Warners -The Talkies, Dwan & Wellman.

Among vintage films now surfacing, I'm enjoying the early Warners talkies. The talents they recruited, the running start they made with Vitaphone, Producer in Chief Daryl Zanuck's taste for newsy subjects, and their being in my first language all contribute. They did go on making powdered wig melodramas, silly ass comedies and Broadway chorus musicals but even these carry realist traces of their celebrated "Social Dramas" outclassing the efforts of their Hollywood competitors.

Warners' Man to Man of 1930 is less than great but still an interesting add-on to the the uneven filmography of Alan Dwan, one of the renowmed second wave pioneer film directors, men (they were pretty much all men) mainly small time actors who saw the potential of the first movies being made by early 20th. Century camera owners and inventors and contributed their own stage experience  - David Wark Griffith, Maurice Tourneur, Raoul Walsh, Wiliam S. Hart, Maurice Elvey or Tiensuke Kinugase.

Dwan's 1930 Man to Man starts off with young Phillip Holmes as a track & field star triumphing in the inter-collegiate stadium. Back in the frat house, where they cheer a film record of Holmes' success, fellow undergrad Sumner Gretchell lets slip that Holmes’ dad was sent to the joint for murder. (This echoes plot elements of Dwan’s silent Black Sheep) It doesn’t go down too well with Holmes’ squeeze Barbara Weeks, who is to be last seen with Gretchell in his open-top roadster as the train taking Holmes back to his rural small town runs distant through the background - one of the striking scenics which often punctuate even Dwan’s most pedestrian work. 

Back home, Phillip is welcomed on all sides by townsmen who consider his dad taking down the local heavy to be heroic. We hear the details of their main street shoot-out -  rather than see it. Our hero is immediately offered a job in the local bank, which brings him into contact with the banker’s so charming daughter, Lucille Powers, and makes his fellow bank teller a rival. The courtship is one of the best elements. 

Grant Mitchell, the father, is released (why?) and resumes his spot as the town barber but is concerned to find his son unresponsive. Then money disappears from the bank. Suspicion of bad blood is voiced - The Stain? However, it is plucky Lucille who sorts matters out rather than our wimpy leading man. 

Holmes, son of actor Taylor Holmes (the 1920 Nothing But the Truth & the 1947 Nightmare Alley) Phillip must be Hollywood's most forgotten leading man from this period (up against Robert Ames for that title). He loses Mary Brian to Gary Cooper in Only the Brave and Loretta Young to Charles Boyer in Carnival but he scored a genuine triumph in Tay Garnet's riotous Her Man (also 1930) showing a flair for comedy that was rarely exploited. Instead he became a prototype Montgomery Clift. Both actors played Theodore Dreiser's doomed George Eastman in the films of  "An American Tragedy."

Man to Man - Marion jnr., Mitchell, Holmes, Powers & Larkin in the shop.

A lot of the staging is routine, with the cast ranged across the frame delivering the unremarkable dialogue. However Man to Man has a couple of aspects that do appeal. It is steeped in the U.S. small  Southern town atmosphere that you get in John Ford’s Judge Priest films. Black actor John Larkin is treated sympathetically but also made a figure of fun. There are no white pillared mansions framed by ghost moss-draped willows here but we do get the timber main street buildings and particularly Powers’ porch with its house plants and swing. There is unusually no designer credit on this one, though it is logical to have had Anton Grot, the head of Warners’ art department, contributing.

Powers, Frye, O'Connor, Simpson, Marion.

The other interesting feature is the appearance of an exceptional support cast of the character actors who will enliven the Golden Years films to come, all at the start of their sound careers - Otis Harlan (Reginald Denny’s former sidekick), Russell Simpson (Santa Fe Trail’s Shubel Morgan), George F. Marion jnr. (Garbo’s dad in Anna Christie) Robert Emmet O’Connor (a cop in both The Big House and Night at the Opera) and particularly Dwight Frye (about to become a fixture in the Universal horror cycle). Reliable Grant Mitchell even gets top billing in some of the publicity.  He is beginning a sound career that will make him a familiar face from often notable films including Laura & The Life of Emile Zola. 

Man to Man is limited by origins in a story by Ben Ames Williams, whose work was the basis of the three times filmed All the Brothers Were Valiant and the dreadful Leave Her to Heaven. The film remains minor but agreeable, a welcome glimpse of 1930 Hollywood production and the recovery of its understanding of filmmaking after sound. For anyone with an interest in film history, it is a treat.

More substantial, William Wellman's 1933 Heroes for Sale brings back the buzz that discovering vintage Hollywood used to be - the films that we thought were gone forever when the original theatrical copies wore out, returned in the hundreds bought for late-arriving Australian TV, vanishing again into Cinémathèques, only to burst out one more time for home video and streaming. 

Before I ever discovered film study, I was delighted with Wellman's Cary Cooper version of Beau Geste - went back to see it again the next day. Turned out director Wellman was a WWI flier drawn to the movies and getting to show his talent just as the silents were making their last great showing. His Wings got the first Best Movie Oscar. The combined assault of a new technology and the Great Depression clipped Hollywood's wings but, like Michael Curtiz and Lewis Milestone, Wellman had already asserted himself.  Reduced to making the modest budget production-line features that kept the theatres open, he still managed conspicuous The Public Enemy, powered by Jimmy Cagney, who its director promoted to the lead. Heroes for Sale is even better.

It opens in the WW1 front line, soaked with Wellman's trademark belting rain. Among the Doughboys selected for a suicide mission (exhausted Captain Arthur Vinton, can only afford to lose twelve men), we spot a familiar face. Richard Barthelmess, once co-star with Lillian Gish in Griffith's celebrated Broken Blossoms and Way Down East, is not getting featured treatment. However, he is the one who heroically completes their assignment, the bodies of his fellow soldiers falling across him, grenading a German machine gun nest and taking prisoner an enemy officer, while companion Gordon Westcott cringes in the trench. Wounded, Barthelmess is left for dead and it is Wescott who is lauded and decorated as a hero.

Recovered with agonising metal splinter fragments in his spine, our hero is treated with morphine in a German hospital. This, rather than heroin, used to be the horror drug in films - think Kings Row. Repatriated with Wescott to their once again familiar rural American home town, it is easier to let the record stand and Barthlemess becomes a teller in another local bank, here run by Berton Churchill, Wescott’s dad and, as in Stagecoach, all-purpose movie nasty of the day. Wracked by his Habit, our hero can’t make the numbers total and desperately needs to buy a fix. Another familiar Wellman device is showing local pusher, Tammany Young, part obscured - here behind a neighboring shop window case. "You work in a bank, don't you?" Dick is tempted to lift a C. note from the Treasury delivery but puts the money back, only to be fired by Churchill, unmoved when he is told the truth about the wartime exploit his son now denies.

The pacing characteristic of these Warner melodramas shows Barthlemess’ hospital cure as taking a system card out of its drawer and stamping it.

Moving on to the city, he sees Charley Grapewin's personal Soup Kitchen, the faces of desperates, for whom there is no more charity food, peer through the window. It is run by daughter Aline MacMahon, making her transition from glamorous Gold-digger to character actress and, more than a decade later, to again impress in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search and Anthony Mann’s Cimarron. She shows Barthlemess a stark room they are letting. “Any bugs?” “Not unless you brought them with you.” He meets fellow tenant (Russian?) inventor Robert Barrat who, in the film’s most questionable choice, is played as farce. MacMahon's sister Lorreta Young, enjoying a great run of these “problem” pictures, shows up in her Earl Luick fashion outfit. 

Hired as a driver at the back-projected laundry, where we get Grant Richards coming up again as manager.  Barthlemess is apprehensive when called into the office, only to find that his delivery run is the one that has grown while the others are declining. Turns out he’s introduced a bonus scheme, which he more than pays for out of his increased commissions. Rather than fire him, Richards makes him supervisor. He can’t wait to get back to the flop house to tell the sisters and offers to take them to dinner. Aline is about to join them in her best outfit, when she opens her door to see Dick with his arm about her sibling and backs off.

Barrat’s new laundry machine, which Dick bankrolled, actually works and, with funds invested by his fellow workers, he installs it on Mitchell’s expanded shop floor, improving productivity despite a no-layoff agreement. However, Warner resident heavies Edwin Maxwell and Douglas Dumbrille (in their one scene) see the profit in further automation and firing the workers whose contributions made their success possible. There follows the film’s labor riot, especially impressive for a modest budget production. Dick tries to deter the leaders and, rushing to his side, Loretta is trampled. We should have guessed that this one was getting too cheery for their Book of Job plot.

MacMahon, Ronnie Colby, Barthelmess.

Sent to the pen as an agitator, our hero is unable to see his son grow in Aline's care.  However, Barrat now in full Capitalist mode, visits him to tell him that their laundry patent is coining it and he’s opened a bank account in Dick’s name. Released with ageing makeup, our hero meets his son, raised by Aline to revere his accomplishments. She's still running her charity to which he donates his royalties.

Meanwhile “the Red Squad” of the Sacco & Vanzetti era is dragging any foreign-looking types from their diner tables along with their friends (sound familiar?) and running them out of town. On the hobo (“we’re veterans!”) train along with Ward Bond, Dick finds Gordon, whose dad defrauded clients and offed himself rather than face the consequences. Moved on again by the bulls from towns who put up signs saying they can’t provide for their own, he delivers the film's best line: “At least it’s stopped raining.”

Heroes for Sale’s analysis of labor relations may be no more insightful than Metropolis but it is Hollywood’s most determined effort. They actually use the word “Communist” unique in an American film of the day - that is outside Wellman’s 1934 The President Vanishes, in which a number of faces familiar from this one may be spotted. The thought content reflects incompletely considered politics of the day, managing to jam in pacifism, breadlines, returned soldiers, miscarriage of justice,  xenophobia, and exploitative capitalism with ruthless bankers. Wellman's more widely cited “Social” film Wild Boys of the Road doesn’t try for as many hot-potato topics.  It is uncomfortable to notice that it is Hollywood filmmakers who flirted with the left-wing issues of the thirties, that would make the Anti-Communist movies of the sixties - Wellman’s Blood Alley, Mervyn LeRoy’s The Green Berets or Raul Walsh’s Marines Let’s Go.

Barthlemess, his popularity undermined by unsuitable vehicles and alcoholism, still managed to get himself into serious items like Cabin in the Cotton 1932, A Modern Hero & Massacre both 1934 - even 1929's Weary River. With Wellman again, he did Central Airport, a nice programner -  great rain storm.

If the ideas were suspect, the filmmaking was state of the art and then some. Wellman drives this one at a speed that enables him to slip in enough story content to serve five films. It is interesting to compare his compression of the rambling Edna Ferber So Big. He made more substantial films. Wings, A Star Is Born and The Oxbow Incident are more accomplished. However, nothing matches the energy of this one, still today. Watching it again is a great reminder of the satisfactions of a lifetime of movie-going.

I'm told Heroes for Sale is on the Russian ru.ok site. My Scooter Movies DVD is quite acceptable quality. Man to Man is in a good transfer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCW81JP0bQs&t=33s

Barrie Pattison - 2026