Blockade

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")

To paraphrase the late great Father Coughlin's jibe at the Roosevelt government's provision of "relief that failed to relieve", this inept film on the Spanish Civil War provided propaganda that failed to propagandize. That, at least to this viewer, is the only thought that lingered after suffering through almost 90 minutes of Blockade. I say this with a great deal of reluctance because I have always considered myself a great fan of both the principals of this film, Madeleine Carroll and Henry Fonda, but, alas, not even these two cinematic greats could salvage this bummer. In my quest to apportion blame I suppose the the script writer, a certain John Henry Lawson, is as good a place as any to start. The clunky lines he puts in the mouth of Fonda, a peasant hero of the so-called "republican" cause--particularly his closing monologue--are grounds for confinement in the most austere of labor camps courtesy of his obvious favorite, Comrade Joseph Stalin. I was especially struck by the tepidity of the romantic interludes with the beautiful Carroll, suggesting that a proletarian partisan like Mr. Lawson has little feeling for the more sublime side of human emotions. All of this I could excuse if Blockade offered anything approaching effective political propaganda if that was what it offered; but, at the risk of being tedious, that was precisely where it failed the most.

For political propaganda that both entertains and persuades, let me suggest Casablanca. For political propaganda that offers only a few glimpses of the radiant Madeleine Carroll and nothing more, I recommend Blockade. That, unfortunately, is not enough to salvage this less than scintillating 1930s leftist pap.

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.

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.

John Howard Lawson joined the CPUSA in 1934 and announced that he would try to "present the Communist position" in his scripts. On the face of it, he didn't get far in "Blockade", a notoriously timid Spanish Civil War pic released while it was still being fought. Publicity promised that "the story does not attempt to favour any cause"; even the uniforms were ambiguous.

The factions are referred to only as "Them" (invaders) and "Us" (invaded). The casus belli is no more than Their attempt to purloin Our land, a valley near Granada. What ensues is personalised, studio-bound melodrama. Heroic amateur soldier Henry Fonda stiffens his fellow peasants' backs to resist the grab. He woos blonde White Russian adventuress Madeleine Carroll and finally demands foreign intervention in a Chaplinesque harangue to camera: "Where's the conscience of the world?"

It all savours of Hays Office intervention and the anxiety of Lawson's "progressive" producer, Walter Wanger, not to provoke the US public by charging them for a liberal sermon. But "Blockade" may be subtler agitprop than it seems.

By 1938 anybody who read a paper or watched "The March of Time" would infer that Fonda stands for the Republic fending off General Franco's Nazi- and Fascist-backed Nationalists-- not the other way round. And Lawson's emphasis on small farmers guarding their ancestral acreage is just what Stalin ordered. In reality the country round Granada was a hotbed of anarchist schemes for collectivising agriculture, but the Communist line was that the Republic's left-front government, including democratic socialists and liberals, must be sustained till the rebel generals were routed. Only then could land reform be considered; reform under the aegis of a Communist-dominated regime subservient to Moscow, which would nationalise the land, not parcel it out to dubious anarchic types.

Moreover, Lawson must have relished making Carroll's character an exiled daughter of Russia with a crooked anti-Red father, who sees the light in Fonda's arms.

We laugh at movies such as this and "Last Train from Madrid" for their superficial, sentimental view of a burning issue. But what right has today's supposedly more liberated Hollwood to laugh? Where were Vietnam films during the conflict, apart from John Wayne's "Green Berets"? How many Gulf War or Enduring Freedom stories have we seen? How many portrayals of radical Islam, pro or anti? Hollywood is more gutlessly evasive than ever during our dangerous times. Well, export markets provide more of its profit margin than 60 years ago...