Heroes for Sale

Suurinta elamassa. US 1933. PC: First National Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation. D: William A. Wellman. SC: Robert Lord, Wilson Mizner. Starring Richard Barthelmess (Thomas Holmes), Loretta Young (Ruth Loring Holmes). 76 min. Print: LoC. Viewed in Bologna, Cinema Lumière 2, 30 June 2008. - A hard hitting social melodrama, to be compared with I'm a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Wild Boys of the Road. Also an ironic tale in Voltaire's Candide tradition. The true war hero becomes a morphine addict and the wrong man gets the decorations. A picaresque story of social adversity from 1918 until 1932. The technical innovation in the laundry leads to unemployment, and our Candide who tries to prevent the Luddite reaction gets to prison believed to be a Communist, and he will be forever under the control of the state police. He donates his fortune from his partnership in the laundy innovation to feeding the poor in the ever expanding lines of the hungry and jobless and disappears underground as a tramp, being chased from state to state like the fugitive from the chain gang.