Heroes for Sale is one of those films in which the disappointment and shock of the Depression mirror the outcome of the First World War and the sacrifices made by the people – a theme admirably depicted in the The Last Flight by Dieterle. The story begins in the war trenches with a deadly mission in the muddy frontlines: it starts out with the courage of a man who gets wounded and is taken prisoner by the Germans, but goes back home anonymous and dis- abled. His foil in the story is a second man who cowardly hides during combat but returns home a hero after taking the credit for the courageous act of his friend, whom he mistakenly believes to be dead. In these terms the film compares a banker’s son whose hero- ism is a lie and a poor, hardworking everyday hero. The latter, Tom Holmes (Richard Barthelmess), in fact, ends up being fired from the bank owned by his questionable friend’s father, becoming just another anonymous and abandoned soul crowding the streets. In the meantime, the country is slipping into a recession. Talent and creativity which Holmes is full of, cannot help anyone in these conditions.

This feature length film is a collage of contradictions: capitalist and “socialist”, sometimes one and sometimes the other, their pros and cons. Heroes for Sale drifts in a whirlwind of utopia, ruthless reality, social criticism, dramatic overstatement, sentimentalism and the contradictory nature of life. It is a combination of romanticism and brutality quite typical of Wellman. Wellman’s film is one of the few that observes the birth of American fascism – the film’s analytical angle is overwhelmed by description, but, at the same time, it is fiercely direct. A work by the great filmmaker based on the main issues of the era that hovered over individual perception.

Peter von Bagh