Scarlet Dawn

To be able to tell a story so eventful in less an hour is in itself a feat and William Dieterlé can't be praised too highly just for that .There are so many characters that sometimes the viewer does not know anymore who is who :even czar Nicholas appears in the flesh at the beginning.Never a dull moment;the Russian revolution only takes two scenes : the railway station where the hero is (fortunately) late and the panic in the streets .There's also a scene in his castle which the revolutionaries plunder : Jacques Feyder would copy it in his own "knight without armor" (1937);in that movie ,Marlene Dietrich is the noble one whereas her co-star Robert Donat is a plebeian.

Dieterle's taste for melodrama comes to the fore in the second part which takes place in Turkey. The connection between the scenes is sometimes thin and leaves the best till last.If this movie were remade,the ending would certainly be modified today.

"Scarlet Dawn" has an incomplete, unfinished feel. Perhaps it was filmed in haste and some scenes were botched and not redone. Who can tell? In any event, there is a touching performance by Nancy Carroll as a servant girl to a lusty young baron (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) who carouses and womanizes (among his girlfriends is the elegant Lilyan Tashman, splendidly portraying a fellow corrupt aristocrat). Comes the 1917 revolution, the aristos must flee, and Carroll loyally accompanies Fairbanks rather than turn him in to the revolutionaries. After a cross-country escape (a sort of abbreviated version of Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat's trek several years later in "Knight Without Armour") they end up in Constantinople where he sinks from high cavalry officer to low dishwasher. The rest of the story will not be revealed here except to say that it seems strangely truncated.

The backstory unfolds with the liberal use of ultra-simplified newspaper headlines (""Czar Nicholas Denies Rumor of Revolution"; "Communists Stage Demonstration Despite Czar's Denial of Revolutionary Rumors. Thousands Gather to Parade Under Communist Banner"; "Communists Riot in Moscow"); the dramatized corollary to these headlines is a scene in which Fairbanks returns to his troop train after a 2-week leave; an anti-government soldier is hissing "no!" at fellow soldiers as their commander orders them to entrain for a return to the front. They refuse and fire on the officers.

Lastly, as in "Knight," the heroine's eye makeup and lipstick remain intact through the ordeal).

Scarlet Dawn casts Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as a Russian baron rudely displaced by the forces of the Russian Revolution and now has to fend for himself in a world not terribly hospitable to former aristocrats. He's also not terribly suited for any kind of real work.

Doug might have been caught by the Reds but for the fact that his former servant Nancy Carroll didn't give him away. Nancy's got a big old crush on Doug and they do marry once arriving in exile in Istanbul which throughout the film is referred to by its former Christian name of Constantinople. They marry and settle down with Doug now reduced to washing dishes.

But Fairbanks's former mistress Lilyan Tashman who's always playing bad girls of a sort on film spots him and offers to have him get back into somewhat the style he was once accustomed to as part of a swindle against father and daughter American tourists Guy Kibbee and Sheila Terry.

Good thing this film has the incredibly short running time of only 57 minutes, usually those were given to B westerns because it's both tedious and melodramatic. The ending is rather unbelievable. Doug knew he was in a Thanksgiving special and really overacts to cover up the defects of a unbelievable story.

What I didn't understand was that Fairbanks was trained in the military profession, why didn't he just become a mercenary soldier after leaving the new Soviet Union? That didn't make sense to me at all.

I'd only see this if I was a dedicated fan of any the main players.

1932, the darkest year of the Great Depression, is also the year the Warner Bros. movie studio hits its peak. With William Dieterle as the director of "Scarlet Dawn," and Anton Grot as the art director, "Scarlet Dawn" moves at breakneck speed amid great sets. The cynical attitude of this movie is best summed up by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s character, Lt. Krasnoff, in a line right after Russian checkpoint guards shoot the car he had just been tossed out of at gunpoint. Krasnoff had paid for a ride out of Moscow with a bunch of jewels. The driver decided to dump Krasnoff and his companion at the side of the road, keeping all the jewels. After the shot up car bursts into flames and crashes over an embankment, Fairbanks' companion (played by Nancy Carroll) says: "They killed him. How horrible." Fairbank's response: "Stop sniveling. What's one thief more or less in this world anyway." This sort of callous attitude toward death by the star of the movie is something you never saw in major studio Hollywood movies for 20 years after the introduction of the Production Code of 1934. "Vera Cruz" had that sort of cynical attitude but that movie was made in 1954 by an independent film production company (co-owned by star Burt Lancaster).

This movie has lots of action and little heart. Let's forget for a minute that it gets just about every aspect of the Russian Revolution wrong - after all we only have only under an hour here to tell our story. In fact, the czar abdicated after World War I proved a disaster for the country, and a provisional government tried to rule as a pseudo-democracy until the Leninists took power nine months later, mainly because they promised to immediately withdraw Russia from the war. Now, back to our story.

Here we have the revolution being "rumored" in Russian newspapers in what appears to still be a functioning country until violence erupts suddenly and upends the life of nobleman Baron Nikita 'Nikki' Krasnoff (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). He flees his home with his former servant girl Tanyusha (Nancy Carroll) in tow, and they start to make a new life in Constantinople. Before the revolution the Baron made a regular habit out of making a play for the girl, not out of any real passion, but out of boredom as a diversion of sorts. The revolution doesn't change this, and he continues to try to take advantage of what is obviously a very simple girl. It certainly doesn't make the audience like this guy to see him toying with her so. Tanyusha follows the Baron because she literally has no place to go after the revolutionaries take over the Baron's home, and she has known no other life other than waiting on Nikki hand and foot. Once in Constantinople, Nikki quickly wearies of life as a penniless laborer, and that is when he meets up with his former lover, Russian aristocrat Vera Zimina, who has a plan for getting them to Paris where the Tsarists have congregated after the revolution. Unfortunately for Tanyusha, Vera's plan does not include her.

This film manages to completely waste the considerable acting talents of early talkie actress Nancy Carroll. She does a good job with what little she is given to do, but that is not much. Lilyan Tashman is the standout here, even though she has only a small role as Russian vamp Vera. Lilyan was so often given supporting roles just as she is here, but her earthy voice and glamorous looks make her the center of attention in every scene in which she appears. Guy Kibbee even shows up in a humorous bit as an American tourist who is curious about the Russian royalty that has been forcefully ejected from their homeland.