Men Must Fight

Courtesy the fine folks at TCM, the most interesting movie I’ve seen in awhile is M-G-M’s “Men Must Fight” (1933). It offers strong evidence to something I’ve always believed – that movies - yes even Hollywood movies - often offer insightful looks as to what society was feeling at the time. Indeed, while “Men Must Fight” tells a most unusual and interesting narrative, it also shows what the country’s mood was at the time. Like several other 1933 films, it reflects what no doubt many felt at the time: society was crumbling at its foundations and there was no way out but Fascism.

“Men Must Fight” was directed by the underrated Edgar Selwyn, who the year before helmed the equally fascinating “Skyscraper Souls”. His filmography isn’t very long, but based on these two movies, I may have to dig deeper into the Selwyn canon.

“Men Must Fight” begins in World War I with battlefront nurse Laura (Diana Wynward, she of the Norma Shearer-like eyes) saying goodbye to her lover Geoffrey (a very young Robert Young). Geoffrey is killed in action leaving Laura alone and pregnant. A sympathetic older man Ned Seward (Lewis Stone, who, in these early scenes, wears one of the cinema’s most ill-fitting toupees) is in love with Laura, proposes to her and promises to help raise her son Bob. Laura agrees, for her unborn son’s sake.

The years flash ahead to 1940 and the world is on the brink of war. (Remember, the movie was made in 1933). Ned is now Secretary of State desperately trying to quell the rising international tides of war. A grown-up Bob (Phillips Holmes) has fallen in love Peggy (Ruth Selwyn) a young woman he met on a cruise. Bob feels it’s his duty to fight but is a sensitive type in the best Phillips Holmes manner and really doesn’t want to go to war. He admits to his mother that the boys at his school use to call him sissy for not engaging in school fights.

Laura, now a doyenne of high society, pleads with her husband to prevent war at all possible costs. During a speech she says if older men did the fighting there would never be a war and says women should stop sending their sons to fight in these unnecessary wars. The women at an assembly nod knowingly while the men in the crowd are ready to erupt in violence.

Meanwhile there is near rioting in the streets and in assembled gatherings. There is a bit of science fiction in these scenes, with the inhabitants of an almost dystopian society using violence to express their emotions. The mob thinks nothing of hurtling rocks and breaking windows of the Seward mansion at the thought of the upcoming war.

Adding to the futuristic bent of the film is its presentation of television as an everyday device. Not only television but picture phones where people can see the faces of those they are having conversations with.

We’ve all head stories about how the studio heads looked with fear upon television in the late 1940s and 1950s but I wonder if even back in the 1930s they knew television would be a formidable competitor?

The televisions on display in “Men Must Fight” deliver nothing but bad news. During a pool hall scene at what looks like a military base, one of the soldiers breaks the television in frustration at the ever-increasing bad news from overseas.

Before I saw “Men Must Fight”, the earliest reference to television in movies that I could remember is the wonderful “International House” (1933), and there the demonstration of a television broadcast brings out all kinds of kooks and ridiculous situations.

Consider the titles of a couple of “B” movies from the era, Columbia’s “Trapped by Television” (1936) starring Mary Astor and Lyle Talbot and the infamous Grade-Z production “Murder by Television” (1935) from Cameo Productions starring Bela Lugosi. It didn’t look television would be the movie’s best friend, at least according to 1930s movies.

Despite the film’s futuristic setting, “Men Must Fight” appears to reflect the country’s growing unrest. Consider the country’s mood in 1933. The country was mired in the depths of the Great Depression, and it looked like there was no end in sight. The year before, troops under the direction of President Hoover fired at former World War I veterans camped outside Washington D.C. who were demanding reparation payment from the Great War. In Europe, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January of 1933 and Italy had been under Mussolini’s Fascist rule for years. Maybe Democracy was coming to an end after all?

Cinema patrons during 1933 could be forgiven for thinking such thoughts. They didn’t have to read the newspapers or listen to the radio to think that perhaps Fascism was the answer.

In addition to “Men Must Fight” M-G-M also gave us that year one of its oddest offerings ever, “Gabriel Over the White House” with President Walter Huston, concerned with the growing criminal element sweeping the nation, receiving a message from God to go out and rid of the country of the underworld using any and all means. Which he does with great glee.

Consider DeMille’s “This Day and Age” (1933) which celebrates the vigilante activities of a group of teenagers who seek vengeance on some gangsters who murdered an elderly shopkeeper in their small town. No judge and jury for these criminals. Here the movie appears to approve of mob rule. It’s been years since I’ve seen it but I still recall the scene of one of the gangsters, trussed up like a turkey and ready to be dumped into a pit of hungry rats. Yikes!

Only Warner Bros., the most socially conscious of the major studios, would end “Gold Diggers of 1933), one of its toe-tapping Busby Berkeley musicals, with the unforgettable musical number, “Remember My Forgotten Man”, decrying a government that turns its back on its World War I veterans. It’s one of the most powerful and bleakest sequences of 1930s cinema.

“Men Must Fight” isn’t as Fascist as the DeMille or Gabriel films, but it does portray a society on the brink of anarchy. Government isn’t the answer, as the same fools who got us in the predicament are now expected to get us out. Shocking scenes showing New York City getting aerial bombed only highlight what is one of the most interesting, and unsung, movies of the 1930s.