“I’ve been in the shadow of death so long that nothing in life seems so important anymore.”
Tom Holmes is the protagonist of Wild Bill Wellman’s Heroes for Sale, a stark, massively moving pilgrim’s progress that opens with a suicidal American mission in the First World War, where one soldier takes credit—honor, medals and all—for a courageous, decisive act that Holmes performs, and ends with Holmes among the army of the homeless during the Great Depression, right after the first inauguration of F.D.R. The platoon of this army in which Tom participates, which is constantly being routed out by law-and-order local thugs, at one point, single file, passes by a gigantic billboard: ‘JOBLESS MEN, KEEP GOING. WE CAN’T TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN.” Of course, if the idea of nation means anything, these men are their own.
Tom’s life, as we see it, includes viciously painful war injuries, resultant morphine addiction, incarceration in a “drug camp” to make him kick his habit (nothing is ever done to relieve his pain; it may be a flaw in Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner’s script that Tom’s pain seems to vanish once his addiction his documented as “cured”), his being wrongly blamed by co-workers for the loss of their jobs to automated machinery in a laundry, the ensuing riot, which Tom is attempting to stop, in which Tom’s wife, Ruth, who is desperately trying to locate Tom, is killed by a stick-wielding police officer, Tom’s wrong imprisonment at hard labor for inciting the riot, upon his release his forcible exit out of town by local thugs, with his young son left behind, and his ironical re-meeting with the soldier who took credit for Tom’s bravery, a rich man whom the 1929 stock market crash reduced to poverty. But Tom himself is rich, having made money without pursuing it—except that he has given it all away so that others won’t go hungry and his son will be provided for.
Perhaps the finest aspect of this remarkable film, which draws upon Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and nicely complements LeRoy’s Gold Diggers of 1933, is the warm, buoyant performance that Richard Barthelmess gives as Tom Holmes, which suits both the character’s lack of self-pity, his empathetic nature, as much philosophical as emotional (“I guess we’re all a little cracked, one way or the other”), and his closing speech on what he sees as the imminent American resurgence. This is a lot to say, given Barthelmess’s prolific and stellar career; but this may be the performance of his life. But Barthelmess is almost always a spot-on actor. Loretta Young, however, is normally dreadful—along with Faye Dunaway, perhaps the most artificial U.S.-born actress to become a major star. As Ruth Holmes, though, she is warm, gracious, tender, entirely believable. We may say then that Wellman proved a better director for Young than Frank Borzage, John Ford or Orson Welles. Moreover, then a teenager, she was never lovelier than here. Barthelmess and Young really seem a couple, I might add. Still, the best female performance comes from Aline MacMahon as Mary Dennis, who silently loves Tom and inherits his son. Two of MacMahon’s best moments find her subtly expressive back facing the camera.
One asks: What kind of country doesn’t see to it that someone like Tom Holmes gets a fair shake? One ultimately asks: Is America more just today?
This entry was posted on June 22, 2009 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Informal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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HEROES FOR SALE (William A. Wellman, 1933)
By grunes“I’ve been in the shadow of death so long that nothing in life seems so important anymore.”
Tom Holmes is the protagonist of Wild Bill Wellman’s Heroes for Sale, a stark, massively moving pilgrim’s progress that opens with a suicidal American mission in the First World War, where one soldier takes credit—honor, medals and all—for a courageous, decisive act that Holmes performs, and ends with Holmes among the army of the homeless during the Great Depression, right after the first inauguration of F.D.R. The platoon of this army in which Tom participates, which is constantly being routed out by law-and-order local thugs, at one point, single file, passes by a gigantic billboard: ‘JOBLESS MEN, KEEP GOING. WE CAN’T TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN.” Of course, if the idea of nation means anything, these men are their own.
Tom’s life, as we see it, includes viciously painful war injuries, resultant morphine addiction, incarceration in a “drug camp” to make him kick his habit (nothing is ever done to relieve his pain; it may be a flaw in Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner’s script that Tom’s pain seems to vanish once his addiction his documented as “cured”), his being wrongly blamed by co-workers for the loss of their jobs to automated machinery in a laundry, the ensuing riot, which Tom is attempting to stop, in which Tom’s wife, Ruth, who is desperately trying to locate Tom, is killed by a stick-wielding police officer, Tom’s wrong imprisonment at hard labor for inciting the riot, upon his release his forcible exit out of town by local thugs, with his young son left behind, and his ironical re-meeting with the soldier who took credit for Tom’s bravery, a rich man whom the 1929 stock market crash reduced to poverty. But Tom himself is rich, having made money without pursuing it—except that he has given it all away so that others won’t go hungry and his son will be provided for.
Perhaps the finest aspect of this remarkable film, which draws upon Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and nicely complements LeRoy’s Gold Diggers of 1933, is the warm, buoyant performance that Richard Barthelmess gives as Tom Holmes, which suits both the character’s lack of self-pity, his empathetic nature, as much philosophical as emotional (“I guess we’re all a little cracked, one way or the other”), and his closing speech on what he sees as the imminent American resurgence. This is a lot to say, given Barthelmess’s prolific and stellar career; but this may be the performance of his life. But Barthelmess is almost always a spot-on actor. Loretta Young, however, is normally dreadful—along with Faye Dunaway, perhaps the most artificial U.S.-born actress to become a major star. As Ruth Holmes, though, she is warm, gracious, tender, entirely believable. We may say then that Wellman proved a better director for Young than Frank Borzage, John Ford or Orson Welles. Moreover, then a teenager, she was never lovelier than here. Barthelmess and Young really seem a couple, I might add. Still, the best female performance comes from Aline MacMahon as Mary Dennis, who silently loves Tom and inherits his son. Two of MacMahon’s best moments find her subtly expressive back facing the camera.
One asks: What kind of country doesn’t see to it that someone like Tom Holmes gets a fair shake? One ultimately asks: Is America more just today?
Tags: Wellman
This entry was posted on June 22, 2009 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Informal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.