Flesh

Polokai, a gifted German wrestler, falls in love with Laura, who has just come out of prison. She persuades him to emigrate to America and there gets him mixed up with crooked promoters. Polokai trusts his strength but cannot see the calculations around him; his good faith is the most fragile place in the story. The film tells how an immigrant is used in a new country inside a sporting frame. The account does not draw Laura simply as someone laying a trap and shows how caught she is herself. It belongs to pre code American cinema of 1932 and carries that period’s plain speaking. The wrestling scenes take as their subject the difference between a show and a fight. Wallace Beery and Karen Morley appear in John Ford’s ninety six minute American film, completed in 1932.