You and the others think me bloodless—nerveless—don't you?

Last night I discovered a Tumblr dedicated entirely to Leslie Howard. To the immense surprise of everyone reading this journal, I'm sure, it made me very happy. (Seriously, I have no idea what's going on at that trial, but those reaction shots are genius.) I'd been looking for pictures of him young and I found them. The upper left-hand one has to be Howard in 1914 or '15; he's in uniform and he was out of the Army with shell-shock by 1916. That is a twenty-one-year-old who did not look old enough to buy his own drinks. Here he is a quarter-century later, directing Pimpernel Smith (1941). And looking at these gifs from Roy Del Ruth's Captured! (1933), I was reminded that it is yet another movie I never wrote about—although at least it was only in 2011 that I caught it on TCM. Other movies have been languishing longer. The Petrified Forest (1936), I know you're looking at me.

I said once to ashlyme that I really thought Leslie Howard has been unfairly remembered for the most conventional of his movies (Gone with the Wind (1939), also easily the least interesting of his roles) when in reality he starred in some really weird stuff. So tonight's hit of vintage WTF is Captured!, a pre-Code war movie that's such a strange mix of melodrama and grit, it's not a bad shorthand for World War I.

We start right in with both: in a P.O.W. camp behind German lines where the new intake—British, American, Russian, French—is being ordered in the night rain, the mud, and the glaring electric lights to empty their pockets, strip, and get deloused. It's efficient, unglamorous, disorienting, depersonalizing. (A strategically diagonal rough-hewn beam obscures most of the relevant bits in the long shot of the shower, but it's still a lot of naked guys for a Warner Bros. picture. If you ever wanted to know what Leslie Howard looked like in the shower, this is the film for you. He's kind of weedy. Watch me mind.) When a battle-fatigued young lieutenant snatches a gun from one of the guards, his suicide triggers a full-scale riot that leaves a shocking number of characters to whom we've just been introduced dead and the rest confined to a medievally filthy cellar, not even allowed aboveground for exercise. After three weeks at each other's throats, Howard's Captain Allison is barely able to hold his men together. Then again, he's not doing such a great job with himself.

For an actor so often described as dreamy or sensitive, and so willing to look like a fool or an eccentric for the sake of the script, I find it curious that I have never especially associated Howard with vulnerability in the same way I do Peter Cushing, or Alex Jennings, or lately Peter Capaldi; it's not that his characters are stuffed shirts or cast-iron—it's often the point that they're not—but they're coping more often than not. They have defenses. Henry Higgins has his armor of prickly arrogance, Percy Blakeney his fashionable drawling mask; Alan Squier is a self-deconstructing cynic and Atterbury Dodd is an enormous nerd and doing just fine that way. Fred Allison has a five o'clock shadow, a dirty uniform with the jacket buttoned wrong, and the drawn look of someone who can't remember when last he slept and probably only remembers the last time he ate because it made him feel sick. His body language always gives him away, distracted half-finished gestures and a kind of nervous apathy, as if he's trying very hard not to care about anything and it only works when he doesn't want it to. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. ruffles his hair with affectionate exasperation and cuffs him lightly—the same old Fred, all nerves and down on himself. He's heartsick for his wife, clinging to the one letter she sent him before he was shot down, fingering over and over his memories of her face, her voice, the way she felt in his arms for such a little while, tormented by her silence ever since. When he bargains for the men to be allowed to work with their hands for the sake of their health, the project he chooses for himself is a little model of the house he bought her the day before he was called up. "I met her, married her, and left for the front—all in six days." And she doesn't write to him anymore, because she's in love with Fairbanks' Digby, and she writes to him as often as the Red Cross will deliver her letters.

(We meet her, briefly. She's not a monster. She's not even unsympathetically portrayed. She married a man who loved her desperately in the heady, precipitous whirl of wartime and was regretting it even before Jack Digby came on the scene. She doesn't know how to tell Allison. She doesn't know whether she should. It might be needlessly cruel: what if he comes back and everything changes between them? What if he dies before the war ends and the last thing he knew on earth was despair? What if he doesn't die and nothing changes and she's trapped?)

I have less to say about Fairbanks because Digby is a simpler role—Allison's foil, dashing and youthful, not a fatalist—but it is a nice touch that he is not a cavalier cheater. He's genuinely concerned about his old friend and commanding officer and it twists him in knots to hear Allison plaintively ask him to describe again the night he took Monica to the theater—how did she look? Was she happy? What was she wearing? He wants every detail of their time together and there's too much Digby cannot tell him. Guilt makes him standoffish and Allison takes it as further reason to retreat. This isn't a situation that can be solved with poly, because Margaret Lindsay's Monica no longer wants her husband even in name (and I don't know if Digby wants anyone but her), but it's a believable way for friendship and love to go wrong.

And then a rape-murder—explicitly named as such, because pre-Code—throws a wrench sideways into this tense, subdued, emotional plot and it shifts abruptly from a study in the stresses of wartime to a moral dilemma with nastily immediate consequences and then again into a heroic finish. It's one of those movies that feels in retrospect as though someone shoved two or three different novellas into the same seventy minutes and didn't waste much time making sure they all fit. I like that Digby's jailbreak is prompted almost less by a sense of honor or the obligations of a prisoner of war than by the intolerable guilt of being around trusting, depressed Allison, but I really have my doubts about the ability of your average P.O.W. to steal a plane from a nearby airfield and fly straight back to England. The ending sets itself up for brutal tragedy and then swerves into adventure mode at the last minute. But even when it's barreling through genres like it's flipping pages in a magazine, the film is full of casually handled, thought-provoking moments—they are its most redeeming feature after Howard's performance. After the initial, brutal treatment of the surviving prisoners, they are granted better conditions when Allison gives his parole to Paul Lukas' Oberst Karl Ehrlich, the new commandant whose Oxford-educated courtesy is a foretaste of La grande illusion (1937) or The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). He treats the prisoners humanely, knows an honorable enemy when he sees one, and even speaks fondly of England; it takes Allison a moment, but he recognizes the older man's name from a register of fencing champions at his college. They both went to Balliol. (OH FOR GOD'S SAKE LESLIE HOWARD JUST PLAY PETER WIMSEY ALREADY.) All the German dialogue is in German, untranslated, and mostly delivered by native speakers. When the two sides meet to hand over a prisoner in no-man's-land, the script is fully aware of the nonsensical formalities of war, politely ceasing to blow one another's brains out for five minutes so that a man can be executed by the book instead of splattered at random across the wires. (A British soldier and his German counterpart share a cigarette, mutually incomprehensible except by gestures and the standing agreement to see one another at Christmas: "Bit of a conference out there, what?"–"Well, you know how it is.") Close shots of battle are intercut with eerily plausible footage of the front lines. German soldiers on watch read the papers for the political cartoons. And just to recap, naked Leslie Howard and nuanced characterization of an unfaithful woman, because pre-Code. I remain skeptical about the ending, but I remain skeptical about a lot of things.

I don't believe this movie is available on the internet. It wasn't on DVD the last time I looked. My best hope for seeing it again is the rather wistful theory that the HFA will do another pre-Code festival and include it because it has name value coming out its ears. Mostly I recommend it for Leslie Howard and the irregular realism of the wartime setting, which is alternately sentimental and two-fisted and way the hell nastier than I expected to see onscreen for another forty years. And I remember liking some of the cinematography, especially in the early scenes. There might have been a better story out of the same premise; Captured! is the one we got. I'm glad of it.