by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Hearts in Bondage, a 1936 production that was the first film released
under the banner of Republic Studios and was, at least by their (subsequent)
standards, a prestige production: a Civil War story based on the real-life
naval battle between the Southern ship Virginia, née Merrimac and the Northern ship Monitor and overlaid with a lot of Romeo and
Juliet-type romantic intrigue in which people
on different sides in the war fall in love with each other and then have their
romantic loyalties strained by their political and military ones. The most
intriguing credit on Hearts in Bondage is the director, Lew Ayres, whose only fiction-film directorial effort
this was (in 1955 and 1976 he did two documentaries, Altars of the
East and Altars of the World, respectively — though given the similar titles the
later one could just have been an expansion of the first), and who according to
the American Film Institute Catalog
was first approached by Republic as an actor and who said he’d agree to appear
in two films for them if he’d be allowed to direct one. The film begins in a
meeting of the U.S. Navy Department, headed by Secretary of the Navy Sumner Welles
(Irving Pichel, wearing one of the most ridiculously fake-looking false beards
in movie history). The time is early 1861, after South Carolina and six other
states have already seceded and Fort Sumter has been fired on but Virginia
still hasn’t voted on whether to remain in the Union or join the Confederacy.
(This part is based on actual history; a lot of Americans who consider
themselves “up” on Civil War trivia don’t know that General Robert E. Lee was
offered supreme command of the armed forces by both sides, and like some of the characters in this movie he
chose to fight for the South because he felt loyalty to his home state trumped
loyalty to the U.S.)
Two members of the Naval Cabinet, Captain Buchanan (Henry
B. Walthall, the leading man in D. W. Griffith’s Civil War epic The
Birth of a Nation) and Commodore Jordan
(George Irving), are both Virginians, so Welles confronts them and demands to
know which side they’ll fight on if Virginia secedes. Buchanan says he’ll fight
with the Confederacy out of loyalty to his state, while Jordan says he will
remain loyal to the Union and remain in the U.S. Navy. The war splits the
obligatory young lovers; Raymond Jordan (David Manners), who resigns his own
U.S. Navy commission to follow girlfriend Julie Buchanan (Charlotte Henry) to
Virginia and fight with the Confederate Navy, but Raymond’s sister Constance (Mae Clarke) remains loyal to the
U.S., her dad and her boyfriend, Lieutenant Kenneth Reynolds (James Dunn,
top-billed). Reynolds is assigned to take command of the U.S.S. Merrimac at Gosport Naval Yard in Norfolk, Virginia, but when
he arrives Gosport is under attack by three Confederate regiments. Realizing
there is no hope of actually defending the place, the commanding officer at
Gosport, Captain Gilman (Oscar Apfel), orders the entire yard destroyed,
including blowing up the ammo supplies, breaking down the cannons and burning
the ships. Reynolds disobeys the order to burn the Merrimac, instead trying to sail it out to sea and save it
for the Union cause, but Gilman’s other men set it on fire anyway, it doesn’t
go anywhere and the Confederates, once they take over the yard, are able to
raise it and rebuilt it with iron armor as the C.S.S. Virginia. For his disobedience Reynolds is given a
dishonorable discharge from the Navy and is spared the death penalty only
because at the time the U.S. and Virginia were still officially at peace with
each other. He returns to New York and his uncle, John Ericsson (a rather schticky performance by Fritz Leiber), who actually did
exist, to help Ericsson work out a revolutionary new design for a Union
ironclad that can stop the Merrimac.
The ship is called the Monitor,
and like the real-life version thereof it’s a peculiar-looking craft one
character describes as looking like “a cheese box on a raft.” The idea is that
the Monitor will ride low in the
water, and the cheese box is actually a revolving turret containing the ship’s
guns, so instead of having to maneuver the whole ship to face an enemy in order
to fire on her, the turret can simply be rotated so the guns will point at the
target wherever the ship is. Needless to say, there’s a lot of derisive chatter
about whether the Monitor will
prove seaworthy (and, as Charles pointed out, much of that was accurate; quite
a few of the later Monitor-type
vessels did sink, and shortly
after the Civil War the U.S. Navy stopped commissioning them, though the one
technical innovation of the Monitor
that did survive and become
standard on warships was the revolving turret), and there’s a race against time
to see if the Monitor can be made
ready to sail before the Virginia, née Merrimac, chews up the entire rest of the Union Navy with its
iron armor (which renders it impervious to gunfire from the standard ship’s
cannons of the time) and its underwater spike for ramming enemy vessels. The Monitor and the Virginia (which is shown here as riding considerably lower in
the water than the contemporary paintings and drawings of the real one, making
it look like an odd cross between a submarine — another bit of advanced naval
technology the South tried during the Civil War — and a sea monster) meet in
their historic naval engagement off Hampton Roads, Virginia on March 9, 1862,
and while most historians consider the real battle to have been basically a
draw (neither ironclad was able to damage the other significantly), the one in
the movie is a decisive Northern victory, sealed when the Monitor is able to fire a shell into the Merrimac and kill Raymond Jordan. Kenneth Reynolds, who’s been allowed on board
the Monitor even though he was
dishonorably discharged because the Monitor’s captain demanded, and got, total control over who
would sail as a condition for taking the dangerous job, witnesses the death,
and naturally this upsets him and upsets his girlfriend — Raymond’s sister
Catherine — even more. Reynolds is offered reinstatement in the Navy but turns
it down, and President Abraham Lincoln (Frank McGlynn, Sr., with a false beard
almost as blatantly fake as Pichel’s and a voice that sounds like McGlynn
believed that by talking as if he had rocks in his mouth he could emulate
Lincoln’s much-described high, rather squeaky voice) encourages him and
Catherine to stay together and go out West, where they can contribute to the
war effort without him actually having to fight.
Hearts in Bondage was originally released at 72 minutes but the only
version we had access to was a 52-minute version cut down, like most of
Republic’s films (except for the ones that were 52 minutes or less to begin
with, which was quite a lot of their output — especially the cheap Westerns
that kept them in business), to sell to TV in the early 1950’s. Still, despite
some of the rather stilted writing and the arbitrariness with which the writing
committee (Wallace MacDonald, original story; Karl Brown, adaptation; Bernard
Schubert and Olive Cooper) juxtaposed the romantic intrigues and the Civil War
story to separate the two couples throughout most of the film, Hearts
in Bondage is a surprisingly compelling
movie and the cut version is good enough to make me want to see the full-length
cut … if it exists; imdb.com claims that their parent company, Amazon.com, has
the 72-minute version available for sale as a DVD or paid download but it was
impossible to tell from the Amazon Web page for the film whether any of the
editions listed are of the complete version. James Dunn and Mae Clarke were
probably the best actors Republic could get for the leads — though it probably
would have been a better movie if, in addition to directing, Lew Ayres had
played Dunn’s role himself — and this is one movie from the classic era in
which the leads are actually better cast than some of the rather dorky
character players in the supporting parts. The naval scenes, though clearly
done with models (ironically the model of the Monitor Ericsson shows to the Naval Cabinet is probably the
same one that later appears as the full-sized Monitor during the battle sequence), are quite convincing,
and if nothing else the film does a good job of showing just how old-fashioned
wooden sailing ships were and how helpless they were against steam-powered
ironclads. (There were a few
attempts to build wooden warships powered by steam — including Robert Fulton’s Demologos, a catamaran that was to be propelled by a single
paddle wheel in between its two hulls, which never got beyond the prototype
stage — but none of them went very far, and until the screw propeller replaced
the paddle wheel steamships weren’t maneuverable enough to handle the open
ocean.)
Charles faulted this film for what he thought was an overly even-handed
attitude towards the Civil War — though the title is Hearts in
Bondage the B-word refers specifically to
romantic bondage and not that other kind the Civil War was really about; there were a few Black people in the cast
(including Etta McDaniel, Hattie McDaniel’s near-lookalike sister) in the
expected servile roles, but slavery wasn’t mentioned and so if you knew nothing
about the Civil War you’d have no idea what it was the secessionist states
wanted to leave the U.S. about —
though given the ardently pro-Southern bias of The Birth of a Nation,
Gone With the Wind and virtually all the other Civil War movies made during the classic era, even-handedness
is definitely a step up. I was somewhat surprised by that criticism because, remembering
who the director was and what else he was famous for besides his film career —
registering as a conscientious objector during World War II (Ayres claimed that
the experience of making the anti-war classic All Quiet on the
Western Front in 1930 had turned him
totally against war) and finally agreeing to serve in a non-combat role as a
medic (which meant he became for real what he had been playing in the Dr.
Kildare films at MGM before the war) — I
read what Charles saw as “even-handedness” as a veiled but unmistakable message
against all war. The way Hearts
in Bondage ends, with Reynolds turning down a chance to glory in the outcome of the battle and reinstate
himself in the good graces of the Navy, certainly runs against the norm of
Hollywood’s portrayal of war (then and now, and then even more than now) and in
a quirky way foreshadows Ayres’ own actions during World War II and the wrath
he got for it, not only from the people you’d expect (like Louis B. Mayer, who
fired him immediately) but from some you might not (like Erich Maria Remarque,
who had written All Quiet on the Western Front and who publicly said that he would have been willing to fight in World War II if
he were still of military age and thought the war was justified and Ayres was
wrong to opt out of it). Granted that it’s difficult to read directorial intent
and auteur-ism into a project
like this with a whole lot of producers, production supervisors and whatnot
between the director and what ultimately reached the screen — and four credited
writers, none of whom were the
director, still it’s hard for me to view Hearts in Bondage without taking into account Ayres’ subsequent career
and his well-known anti-war views, and thinking that at least some of the film’s cynicism towards war came from the
mind and heart of its director.
