Fils de Russie

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).