by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Last night at 8 p.m. I started the next installment of the complete go-through of the James Whale catalog Charles and I embarked on last January – screening all the Whale-directed movies in chronological order regardless of genre (and while the great success of Frankenstein inevitably “typed” him as a horror director, he actually made a wide variety of films: war dramas, romantic melodramas, screwball comedies and romantic comedies), The Road Back and The Great Garrick. The Road Back was a project Universal had been working on under various auspices since 1933. It was based on a book by Erich Maria Remarque, German anti-war author whose classic All Quiet on the Western Front had given Universal its first Academy Award for Best Picture in 1930. (Universal would win a Best Picture by proxy in 1948 as the U.S. distributor for Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, produced in Britain by J. Arthur Rank, but the next Best Picture Oscar for a film Universal itself produced did not come until 1974, for The Sting.) Remarque had written The Road Back as a semi-sequel to All Quiet; though Paul, the protagonist of All Quiet, was killed at the end and therefore unavailable for a sequel, some of the minor characters carried over to Remarque’s new tale of German soldiers returning home after the nation’s defeat in World War I and trying to adjust to peacetime conditions.
Remarque had wanted his book to dramatize the tensions in postwar Germany that had given rise to the Nazi movement and brought about much of its appeal – particularly its endorsement of the so-called “stab-in-the-back” myth that the German military could have won the war if the civilian government hadn’t surrendered behind their backs – and Whale and his writers, Charles Kenyon and R. C. Sherriff (the latter had been a Whale collaborator since Whale directed Sherriff’s World War I play Journey’s End on both stage and screen), were fully on board with that. But the shoot of The Road Back was troubled, partly because Universal had decided that since All Quiet had been a huge hit in spite of a virtually unknown actor in the lead, they would cast a relative unknown in the lead of The Road Back as well. Alas, their choice – John King, who had a long list of previous credits but virtually all of them for “B” Westerns (in which he was billed as John “Dusty” King), thrillers and serials – was no Lew Ayres. Whale’s movies tended to run over budget and schedule, but The Road Back went farther over than most of his productions, mainly because it took so much time and so many takes for him to get even a reasonably credible performance out of King.
The Road Back was also Whale’s first film created entirely under the new regime at Universal that had taken over once hedge-fund manager J. Cheever Cowdin had driven the studio’s founder, Carl Laemmle, and his son Carl Laemmle, Jr. out of control and had installed Charles R. Rogers as head of production. Rogers thought the “New Universal,” as it billed itself, should focus on musicals and light romantic comedies rather than stark war dramas or horror films, though Universal had already sunk so much money into The Road Back he let it go ahead. Then, once Whale finished his cut and it was previewed, the German consul in Los Angeles saw the film, cabled a memo about its contents to the Nazi government, and returned with a list of at least 21 cuts or changes he wanted made in the film. At first Charles Rogers did the right thing and publicly insisted that he wouldn’t change a frame of the film at the behest of a Nazi official – but then he caved and ordered the film cut and revised according to the Nazis’ specifications. According to Whale biographer James Curtis, the reason Rogers did this was he and Cowdin were worried about what a ban on Universal’s movies in Germany would do to Universal’s overall finances and stock price – though Cowdin’s hedge fund owned a controlling interest, Universal was still a publicly traded company and its stock price would have sunk if the Nazis had followed through on their threat to ban all Universal films from German release if The Road Back went out with its anti-Nazi content intact.
What’s worse – and this was something I did not know until I read the latest edition of Curtis’s book – various countries had reciprocal agreements about films so that if one signatory to the agreement banned certain movies, the others would follow suit. Germany had such an agreement with China and Brazil, which would have cut off a good chunk of the world’s moviegoers from access to Universal pictures. So Rogers agreed to recut The Road Back and put another director, Edward Sloman, on the project to film the retakes needed to make the film Nazi-safe. Then, in 1939, yet a third director was put on to rework the ending of The Road Back to acknowledge that the naïve hopes for perpetual peace uttered by the central characters, Ernst (John King) and his fiancée Elsa (Jean Rouverol) had not been fulfilled, so the print we saw ended with a montage of newsreel sequences showing the various countries involved in World War I – Germany, Italy, Russia, Britain, France and the U.S. – all rearming and getting ready for World War II. What emerged from this troubled production history and even more troubled post-production history was a surprisingly powerful anti-war movie, beset by the clashing agendas of the different people who worked on it at different times but still a gripping film even if hardly the movie it could have been if Whale and Sherriff (who had collaborated so beautifully depicting the war from the other side in Journey’s End) had been let alone to make the film they wanted to make from Remarque’s material.
The one thing they did near-perfectly was depict the returning soldiers’ experience of what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); if the film has a theme it’s the difficulty you put people through when you yank them out of their homes and pull them away from their families, train them to be hardened, heartless killers and then expect them to return to society and resume their old roles as workers, sons, husbands and lovers without letting what they’d gone through in the war affect their characters. Curtis ridicules one line of dialogue in which Ernst says, “I’ve got to find myself,” but as someone who grew up in the 1960’s (in an era in which many of my friends had served in an even more pointless and destructive war and had returned home to a population that didn’t give a damn about their sacrifices), when that became an almost omnipresent cliché among young people who found the values they’d grown up with wanting and hoped to find a better place to live, that line seemed unusually prescient to me.
The Road Back takes its central characters and buffets them through the various social changes Germany went through in the immediate aftermath of the war, including the short-lived attempt at a socialist revolution in Germany in 1919 – which Whale and his writers seem to have two minds about. First, they depict the revolutionaries as obnoxious idiots – one of them shows up at the unit in which the main characters serve and demands they immediately elect a “Soldiers’ Council” which will take over the leadership once they demote all the officiers, and the hard-bitten and traumatized soldiers wonder who on earth this guy is and why he’s babbling about a “Soldiers’ Council.” (Obviously the German revolutionaries were following the example of the Russian soviets.) Later on one of the survivors of the war gets caught in a street confrontation between the police and army on one side, and the revolutionaries on the other: he walks across the no-man’s-land between them naïvely hoping to broker a deal, and his old commanding officer, Caplain Von Hagen (John Emery, Mr. Tallulah Bankhead, playing the part in the best Erich von Stroheim manner), orders him shot and killed. The flim lurches to a climax when one of the soldiers sees his old girlfriend making out with a war profiteer who stayed home and made a fortune off selling bullets to the army in a curtained booth at a restaurant (there’s a surprisingly class-conscious aspect to this film in its cut-backs between people with money entertaining themselves at lavish parties, banquets and restaurants with plenty of food, and ordinary people starving – though that had been a staple of anti-capitalist filmmaking since D. W. Griffith’s ground-breaking one-reeler A Corner in Wheat in 1912). He takes out his revolver and kills the man, and is put on trial.
The prosecutor is Lionel Atwill, making his second appearance in a Whale movie (his first, One More River, also cast him as an unsympathetic prosecutor – ironically, though Atwill was best known as a horror star and Whale as a horror director, they never worked together in that genre – just as Whale worked with Vincent Price in his next-to-last feature, 1940’s Green Hell, but never made a horror film with him either!) The defendant, Ludwig (Richard Cromwell, who the previous year had been the romantic lead for Rochelle Hudson in the film Poppy with W. C. Fields), makes the obligatory point that society trained him to kill during the war and therefore shouldn’t be surprised that this permanently warped him and made him susceptible to killing even during a supposed time of peace. Atwill’s character is aghast that Ludwig would compare killing in war with killing an unarmed civilian in a lovers’ quarrel, but the critique of war for turning innocent young men into murderers was a stable of pacifist literature in the 1930’s and came up in some unlikely places (like an episode of The Shadow radio show from 1938 in which a serial killer turns out to be a deranged war veteran). The Road Back as it stands may not be the film its creators intended, but it’s surprisingly effective given its troubled production history, even though it works as a series of sometimes powerful scenes rather than a dramatic whole (though to some degree that could be said of All Quiet on the Western Front as well; Remarque seems to have been the sort of writer who’s better at inventing dramatic and powerful scenes than at integrating them into a dramatically and artistically coherent whole), and though the film as we have it betrays the clashing agendas involved in its making, it’s still a good movie and a worthy addition to the James Whale canon.
