Heroes for Sale is a 1933 American pre-Code drama film directed by William Wellman, starring Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, and Loretta Young, and released by Warner Bros. and First National Pictures.

During World War I, Thomas Holmes (Richard Barthelmess) and his friend Roger Winston (Gordon Westcott) are on a mission to gather intelligence by capturing a German soldier.

Roger returns to the safety of American lines with the captured German soldier and is rewarded with a medal for it; his feeble efforts to refuse credit are dismissed as modesty, and he comes home a decorated hero.

Heading to Chicago, he happens upon an apartment over a diner, run by kindhearted Pop Dennis (Charlie Grapewin) and his daughter Mary (Aline MacMahon).

A fierce radical inventor (Robert Barrat) devises a machine that will make washing and drying clothes easier, and Tom induces his fellow employees to raise the money to pay for patenting it.

Tom is put away for five years in prison; in the meantime, the invention he helped finance continues to sell nationwide, throwing countless other people out of work.

Instead, it goes to feed the endless line of hungry and jobless that come seeking a handout at the diner that Pop Dennis and Mary run.

And back at the diner, the line of needy continues to stretch down the street, all of them being fed by the funds he provided, and on the wall a plaque honors him for his gift.

Where hints are given from the start that Mary is also in love with Tom, and where, in the customary movie formula from later in the 1930s, audiences might expect that they would end up together at the film's close, no such reuniting happens.

[1] Ben Sachs from Chicago Reader in a positive review stated "Wellman crams an astonishing amount of narrative incident into the short running time, with more developments every ten minutes than most contemporary Hollywood productions cover in their entirety.