Men Must Fight (1933) straddles the convictions of pacifism versus a willingness to go to war on provocation; it straddles a cinematic proclivity to predicting the future and yet carries forward anachronistic images to illustrate that future. Mostly, it straddles the past and present: the former grim and the latter an airy illusion of modernity we weren’t living up to in 1933.
This is another in the films I’d like to examine this year
made during the 1930s that represent our mindset and our pop culture of that
pivotal decade.
The film begins during World War I, with a gentle and yet provocative shot of lovely English actress Diana Wynyard and Robert Young chatting in a charming, homey room in England, preparing to take leave from one another. The director Edgar Selwyn handles this opening in a sensitive and tantalizing manner. As the seconds and the chatty dialogue click by, we gradually realize they are lovers, and they are dressing, both preparing to return to wartime duties. In another moment, as they dress, we see she is a nurse, and he is an American flyer. We must pause a moment to reflect how handsome and charming Robert Young was in his early career, and what a remarkably confident and appealing nature he projects. He is quite natural in an era where screen acting could still be quite mannered and even stilted.
Robert says he wants to marry her and we have it on good
authority now that they have enjoyed a romantic tryst and are unmarried. There is no discussion of mores of the time,
only that she has anxiety that he may be killed in the war, and he brushes that
off with boyish gallantry.
But he does die.
(Longtime readers of this blog will be aware that I give no warning of
spoilers, I just spit them out, so you newcomers to the blog had better adjust
or go out and come in again.)
In an abrupt scene, we see a plane crash, and the body is
transported to Miss Wynyard’s hospital, and it is Robert Young, and he doesn’t
make it.
We are shunted to another scene where Miss Wynyard is
talking with an old friend, played by Lewis Stone. He is an American officer as well, but has
never met Robert Young. However, he
knows Diana well enough to help her get a transfer, and make a gentlemanly
offer to marry her. “You don’t want your
baby born in an atmosphere like this.”
The movie has barely begun and we get Pre-Code shock after shock. Diana Wynyard at first rejects Lewis Stone because she does not love him and it would not be fair to him, and he gallantly accepts that, but offers security for her and the child.
The war ends, and Diana remarks, “Thank God it’s over and it
will never happen again.” That was the
general idea during The World War, however unfortunate and inaccurate a
prediction that turned out to be. We
know now the sequel to The World War began in 1939, but this movie, filmed in
1933, projects ahead at this point to 1940 and war clouds gather ominously again. It is, however, a fictional war and is not
really a remarkable prediction of World War II, but is rather a reflection of
the dichotomy between the extremely strong anti-war fervor that began after
World War I and continued into the early 1930s and the beginnings of militarism
around the globe—first with Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s, Hitler’s rise in
Germany and becoming chancellor in January 1933, and the Japanese invasion of
Manchuria in 1931. These world events had us on tenterhooks—at least those who
paid attention to world news—and pacifism, isolationism, nationalism all converged
and began to make even the most unwilling take stances. Eventually, they would take sides.
Lewis Stone, we may note, in the early scenes during the
World War is given a very dark dye job to suggest he is a much younger man than
we see him in the 1940 scenes, which is appropriate, but even with the dark hair,
and even looking trim in his officer’s uniform, we might note he still looks
too old for Diana Wynyard, but this is not mentioned and perhaps we are meant
to take him for her contemporary.
By the 1940 scenes, he looks like our old friend Judge Hardy, and Diana is now made up to look middle-aged and matronly. They are married, and her baby is now a grown man, who has never been told that Lewis Stone is not his father.
Played by Phillips Holmes, young Bob is a recent college graduate
with a chemical engineering degree, who is returning to the U.S. from abroad with
a new girlfriend on board, played by Ruth Selwyn (who in real life was the
second wife of the director, Edgar Selwyn).
When she eventually goes to meet his folks, she brings her mother along—played
by Hedda Hopper in her pre-gossip column days.
Lewis Stone is a bigwig in the American diplomatic service, Secretary of State, and Diana Wynyard is a peace advocate. With them living in their Art Deco apartment in New York City is May Robson, the grandmother. Miss Robson gets to make snappy remarks and get away with it.
Their butler, Albert, is played by Robert Greig, who played
so many butlers in his career that he must have belonged to the union. Perhaps my favorite is his turn as Joel McCrea’s
butler in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), which we discussed here.
Diana Wynyard and Lewis Stone have a cozy, comfortable
marriage, but trouble comes between them when a U.S. ambassador to a fictional
nation called “Eurasia” is murdered and the United States finds itself on the
brink of war. The naval fleet is sent to
confront Eurasia. Diana wants Lewis
Stone to resign his position, but he will not.
“I’m not obsessed with the fear that has haunted you all your life. You’ve seen one war, you’ve seen the man you
loved killed, and ever since you’ve been afraid of what might happen to his…” He’s about to say “son,” but just then their
boy Phillips Holmes enters and Diana shushes Lewis Stone.
She speaks at a pacifist rally, and he wants their boy, with
his new degree, to enter the chemical engineering side of the war department
because “Gas will win this war,” that it will kill not only soldiers but
civilians as well. While we know poison
gas was one of the greatest horrors of World War I, it’s not being the weapon
of choice in World War II makes the remark sound anachronistic, but not funny.
Lewis Stone is adamant, “Any talk of peace is not only
cowardly, it’s treachery.”
Their cook, an immigrant, wants to go back to his homeland—Eurasia—to
fight in its defense. He sounds vaguely
Italian, so we really don’t know where Eurasia is supposed to be. Butler Greig gives him a boot.
One of the interesting attempts at imagining the future world of 1940 is the scenes where we see Diana Wynyard’s speech at the peace rally on television, and another scene where the characters talk on video phones.
Diana is heckled at the rally and fights break out. Guards hustle her away to safety. There is mob violence in the city, but Lewis
Stone addresses it from their balcony, with their son’s girlfriend’s visiting brother,
who is in uniform. Mr. Stone uses the young soldier as a prop to show the crowd he is all for war. The uniform calms the
crowd and they cheer Lewis Stone for not being a pacifist.
Their boy, Phillips Holmes, however, is. He has learned about the evils of warfare from his parents from an early age and he has no desire to join up or use his education to become a military chemical officer. He is torn about what to do, and his girlfriend breaks up with him. He wants to speak up about peace and his mother’s pacifist cause, but Lewis Stone intervenes in a surprisingly cruel way.
He will not let the son use his good name in the
cause of promoting peace. He tells him
that he is not his real father and that he is not free to use in this way the surname
that has been generously given to him.
“You have no moral right to use the name of Seward in the manner
you propose or any other manner.” Diana Wynyard
cringes, she knows what’s coming.
Lewis Stone continues telling Phillips that he is illegitimate, “Your father was a brave man who died for his country.” He zealously pulls away the honor of his name and the security it represented to a much younger Diana Wynyard.
She tells the whole story to her son, who is now more torn
than ever.
Men in uniform march in the streets, and the enemy from Eurasia bombs and burns New York City. Diana Wynyard and her son’s girlfriend are caught in a cab that is blown up and overturned, but she’s not seriously injured.
Lewis Stone makes a prescient remark, “All those years we’ve
sat around and waited. Talked about peace and disarmament. It’s cost us lives of thousands of men. We
weren’t prepared for a war like this.”
Phillips Holmes eventually decides to join up, not in the
chemical corps with its ghastly poisons, but as a flyer, like his real father.
His mother is crushed, of course, and the hand of fate
weighs heavy on her, to think of her son being a flyer like his father, Robert
Young.
“Do you believe in this war?” she asks him.
“Of course not. It’s
a dirty rotten business,” he replies, but adds no less truthfully, “I’ve got to
play the game.”
His girlfriend takes him back, they are married, and in the final scene, the women are sitting on their New York City balcony watching warplanes, biplanes, flying overhead. We have also gotten a glimpse of zeppelins. Nothing says future war like zeppelins.
May Robson remarks that the world should be run by women. “Let the men crow and strut and fight and be ornamental. Like roosters. That’s the function of the male.”
The new young bride muses that if she ever has a child, he’ll
never go through this, but May responds, “Fat lot you’ll have to say about
it. You’ll be just another mother.”
It is a wistful and sad ending, not terribly inspirational
though one suspects a certain amount of inspiration was intended.
The movie is daring in so far as it can be; truthful in so
far as it could presage the facts of another war, but it fails to give any
guiding wisdom about what to do about extermination camps, atom bombs, and the
total annihilation of total war. It couldn’t,
of course. In 1933 we were still too
innocent, despite the famed world-weary attitude of the Lost Generation, to
imagine anything could be worse than what we had already experienced.
Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.
And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.
From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books. From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.
