Heroes for Sale (film)

Heroes for Sale 1933 is an American Depressionera PreCode film directed by William Wellman, starring Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, and Loretta Young, and released by Warner Bros. and First National Pictures. Original 76 minute considered lost, current 71 minutes from Turner Entertainment print.

He captures a German but is apparently killed in fact, he has only been wounded, and the Germans take him to their hospital to recover. His friend Roger Winston returns to the safety of American lines with the captured German soldier and is rewarded with a medal for it his feeble efforts to refuse credit are dismissed as modesty, and he comes home a decorated hero. During Toms captivity, German doctors treat his pain with morphine and he becomes addicted to the drug. After Tom returns from the war, Roger offers him a job at his fathers bank out of shame.But Toms addiction costs him his job. Exposed as an addict, confined and cured in an asylum, he comes out in 1922, unemployed and alone his mother has died, apparently of shame and grief, while he was away. Heading to Chicago, he happens upon an apartment over a diner, run by kindhearted Pop Dennis Charlie Grapewin and his daughter Mary Aline MacMahon. Tom finds a job in a laundry, and a romance with Ruth Loring Loretta Young. Always the gogetter, Tom makes good, better than the other drivers on his route, and earns a promotion. A fierce radical inventor Robert Barrat devises a machine that will make washing and drying clothes easier, and Tom induces his fellow employees to raise the money to pay for patenting it. The laundry company adopts the machinery, but only on Toms stipulation that none of the workers at the plant lose their jobs because of it. Success and marriage are his. Then the president of the firm, the kindhearted Mr. Gibson Grant Mitchell dies. The new ownership decides to break the deal and automate the laundry, throwing most of its employees out of work, Tom included. ........

Source: Wikipedia