Blockade

Henry Fonda

William Dieterle's Blockade is about the worst film I have seen from the golden age of Hollywood in the last year or so. This does not seem to be an unusual or controversial stance. When Otis Ferguson wrote about the film for the June 29th, 1938 edition of The New Republic the review was entitled Spanish Omelette, with Ham. However, the flick is interesting from a historical perspective as one of the few American films to address the Spanish Civil War during that conflict. Blockade was released in 1938, the only other Hollywood feature I could think of that addressed the war before Pearl Harbor was 1937's The Last Train to Madrid. This is do to many factors, such as the Neutrality Act, but it is closely aligned with Hollywood's kid glove treatment of rising fascist regimes in the 1930s.

Henry Fonda delivers a typically nuanced and sensitive performance, but is woefully miscast as a Spanish shepherd.  He meets cute with the top billed Madeleine Carroll when her jalopy plows into his oxcart. Fonda and his oxen pull Carroll to a fictional port town, where they sadly part. Moments later in screen time, Fonda is musing to his best buddy (Leo Carrillo) what a peaceful and serene place their Spanish valley is when their idyll is broken by the sound of cannons. Immediately caught up in war, Fonda rallies the peasantry to defeat the fascists brandishing a rifle a half a century out of date. The brief combat section displays that action was not Dieterle's forte. The picture ambles into international intrigue as it is revealed that Carroll and her father (Vladimir Sokoloff) are fascist agents who the newly promoted Fonda must apprehend. Soon, the port town where all the characters have congregated is under attack by bombers with submarines poaching the nautical supply line. Carroll eventually sees the error of her ways, but most viewers will have checked out long before.

Blockade is an odd hodgepodge of war, bathos (lots of starving children), thriller elements, and even comedy. The point of the film was not entertainment, but agitprop to call attention to the fascist menace in Spain. However, the film contorts itself to muddy the actual issues that provoked the war. The name Franco is never mentioned. Viewers of 1938 could probably suss that Fonda is fighting for the Loyalist army defending the Spanish Republic, but fear of censorship dilutes the film's impact. William K. Everson has sagely noted the similarity between Blockade and another Madeleine Carroll potboiler, 1936's The General Died at Dawn. That film was directed by Lewis Milestone, memorably deemed a formalist of the Left by Andrew Sarris, who was initially slated to direct Blockade. Ms. Carroll had also had  success in a number of Hitchcock thrillers, but Blockade doesn't have the thrills or the sophistication of The 39 Steps or Secret Agent. Outside of those two films, Ms. Carroll displayed little onscreen charisma and the paucity of her character in Blockade does her no favors. Dieterle's wispy expressionism adds little to this muddled message picture. What does tie the picture together is Rudolph Maté's sparkling cinematography which achieves Eisensteinian heights picturing the huddled masses during the final reel.

There are two other artists behind the film that I think qualify more than Dieterle to be the film's true auteur. Walter Wanger was probably the only independent producer to have cojones to make a picture like this at the time. Fonda had starred for him the previous year in Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once. Carrillo had appeared as the comic relief chef in Wanger's production of History is Made at Night, Frank Borzage's sublime masterpiece from 1937. I think it is fair to say that comedy is out of place in a film about the Spanish Civil War. Carrillo is wonderful in the earlier Wanger production, but his comic efforts are flat beer in Blockade. Which leads me to the man who I think was the real auteur behind this flick, screenwriter John Howard Lawson. Lawson was the sole writer credited on this picture, so one can only conjecture on the contributions of Clifford Odets, who also contributed to The General Died at Dawn (I'll guess continuity) and James M. Cain (sex). Lawson eventually became the most unrepentant member of the Hollywood Ten. He remained a committed communist and was never invited back into the Hollywood fold. He was a big influence within the CPUSA ranks and it was his efforts to make What Makes Sammy Run? hew closer to the official line that made Budd Schulberg quit the party. One watches Blockade and hears Lawson use his feeble characters as a mouthpieces to decry the rape of Spain. Henry Fonda closes the picture by exhorting his comrades to continue to resist fascism, crying out to isolationist America, "Where is the conscience of the world!" Despite noble intentions, this is one lame flick.