Recent depictions of World War I—particularly Sam Mendes’s 1917 and Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front—have obsessively detailed the sheer brutality of trench warfare. Yet, for all their attempts to viscerally and realistically present the hellish aspects of war, they’re effectively sterilized by a hyper-focus on the purely technical aspects of filmmaking. Verisimilitude is thus ultimately eclipsed by a flurry of self-congratulatory stylistic flourishes that leave the films devoid of any actual humanity, compassion, not to mention genuine insight, while the social and political context of the era in which they’re set remains irrelevant to their concerns.
Now, William Wellman’s riveting, hard-hitting 1933 drama, Heroes for Sale, is only in part a wartime film. Its battle scenes, in which working class soldier Tom Holmes (Richard Barthelmess) saves the life of rich kid Roger Winston (Gordon Westcott), gets steel from a bullet permanently lodged in his spine, and sees Roger steal the glory for capturing a German officer, last all of ten minutes. But although these scenes lack gritty realism and flashy long takes, they serve a grander purpose beyond extolling war-is-hell platitudes, instead speaking to the broader cultural climate of the times while also remaining achingly humane in their revealing of the tragic ironies that bind the struggles of wartime and peacetime.
Following these early battlefield sequences, Wellman briskly, and in an almost fablelike manner, touches on a wide array of social issues and changes genres and settings to capture the totality of the American experience in the early 20th century as effectively and efficiently as any other film of its time. What begins as a straightforward war film morphs into an exposé of veteran mistreatment; a social drama about capitalist greed, the effects of rapid mechanization, and the rise of organized labor; a satire of armchair revolutionaries; and finally, a romantic melodrama.
In a remarkably taut 71 minutes, Heroes for Sale doesn’t waste a second of its runtime as it unearths something perhaps even more harrowing than the barbarism of horrific WWI battles—the reverberations of that war, which led to a time in which veterans and the working class were left helpless to be overrun by an enemy on their own turf in the form of newly empowered bankers, bullying anti-Communist brigades operating without oversight and a social and political system increasingly run by and for the wealthy. Only in the pre-Code era could such forceful and direct social commentary reach the public without being diluted or reduced to subtext. And while such far-reaching and varied topics would lead most films to feel scattershot, Wellman seamlessly weaves the various threads together to form a perceptive and damning tapestry of American life from the late teens to the early 1930s.
Tom is something of an everyman, an honest, hard-working fella just looking for a fair shake. But Wellman’s portrait of America as it barrels ahead toward the Great Depression sees its central figure thwarted at every turn. His good deeds either go unrecognized, as in the war, or warped from their original utopian intention, as when he introduces a newly patented and more efficient washing machine to his bosses with the promise that it will lead to no jobs being cut and shorter hours for the workers. His plight, along with his durability and unflinching resolve in sticking to his principles, makes him reminiscent of protagonists in several of Frank Capra’s dramas in the 1940s, but Wellman is not one for sentimentality and his stylistic and narrative restraint keeps the film from veering into the maudlin melodrama it could easily have become.
Indeed, Heroes for Sale barely plays like a melodrama at all, but rather an in-depth examination of the social and economic anxieties that gripped a nation between the two World Wars. If Richard Barthelmess’s slightly wooden performance leaves a bit to be desired, the film is enlivened by a luminous Loretta Young as his love interest and hilarious turns from Aline MacMahon as his co-worker and Robert Barrat as the hypocritical revolutionary-turned-capitalist Max.
The film, however, lives and dies by Wellman’s sheer mastery of both tone and pacing, which condenses what could easily make for an 800-page literary tome into kaleidoscopic treatise of the times. Yet, with all the specificities it captures in its era, it’s remarkable (and perhaps a bit depressing) how much it relates, quite eloquently, to our own time living under the thumb of late capitalism. Where Mendes and Berger look to the past only to focus on an arcane mode of warfare that the audience can see and simply be glad no longer exists, Wellman uses World War I as a catalyst for holding up a mirror to the realities of not only what drives war but what drives America as a whole. What we see isn’t often pretty, but Heroes for Sale remains both universal and timeless even 90 years after its initial release.
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