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From across the trenches to under a bridge between wars, America's Book of Job. William Wellman starts off with a blow and keeps on punching, his study of a suicidal charge across No Man's Land has the horror-paralyzed commander (Gordon Westcott) crowned hero while the gallant doughboy (Richard Barthelmess) is left with shrapnel in his spine and an itchy morphine addiction. Quivering for a fix behind the bank's barred window, he's a cogent poster for the plight of the returning soldier that nevertheless leaves the plutocrat unmoved: "Time to quit beating the drum and waving the flag!" The camera tilts down from a sign on the boarding house ("Have you written home to mother?") to a vagrant working on a saucy sketch, the protagonist is not impressed with the room shown by the lovelorn landlady (Aline MacMahon) but changes his mind as soon as he spots the lass next door (Loretta Young), surely a gag that tickled Nabokov. "When you get to be my age, you'll have a bomb in each pocket," snaps the inventor (Robert Barrat) who's got Marx in the brain until he strikes it rich with a proletariat-gutting gadget. (A terse panning shot at the factory reveals a gargantuan mechanism where a roomful of laundresses used to be.) The tale of the fake socialist who turns absolute capitalist while the all-American boy sets up communes for fallen comrades and finds himself in the middle of a homegrown Cossack raid—not a gram of fat in Wellman's crazy, urgent, racy Depression pamphlet, about five or six social-protest tracts rolled into one. Shot at, clubbed, imprisoned and banished, Barthelmess is the entire battered populace forced to toe the edge of the precipice and instead choosing to gaze heavenwards and shrug. "At least it stopped raining." With Berton Churchill, Grant Mitchell, Charley Grapewin, Robert McWade, and James Murray. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |