connected with material evidence of his war crimes: Nicole (Aleksandra Nieśpielak), a French television journalist, and Dano Ivanov (Denis Delić), a dodgy Balkans ‘government representative.’ Keller also takes an interest in a ‘Gypsy’ village in harm’s way. A twist in the tale gives the story a clean finish.

Demony wojny według Goi apparently was the first Polish film released on DVD. The reference in the film’s title to Francisco de Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra etchings, a series of which appear as background to the title credits, feels unnecessarily arty. It is Keller’s humanity and professional grasp of war’s ‘disasters’ that gives him the skills to navigate and survive this perilous terrain.

This film does a good job showing the less glamorous side of men under fire, in advance of similar treatment in the new generation of American feature films and documentaries of war released since the American-led Crusade began a decade ago. 

Though not tongue-in-cheek, this story bears comparison with Danis Tanović’s classic satire Ničija zemlja [No Man’s Land] (2001), also set in the Bosnian war. In that film, a Bosnian civilian soldier, a regular Serbian Army enlisted man, and a French NATO sergeant try to save the life of a Bosniak whose temporarily unconscious body Serbian soldiers laid as a booby trap on a ‘bouncing betty’ land mine. This delicate task takes place under the klieg light of European Union political posturing and a media circus between the front lines in the Bosnian war.

Apart from the disparagement with which many Americans greeted the Bush fils ‘alliance of the willing,’ Americans get scant notice of the country’s many political allies engaged in its foreign policy in action. Several notable foreign films show what American foreign policy looks like through the eyes of its allies.

Armadillo (2010), a documentary about a contingent of the Danish Guard Hussar Regiment in Afghanistan, came out the same year as Sebastian Junger’s and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo. A memorable edit comes when a grenade flung on a video game cuts seamlessly to an explosion in the lethal night outside an armored personnel carrier screened inside via infrared camera.

Brødre [Brothers] (2004), Susanne Bier’s searing feature about the readjustment problems of a Norwegian special operations officer presumed dead who returns home from Afghanistan after a period of captivity, five years later became Jim Sheridan’s Brothers (2009), starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman.

We are meant to feel the senselessness of war in the severe and outsized impact these soldiers’ harrowing experiences has on their civilian families. This senselessness feels the more poignant when the soldier comes from a small civilized country that seems to have so little at stake so far away from his home. 

In Armadillo, an enlisted Danish medic telling a newcomer about finding a dead comrade and picking up another soldier’s body parts, said:

‘You have to keep an eye on yourself. You’re not wacko just because you laugh at some irrelevant stuff. You need normality, because this is so meaningless that you can’t grasp it.’