In the last moments of Heroes For Sale (1933), a hobo gestures helplessly into a rain-swept night and speaks one of the bleakest lines in Hollywood cinema: "It's the end of America." [1]

The early 20th century witnessed the collapse of the Enlightenment Project - which had envisaged a global cosmopolitan society. [2] This rapidly gave way to the turbulent post-World War I period, and a century described by historian Eric Hobsbawm as the Age of Extremes. [3]

By the early 1930s, the laissez-faire orthodoxy shifted to a mercantilist-oriented Corporatism in the US, and various forms of fascism in Adolf Hitler's Germany and Benito Mussolini's Italy. Business analysts such as George Soros would later note that this pattern threatened the ideal of the Open Society.

The film quartet Night Nurse (1931), I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932), Employees' Entrance (1933) and Heroes For Sale (1933) are priceless artefacts from this turbulent 1930s period: their confused narrative structures and sudden, jarring endings capture the Zeitgeist of their times. They are a fore-runner to the postmodernist and multiplistic plots of some contemporary cinema. The re-discovery of pre-Code films parallels the post-revisionist Cold war debate within international relations, [4] notably by scholars who have now recognised that the 1930s created a social climate that in turn reinforced mutual suspicion between America and Russia at the end of World War II. [5]

As the US slipped down the international 'pecking order of nations' (Howard Bloom) [6] from 1929-33, President Herbert Hoover's weak leadership and ineffective administration created a feeling of nostalgia, an isolationist foreign policy, and an America turning introspectively inwards upon itself.

The 1931-33 period was a crisis-point: the prevailing liberal democratic order was threatened, with lasting implications. [7]

This period corresponds to variations within each film, a 'hankering for superman'(Walter Lippmann) [8] deep values life-cycle that film historian and scholar Thomas Doherty defined as: "the meteorology of the Great Depression is a steady torrent of misfortune until the New Deal forecasts a break in the clouds." [9]

A description of Heroes For Sale (1933) by Doherty offers a biopsychosocial systems [10] template of the change occurring during this life-cycle: "the film reaches back to the horrors of combat and the pressures of the upwardly mobile 1920s before casting out its hero into the dead ends of the early 1930s." [11]

Viewing this quartet in their historical context has a jarring effect on the viewer, much like how Peter Watkins' pseudo-documentary The War Game (1965) brought Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities home to Britain. Fugitive notably reveals a Third World nation co-existing in the same psychological space as a First World superpower.

Hollywood was now mining the repressed desires of its movie-going audience: Warner Brothers' on-location gritty Social Realism offered them a cathartic release, a purging of the inability to cope (Melanie Klein's concept of symbolic poison containers). This economic stratification was reflected in studio aesthetics: "MGM people just exist, Warner Brothers people must work"). [12] Motifs such as the 'Jazz Age' prelude signify shared group guilt.

Warner's Night Nurse and Fugitive accomplish release through different means: the former by lingering shots of Barbara Stanwyck and Jon Blondell undressing, [13] the latter by subtle sexual fetishism (the prison camp's black prisoner) and visceral social commentary (the famous blackout ending and final poignant line: "I steal"). [14]

Tom Holmes (Richard Belthelmess) in Heroes and the symbolic doppelganger James Allen/Allen James (Paul Muni) in Fugitives both prosper initially "via the traditional American blueprint, a slow and steady progress up the economic ladder" [15], whereas in Entrance, protagonist Kurt Anderson (Warren William) violates the Protestant work-ethic by seducing unemployed Madeline (Loretta Young), who climbs up the pecking order ladder by sexual favours, before pursuing a traditional marriage. [16]

The film quartet represent the dichotomy of predatory Corporatism [17], typified by the benign autocratic management style of William in Entrance, [18] and the prison gulag in Heroes and Fugitive: different styles, same structure (order-from-above).

Prison reform movement films, notes Doherty, "foretold the shift in power and sympathy away from state autonomy and toward national authority." [19] This transition within the US is obliquely conveyed in Fugitive and Heroes via dissolve montages of the protagonists aimlessly wandering through the states. [20] Bureaucracy can no longer be trusted: faith must be placed in either individual deviation from the norm, or a saviour-like leader.

The most harrowing aspect of the bureaucracy and judiciary depicted in Fugitive, claims Doherty, was the "calculated betrayal of the state and an open-ended sentence" that Muni endures, with no resolution or end in sight. [21] Although the prisons are 'Dantesque environments', forced segregation enforces equality (but stifles dissent). [22]

In this quartet, sentences meted out by the judiciary are out of all proportion to social norms. Miscarriages of justice occur in both Heroes and Fugitive: in the latter, Muni memorably says he was arrested "for looking at a hamburger." [23]

The psychological estrangement from mainstream society that the 'marked' prisoner mus endure is conveyed in Fugitive and Heroes diegesis through the use of montage. [24] In Fugitive this occurs both whilst Muni searches for work and whilst he is in the prison work gang; in Heroes it occurs when Holmes spends 1929-32 in prison, emerging unprepared into a new milieu.

The isolation depicted in Fugitive spilled off-screen to infect Warner Brothers PR tactics: Robert Burns, the film's autobiographical source, was rumoured to be on-set, and he was eventually re-captured in Newark, New Jersey. [25]

Night Nurse is described by Doherty as 'uninhibited', and "the most cynical of the pre-Code excursions down hospital corridors." [26]

Instead of an attack on the prison system, Night Nurse sidesteps the judicial system altogether (highlighting its earlier placement in the socio-cultural life-cycle). Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) discovers a plot by a society doctor to slowly kill several children under his care for their trust money: a definitely Saturnian sub-text of devouring the young. [27]

Medical ethics are spurned in Heroes when "a family doctor betrays the trust of his patient," [28] and in Night Nurse, bootlegger Mortie (Ben Lyon) meets Lora in an emergency room, and convinces her not to report a bullet wound to the police. [29]

This arrangement turns vigilante at the film's close, when Mortie organises for the evil chauffer Nick (Clark Gable) to be "taken for a ride". The ending is as confronting as Fugitive: "the startling coda replays the montage that began the film, the screeching sirens of an ambulance rushing a dead-on-arrival to the emergency room." The street has found its own brand of justice: Nick's capital punishment is "not by the law but by the criminal." [30]