Bloqueo

Marco is a simple Spanish farmer who is forced to stand up and be counted when he takes up arms to protect his country during the civil war. When his heroics and bravery sees him promoted up the ranks, Marco finds things complicated when he starts to fall in love with a woman who's father turns out to be a Russian spy. The couple try to deal with their feelings while they find themselves on opposite sides of the war.

Boasting the tagline 'the most important film of 1938' and having been awarded Oscars at the time of its release, I decided to watch this film and see what the fuss was about. What I found was a film that is too self-consciously cautious to be great fun, too worthy to be involving and ends up being rather dull and uninteresting. The basic plot is set around the Spanish civil war but it appears to have been careful about coming down on either side of the argument and therefore is so balanced that it almost cancels out any content that may have been challenging or informative. This leaves a story about personalities and the central romance, which is a problem because the film doesn't deal with these very well either. The romance tries to be bleak and supposedly doomed but it just can't get the tone right and it never really gets anywhere near as emotive as it needed to be – certainly this is no Casablanca.

With the script problems and rather drab direction, the film only occasionally gets close to being really impacting and involving and it was only the moments where the horrors of the conflict are allowed to get above political neutrality that the film comes to life – but these are too infrequent. The cast are set adrift and do the best they can to squeeze emotion and drama out of the script but their efforts just seem out of place against a rather flat backdrop. Fonda is always watchable even if his 'good honest man' is a rather dull character and, for that reason, hard to get behind; certainly modern audiences may find his unquestioning patriotism and simple morals hard to swallow. Carroll is better than the film deserves, her performance is very good and it is just a shame that the rest of the film doesn't come up to her level of work. Support is OK but the script doesn't fill the film that well and most of the cast are given little to do.

Overall this may well have been the 'most important film of 1938' but it doesn't do a great deal today. The film doesn't inform and isn't interesting as it carefully treads the complexities of the conflict – and Fonda's final to-camera rant about peace is too little, too late and just comes across as being rather pat. The romance could have saved it but this too is fluffed despite the best efforts of Carroll, but Fonda, despite being worth a look, plays it all to simplistically in line with the material.

The late and unlamented Senator Joseph McCarthy was wrong about many things, but one thing he got right was the extent of Communist penetration of the American movie industry during the thirties and forties; despite the fact that the Communist Party of the USA had virtually no popular support a remarkable number of Hollywood screenwriters and directors had links to the Party. What McCarthy got wrong was the idea that these individuals posed any real threat to American democracy. The combined efforts of all these Marxist intellectuals did not result in any rise in support for the Party (its best performance in a Presidential election was 0.3% of the vote in 1932). Indeed, they did not even succeed in getting any films made which could be regarded as furthering the Communist cause, other than a few wartime propaganda films like "North Star" which were made-with the blessing of the American authorities- to highlight the Soviet war effort.

"Blockade" is a case in point. The script was written by John Howard Lawson, one of the most hard-line Communists working in Hollywood, about the Spanish Civil War, a cause dear to the heart of every leftist. And yet its script is so confused that it is impossible to tell whether its politics are pro-Republican or pro-Nationalist.

Marco, a small farmer living somewhere near the Mediterranean coast of Spain, takes up arms to defend his land against the Bad Guys, and then becomes part of the Good Guys' army. He takes part in the defence of Castelmare, a port city held by the Good Guys but being blockaded by the Bad Guys who are hoping to starve it into surrender. The plot revolves around the attempts of the Good Guys to send a ship through the blockade to bring food to the starving citizens, and the attempts of the Bad Guys and their spies within the city to frustrate this plan by sinking the ship.

No doubt if Lawson had had his way he would have written a script which made it quite clear that the Good Guys were to be identified with the Republicans, but the studio- who doubtless felt that actually making a film about the conflict was quite brave enough- were determined that they should not be seen as favouring one side against the other, and the script was therefore neutered so as to ensure that the question of who the Good Guys and the Bad Guys actually were remained obscure. The film makes no reference to the International Brigades or to foreign intervention in the war, and all personal names and place names are fictitious. (The name "Castelmare" is actually Italian rather than Spanish, as is "Montefiore", another place mentioned in the film. The hero's name in Spanish would normally be "Marcos" rather than "Marco", and there are also characters with the Italian-sounding names "Pietro" and "Seppo". Lawson seems to have got confused about the differences between Spanish and Italian).

There are some factors which do indeed suggest that the Good Guys are intended to be identified with the Republicans, in particular the fact that the Bad Guys carry out air raids against civilian targets, a typically Nationalist tactic. Some have also pointed to the fact that the chief Bad Guy spies, a young woman named Norma and her father, are of Russian origin, although it should be mentioned that not all Russian émigrés at this period were Tsarists or even right-wingers; there were plenty of Russian liberals, social democrats, anarchists and Trotskyites in exile from Stalin's regime. (Norma later has a change of heart when she sees the suffering the blockade is causing, switches to the Good Guy side and becomes Marco's love-interest).

Other factors, however, suggest that the Good Guys are intended to be identified with the Nationalists, and not only the design of their uniforms which another reviewer mentioned. Marco mentions that the Bad Guys are targeting churches for destruction, just as the anarchists and communists did in the regions of Spain under their control. His taking up arms in defence of his land recalls the fact that the leftist programme of collectivising land forced many small farmers, who otherwise would have had little sympathy with Fascism, to support the Nationalist cause, fearing that in the event of a Republican victory they would share the fate of the Russian kulaks.

Yet despite its political incoherence the film has some good points. Indeed, it is perhaps the film's refusal to take sides that makes it still watchable more than seventy years on, certainly more watchable than a mere Francoist or anti-Francoist propaganda tract would be. Certainly, it is dated, something shown in those scenes which supposedly take place outdoors but which were in fact shot in a studio in front of very unconvincing-looking backcloths. Although it ends with a rousing peroration from Marco in which he calls for outside intervention in the war, its main interest today is as an anti-war drama, a film which shows us the human cost of war, a cost which remains the same whether the war is being waged by Good Guys or Bad Guys. 6/10

Although Blockade managed to get two Academy Award nominations for Best Music Score and Best Original Screenplay, time has not dealt well with the film. For Whom The Bells Toll is a great Hemingway novel and great film made from that novel and it is a far better interpretation of the Spanish Civil War.

Which was still going on when Blockade was made by Walter Wanger in 1938 and released by United Artists. Wanger had under personal contract at the time Henry Fonda whom he had brought to Hollywood to recreate his Broadway starring role in The Farmer Takes A Wife. After that during the Thirties he mostly rented Fonda's services out to the studios until Fonda signed a contract with 20th Century Fox to get to play Tom Joad in The Grapes Of Wrath.

One of the big problems is the casting of Henry Fonda as a Spanish peasant who joins the Republican Army and is the voice of the Spanish proletariat on screen. Fonda is just way too American in his speech to ever be convincing as anything else. As the voice of an American worker, Tom Joad in The Grapes Of Wrath, Fonda was perfect. As a Spaniard he just doesn't cut it. But he was certainly a bigger box office than the guy who should have played the part, Gilbert Roland.

While still just a peasant working his fields before war comes, Fonda meets up with Madeleine Carroll who is a Russian expatriate traveling through Spain to meet her father Vladimir Sokoloff and another family friend John Halliday. She doesn't know it, but the two of them are spies. And she gets roped into their espionage game as well.

The story of the Spanish Civil War is a complex one, but one of the failures of Blockade is that we never get any kind of background. Roughly speaking the bulk of the military staged a coup against the Republic of Spain and in the end which came in 1939, Francisco Franco emerged as a fascist dictator of Spain out of all the generals in revolt. But none of that is explained here in Blockade. All we know is that it's an amorphous 'them' out there making it tough on the peasants who are in fact supporting the constitutional and elected Republic of Spain.

Although the wholesale bombing of civilians had first been done in Ethiopia by the Italians, civilian bombing targets were first done in Europe in the Spanish Civil War. It was new and frightening and widely covered in the domestic and foreign press. The story of Blockade centers around a coastal town in which a relief ship cannot get through. The port may have to be surrendered and with it the whole province. It's what the Nationalists are working for and the Republicans like Fonda trying to prevent, though the names Nationalist and Republican are never used.

John Howard Lawson wrote the original script that got the Academy nod and he was one of the later Hollywood Ten and one who in fact made no bones about his Marxist sympathies. But this film has been so drained of politics that it's almost antiseptic.

I'd say Blockade is one for fans of the leads and an interesting if mediocre way showing how Hollywood handled a burning issue of the time.

In the spring of 1936 in Castelmare, the peasants Marco (Henry Fonda) and Luis (Leo Carrillo) help the aristocratic Russian Norma (Madeleine Carroll) that had a car accident while driving to the house of her father Basil (Vladimir Sokoloff) and Marco falls in love with Norma.

Sooner the Spanish Civil War begins and Marco leads a group of peasants to defend Castelmare and he is assigned lieutenant of the rebels' army. Meanwhile, Basil and Norma are forced to spy for Andre Gallinet (John Halliday). Marco suspects of Basil and follows him to his room. When Basil reacts, Marco kills him in a shooting.

Meanwhile, Castelmare is under siege and without supplies, and Norma escapes from Marco. But she is blackmailed by Gallibet and forced to return to Castelmare with information about the ship that is bringing supplies for the population.

"Blockade" is a shallow and corny melodrama during the Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936 to 01 April 1939). The dull romance between Marco and Norma has no chemistry and the author uses a historical event that is happening in 1938 in a neutral position and no references. The final speech of Henry Fonda's character is one of the awfullest conclusions that I have ever seen in a classic. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Bloqueio" ("Blockade")

I live in Spain now and have nurtured an interest in twentieth century Spanish history, in particular the Spanish Civil War and the rise of the dictator Franco. I was completely unaware of this vintage Hollywood feature made while the war was still raging, starring an emergent Henry Fonda and the already established Madeleine Carroll.

The screenplay, as if you couldn't guess, is by one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, John Howard Lawson, who wrote a number of left-leaning works for both the theatre and cinema at this time and I must admit I was surprised to learn that this one was nominated for an Academy Award this particular year.

The story is both simple and contrived. A lowly, young Spanish farmer, Fonda, with his oafish chum encounters Carroll after she crashes her car at breakneck speed on the road where they're walking their cattle. Just as you wouldn't guess Fonda was a native Spaniard from his accent, Carroll we later learn despite her cut-glass English accent is actually a Russian whose father, we learn is aiding the fascist Nationalist forces, presumably at the behest of Stalin.

Then, of a sudden, the Spanish Civil War kicks off with Fonda's character seemingly unaware that it was even in the wind. Sure enough, he enlists on the underdog Republican side, although these descriptive terms are never used in the film and when he discovers Carroll's father's treachery to his country, shoots him dead. You might think that this would be enough to turn her forever against him but you'd be wrong, although initially she of course has to see the error of her ways, even if she seems to have betrayed the starving native Spaniards by passing on intelligence which enables the oppressors to sink each relief ship, bringing in essential food and supplies, attempting to break the imposed blockade.

It sort of all ends up all right in the end thanks to a cunning piece of duplicity by the resistance with Fonda and Carroll now firmly committed to fighting for their poor countrymen, women and children with the last word going to Fonda making a rallying call directly to the viewer for other countries to help his beleaguered nation as they will surely be next to be threatened by the rise of fascism in the west.

I'm all for the political motivations behind the movie which must have taken some bravery for the cast and crew to produce but really it's very heavy-handed in its writing, seems to be directed in a very-slapdash fashion by William Dieterle and is acted over-earnestly by Carroll and in particular Fonda.

I kind of wished the production had instead made the trip to Spain to film at first-hand in documentary fashion the horrors of this terrible war, but lame and stilted as this movie was, its heart at least was in the right place so I'll forgive some of its all too apparent flaws and give it a tacit nod of approval.