A Month of Pre-Code Hollywood

Posted 5 May 2008 in Pre-Codes

Another new feature. Because, when getting back into the swing of things after a long break from writing anything at all, it’s always a good idea to take on more than one has ever successfully juggled before.

Anyway, Pre-Code Hollywood! That glorious second coming of the studio system, the brief but bountiful period between the rise of talkies and the crackdown on “morality” that came with the enforcement of the Hays Code in July 1934. For a few years, gangsters got away with murder, husbands and wives slept in the same bed when times were good and cheated wildly when times were bad, and once in a while gay and interracial relationships were considered openly. It was a great time for women in Hollywood, both for actresses who made up a far greater proportion of the star pool and more often than not commanded top billing, and for the characters they played. Real women with real problems were given sympathetic treatment, the same issues that would be ignored, denied or deeply coded just a few years later: premarital sex, abortion, child abandonment, prostitution, the plight of the working girl, on and on. Characters were not so easily identified as bad and good, and ultimately punished or rewarded accordingly.

It was a time of acclimation to new technology: sure the rise of sound seems to be responsible for quelling the formal experimentation that had barely begun in the realm of silent cinema; many directors favored a plant-and-shoot method and theatrical blocking. But plenty of talented guys — and one lone woman — did interesting work with what they were given: William Wellman, Frank Capra, Rouben Mamoulian, Clarence Brown, Dorothy Arzner to name a few. And while many plots were hackneyed and pictures were churned out as if on a factory line, this was also a great period for screenwriters, with many scripts as bright and fast-paced as any screwball comedy to follow and twice as blunt.

Over the course of the next month, I’m going to try to make as large a dent in the following list as I can. I encourage you to recommend your favorites, and offer any pre-Code points of interest you’d like to share, here or as we go along!

Applause 1929, Mamoulian
Bed of Roses 1933, La Cava
The Bitter Tea of General Yen 1933, Stanwyck/Capra
Bombshell 1933, Fleming
Born to Be Bad 1933, Grant/Sherman
The Cabin in the Cotton 1932, Davis/Curtiz
Dance, Fools, Dance 1931, Crawford/Beaumont
Female 1932, Chatterton
Forbidden 1932, Stanwyck/Capra
A Free Soul 1931, Shearer/Brown
Hell’s House 1932, Davis
Heroes for Sale 1933, Wellman
Hot Saturday 1931, Shearer/Brown
I’m No Angel 1932, Grant
Impatient Maiden 1932, Whale
Kept Husbands 1931, Bacon
The Love Trap 1929, Wyler
Man of the World 1931, Lombard,Powell
The Man Who Played God 1932, Davis
Mata Hari 1931, Garbo
Millie 1931, Dillon
The Miracle Woman 1931, Stanwyck/Capra
The Most Dangerous Game 1932, Wray
Night Nurse 1931, Stanwyck/Wellman
No Man of Her Own 1932, Lombard,Gable/Ruggles
Of Human Bondage 1934, Davis/Cromwell
The Office Wife 1930, Bacon
Platinum Blonde 1931, Capra
The Public Enemy 1931, Wellman
Red-Headed Woman 1932, Boyer
The River 1929, Borzage
The Saturday Night Kid 1929, Bow,Arthur
She Done Him Wrong 1933, Grant/Sherman
So Big! 1932, Stanwyck,Davis/Wellman
The Song of Songs 1933, Mamoulian/Dietrich
The Story of Temple Drake 1933, Hopkins
Street Angel 1929, Borzage
This is the Night 1932, Grant
Three on a Match 1932, Davis
The Unholy Three 1930, Conway
Waterloo Bridge 1932, Davis/Whale
The Wild Party 1929, Arzner
The Woman Accused 1933, Grant

2 Comments »

I noticed the Pre-Codes in your Netflix queue and decided I might join you with a few of them–right now, Applause and Dancing Lady, which I’ve been meaning to watch for sometime now.

As for the Pre-Codes themselves, I am not so hot on them, although they can be endlessly fascinating. That bluntness you speak of isn’t always a good thing–sometimes being blunt is the perfect way for a film to reveal its shallowness or immaturity. Also, lots of this bluntness was used for the tragic, and I’m sure you’ve noticed that even a lot of comedies from the period take a traditionally tragic art (how could you ignore the tacked-on “comedy” ending of Our Blushing Brides? the tragedy is overwhelming there). Not that tragedy is worthless, but I think you can guess my stance on it; I am really not fond of that over-characterization of emotion. Too serious.

From what I’ve seen on your To See list, Waterloo Bridge is my favorite. I think you’d like it too.

Keep me updated on the Pre Codes you are about to watch and I will try to keep up with you. Lots of interesting things to be mined from them.

Comment by Mango — 5 May 2008 @ 5 May 2008
I agree with you totally on the bluntness and lack of sophistication; in fact from everything I’ve seen it’s hard to take any one of them very seriously (in the sort of ’skewed’ way we might take, say Sullivan’s or Awful Truth ’seriously’) except on a sort of lazy-cultural-historian level, which is where my interest lies. As cinema or performance or literature they’re mostly rudimentary and crude, but the ideas are all there, and then — how much early Wellman have you seen? So Big! was more or less so lame but he did some wack stuff in it. See it for Barbara for sure.

Comment by Lauren — 5 May 2008 @ 5 May 2008

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A Month of Pre-Code Hollywood

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