Scarlet Dawn

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. stars with Nancy Carroll and Lilyan Tashman in "Scarlet Dawn," a precode film from 1932.

Fairbanks plays a Russian baron, Nikita, who finds himself caught in the Russian Revolution, where he becomes one of the common people and realizes that he has no skills and needs a job.

He's nearly caught but after lying to the Reds, they take him to be identified and ask a servant, Tanyusha (Nancy Carroll) where he was staying about him. She plays along that he's not a baron, and he's released.

Nikita takes off for Istanbul (called by its old name here, Constantinople), and she follows. They marry; he gets a job washing dishes, and she gets one scrubbing floors.

The restaurant boss gives him a chance as busboy, he encounters an old love Vera (Lilyan Tashman) at the table. She waits for him outside and encourages him to go to Paris with her, where they can swindle a man and his daughter and enjoy some semblance of their old life.

Nikita agrees to go and tells Tanyusha that he will be sending her money and will return.

This film runs slightly under an hour, uses footage from the real Revolution or old Russia, I guess, and has that old trick of the paper showing headlines in Russian and then fading to English. Cracked me up.

For me the only good thing was Fairbanks, whom I love, and who always managed to hand in a performance that stands the test of time. He's handsome and sexy here, despite his sexual harassment of Tanyusha before they marry.

I'd say skip it.

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.

Scarlet Dawn (1932)

** (out of 4)

Extremely light "B" movie from Warner about nobleman Nikita Krasnoff (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) who along with his servant (Nancy Carroll) is forced out of Russia. The two try to find a better life for themselves but each place they land just erupts in more violence as the revolution grows stronger by the day. Okay, Warner gave director Dieterle 57-minutes to tell an epic story about the Russian revolution so it should come as no surprise that the end result really isn't all that good. You really can't blame the filmmakers or the cast but what can you do with such a short time. Different characters keep coming up every few minutes and they'll make a brief appearance and then just disappear. We don't get to know that much about them and we really don't get to know why they're there to begin with or why they go away so fast. The movie features Fairbanks in a pretty good performance as he at least manages to put some fire in the character and make you feel like you're watching something real. Carroll doesn't have the same luck nor does Guy Kibbee in his supporting role. The sets aren't at all believable and not for a second did I ever believe I was in Russia or anything where a revolution was really going on.

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).

"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).