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.