MGM’s MEN MUST FIGHT is one of the great curiosities in the Turner Classic Movies library.  Like most war movies made in the early 1930s, it is fervently anti-war, but this one has the twist of being set in 1940, predicting World War II.  In just 72 minutes, it manages to tackle an astonishing amount of content:  the knee-jerk flag-waving that arises in wartime; the home-grown violence spawned from ”patriotism”; the difficulty in standing firm against a war’s mounting popularity; and an acknowledgement that it’s the young who must die in war.  But those are the most conventional elements of this unknown movie.  Though it is too short to develop any of its themes, MEN MUST FIGHT even gives the other side its due, theoretically addressing how the peace movement made us vulnerable as we lagged behind in the arms race, with thousands of Americans dead as a result.  Mostly, the movie is about women’s powerlessness in stopping men from eventually succumbing to calls of honor and duty and their fears of being tagged as cowards.  And so, men must fight.  The movie is appropriately hopeless.  

In true pre-Code fashion, MEN MUST FIGHT begins with an unmarried flier and a nurse getting dressed after a sexual encounter.  The setting is WWI France; the flier is Robert Young; the nurse is Diana Wynyard.  After Young’s death in the air, Wynyard, a firm pacifist, marries loyal friend Lewis Stone (dull as ever).  He accepts her pregnancy and agrees to raise the child as his own.  In 1940, Stone is America’s peace-promoting Secretary of State, while Wynyard’s grown-up love child, Phillips Holmes, is another idealistic pacifist.  Stone and Wynyard are happily married until an assassination brings a new threat of war.  Though sympathetic to his wife’s views, Stone is soon in favor of the war (with “Eurasia”), while Wynyard staunchly opposes it.  Imagine a movie in which the wife of the Secretary of State leads an anti-war rally in Manhattan, making appeals to the mothers of the world to stop the killing of the “other sons of other mothers.”  Young Holmes eventually enlists and the picture ends with him flying over Manhattan and headed for our enemies.  The most jaw-dropping sequence is the bombing of New York, with the special-effects team destroying the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building!  The movie shows a future of television and picture phones, and features much talk about chemical warfare as the way of the future.

MEN MUST FIGHT is no undiscovered classic, barely even a good movie, but it is consistently fascinating.  British Diana Wynyard, a bit too cross-eyed for major stardom, had her big year in 1933, also starring in the Best Picture Oscar winner CAVALCADE, one of the worst of all victors in that category.  Wynyard was up for Best Actress for CAVALCADE, as was her MEN MUST FIGHT co-player May Robson (for LADY FOR A DAY).  Robson is the comic relief here, as Holmes’ feisty grandmother.  She believes the world ought to be run by women.  Both Wynyard and Robson lost the Oscar to Katharine Hepburn (MORNING GLORY).

A final chilling note.  Phillips Holmes ended up dying in a plane crash in World War II at age 35, having enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force.  What a stinging coda to the film’s timeless message.