Thomas "Tom" Holmes
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Heroes for Sale (1933) is an American pre-Code drama film directed by William Wellman, starring Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, and Loretta Young, and released by Warner Bros. and First National Pictures.
Heroes for Sale: Directed by William A. Wellman. With Richard Barthelmess, Loretta Young, Aline MacMahon, Gordon Westcott. A veteran fights drug addiction to make his way in the business world.
Returning to America after the war, Roger meets Tom, who he believed to be dead. Tom's life was saved by the Germans, but in the prisoner of war camp, he took morphine for his pain and is now addicted to the drug. Roger gets Tom a job in his father's bank, but his addiction gets him fired.
One of seven films William “Wild Bill” Wellman socked out in 1933 alone (including an uncredited effort), Heroes for Sale nimbly trots through a number of generic and thematic registers—wherein epigrammatic storylines often correspond to actual sociopolitical or historical events—by employing a cinematic shorthand that's rare even for ...
The saga of Tom Holmes – a man of principles – from the Great War to the Great Depression. Will he ever get a break? His war heroics earn fame and a medal for someone else, and his wounds result in a morphine addiction that costs him a job, his reputation in his home town, and months in a clinic.
Within its 71-minute time frame, this film (co-written by "professional cynic" Wilson Mizner) tackles such issues as disenfranchised war veterans, misguided hero worship, drug addiction, the Depression, capitalism, labor relations and communism.
Overview. Tom Holmes is someone guided by honesty and moral rectitude, a heroic veteran of the World War I marked by the unbearable suffering caused by his battle wounds, a traumatized but courageous man who will experience, in the years to come, the pain of misfortune but also the happiness of success and hope and love for other human beings.
