The advertising for Heroes for Sale listed as a social problem film dealing with the plight of World War One veterans during the Great Depression, but in realty the movie only briefly discuss that problem. The movie has a strange rambling plotline that takes up a number of other social concerns while rarely commenting on any of them. It’s a strange movie, but a good one.
The film stars Richard Barthelmess, who used to a big star but is now almost forgotten as Tom Holmes, who is indeed a WWI veteran. Opening during the war, the movie depicts how Holmes is wounded during a super dangerous mission and his cowardly richboy comrade, Roger Winston (Gordon Wescott) takes the credit, believing him dead. Tom has really just been captured, and is well cared for by the Germans, who are nonetheless unable to give him the surgery he needs to remove the shrapnel from his spinal cord, meaning he is constant pain. A German doctor gives him some morphine capsules to deal with the pain and Tom is soon a genuine fiend, and gets fired from his job as a teller at Roger’s father’s (Benton Churchill) bank. He’s incarcerated and forced to undergo a drug treatment program and the strain is so great it kills his mother (Margret Seddon). Near penniless, he heads to Chicago, where he takes a room at boarding house because a hot babe (Loretta Young). He then gets a job as a laundry truck driver.
I am going stop the plot summary at this point because we are barely into a third of this movie. Spoilers! Tom still must be involved in a labor riot, sent to jail for a crime he didn’t’ commit, become a millionaire, be run out of town under false suspicion that he’s a Communist, and so on.
Heroes for Sale is a very unfocused film, and although it concerns itself with a number of contemporary social problems, it rarely takes much of a stand on any of them. The exception is a satire on Communism with a poor Russian worker (Robert H. Barrat) who immediately becomes a hardcore conservative when he his it big. Aside from that, the picture seems content to point out controversial issues, but afraid to actually say something, making it less brave than it seems. However, I am told that for a film, even in the pre-code era, to even mention drug addition was a big deal.
As I said earlier, Barthelmess is almost completely forgotten today, possibly because he did not appear in any grade-A classic film, but that it is not a statement on him as an actor. He is quite good in this performance, and his somewhat folksy, down to earth style allows him to carry the picture with ease.
Heroes for Sale is perhaps most interesting to contemporary audiences as an example of many of the social concerns that were important to people in 1933, shortly after FDR came to power. Some (such as drugs) are still around, but luckily even the worse economic climate today is nowhere near as bad as the Great Depression, which is something to be thankful for.
Heroes for Sale (1933)