As of January, 2025 this film is considered lost, but I found the description film historian Kevin Brownlow provided in Behind the Mask of Innocence to be interesting enough to quote it here, with the thought that others may find it of interest too. All of the information in what follows is from him.
As Brownlow describes it, "Human Wreckage was made as a direct result of the Wallace Reid case," in which the good-natured, energetic silent film star became addicted to the morphine that was readily supplied by studio doctors to keep actors working. (It's debatable as to whether the origin of the addiction was a serious injury sustained while making Valley of the Giants (1919)). He would die in a sanitarium in 1923 at just 31. The same year, his wife, Dorothy Davenport would produce and star in this anti-drug propaganda film, dedicated to the memory of "A man who fought the leering curse of powdered death and, dying, was victorious."
Some highlights of the film:
- "The picture fades in to an Indian poppy field. The poppies are nodding in the breeze, and the gray, wasted faces of addicts are faded into them. Mrs. Wallace Reid delivers a statement, in the company of her two children: 'The drug evil is daily devastating more homes than the white plague (tuberculosis). None of us can render a greater service to humanity.'"
- Director John Griffith Wray used a street with "houses set at insane angles," a set inspired by Dr. Caligari's Cabinet, meant to provide the viewpoint of a drug addict.
- In one scene the young drug-addicted mother, Mary (Bessie Love) opens her dress, and after dipping her fingers into a diluted morphine solution, rubs it on her breast. As the script explains, "She has gotten into the habit of rubbing morphine on her breasts to quiet the baby when he nurses."
- As the lower level drug dealers are arrested and, addicted themselves, begin informing on those above them, soon we reach a level of powerful people introduced by the title "Higher up." "The men keep their backs to the camera, and we never see their faces. Orders are issued: 'Furnish bail for Stone (one of the dealers) immediately - then have him see the best lawyer in the city."
- After the dealer is found not guilty despite a recovering addict taxi driver (George Hackathorne) telling his friends "Every hophead in town knows that Stone handled dope," the title "Not guilty" is "repeated like a tolling bell before a shot of Mary, suffering in the hospital before a shot of a peddler selling dope to a girl of sixteen. Even in jail, the drugs circulate smoothly..."
- Later, after the city has declared war on the drug ring, the lawyer (James Kirkwood) makes this idealistic statement: "The American public no longer regards the drug addict as a criminal, but as a sick person needing the best medical attention obtainable."
- In a bit of cathartic revenge, the taxi driver picks the dealer up in his cab and "takes him on a wild, drug-induced ride through city traffic. 'You're on your way to hell,' he tells him, moments before he drives at full speed into a locomotive. Both are killed." This scene required police cooperation, with cameras on top of vehicles and on the back of a police car.
- The August, 1923 issue of Photoplay included a story about this scene that sounds to me invented and racist, that "As the whistles blew and the camera began to grind, a Chinaman started across the street, evidently quite unconscious of what was happening around him. Two policemen started toward him, anxious to get him out of the path of the taxi. But the Chinaman misunderstood. With a terrified glance at the two officers, he dropped something from the sleeve of his jacket and, slipping into the crowd of bystanders, disappeared. The scene was shot before one of the policemen noticed the little package the Chinaman had dropped. Picking it up he found that it was filled with little 'bindles' of cocaine."
- The lawyer then undermines his earlier statement by saying "If we are to crush the drug evil, we must have a law which will bite. It cannot be too drastic."
- Davenport then appears to ask the audience, "Won't you help us."
The film was praised by almost reviewers, and very popular in America. It was one of the financial successes of the year. At the New York opening, Davenport was "standing up in a box, after the picture, while flowers in gracious tribute were laid at her feet; standing there white faced and weary-eyed, the tears rolling down her cheeks, very near to collapse, a tragic, pitiful, inarticulate figure." She was just 28, and would live to ripe old age of 82.
Motion Picture Classic had this to say about the film: "Human Wreckage is a profoundly moving picture handled with dignity and restraint. There is nothing cheap or sensational about it. Quite the contrary. A tremendous and unmistakable sincerity animates everyone who had anything to do with it. It is a grim, terrific, tragic indictment of stupidity and criminal indifference towards these 'living dead' whose pitiable army is vaster than you or I ever dreamed of."
