Pre-Code
Encyclopedia
Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the era in the American film industry
between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.
As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, references to homosexuality, miscegenation
, illegal drug use, infidelity, abortion and intense violence. Strong women dominated films such as Female
, Baby Face
, and Red-Headed Woman
. Gangsters in films like The Public Enemy
, Little Caesar
, and Scarface
were more heroic than evil. Along with featuring stronger female characters, films examined female subject matters that were not revisited until much later in Hollywood history. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions, and drug use was a topic of several films.
The Pre-Code era featured shorter films, usually running little more than an hour. Many of Hollywood's biggest stars such as Clark Gable
, Barbara Stanwyck
, and Edward G. Robinson
got their start in the era. But it also contained stars like Ruth Chatterton
, Lyle Talbot
, and Warren William
(the so-called "king of Pre-Code") who excelled during this period but are mostly forgotten today.
Beginning in late 1933, and escalating throughout the first half of 1934, American Catholics launched a campaign against what they deemed the immorality of American cinema. This, plus a potential government takeover of film censorship and social research seeming to indicate that so-called "bad" movies could promote bad behavior, was enough pressure to force the studios to capitulate to greater oversight.
In 1922, after some risqué films and a series of off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars, the studios enlisted beacon of rectitude and Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays
to rehabilitate Hollywood's image. Hays, who was later nicknamed the motion picture "Czar", quickly tarnished his sterling image by lying before the U.S. Senate, although the American people seemed unconcerned that Hays was less noble than imagined. Hollywood in the 1920s was expected to be somewhat corrupt, and many felt the movie industry had always been morally questionable. Hays was paid the then-lavish sum of $100,000 a year. Hays, Postmaster General
under Warren G. Harding
and former head of the Republican National Committee
, served for 25 years as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
(MPPDA), where he "defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing nostrum s, and negotiated treaties to cease hostilities." The move mimicked the decision Major League Baseball
had made in hiring judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis
as League Commissioner the previous year to quell questions about the integrity of baseball in wake of the 1919 World Series gambling scandal
; The New York Times
even called Hays the "screen Landis". Hays introduced a set of recommendations dubbed "The Formula" in 1924, which the studios were advised to heed, and asked filmmakers to describe to his office the plots of pictures they were planning to make. The Supreme Court had already decided unanimously in 1915 in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio
that free speech did not extend to motion pictures, and while there had been token attempts to clean up the movies before, such as when the studios formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry
(NAMPI) in 1916, little had come of the efforts.
, a prominent trade paper, and Jesuit
priest Father Daniel A. Lord
, created a code of standards (which Hays liked immensely), and submitted it to the studios. Lord's concerns centered on the effects sound film had on children, whom he considered especially susceptible to their allure. Several studio heads including Irving Thalberg
of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
(MGM), met with Lord and Quigley in February 1930. After some revisions, they agreed to the stipulations of the Code. One of the main motivating factors in adopting the Code was to avoid direct government intervention. It was the responsibility of the SRC headed by Colonel Jason S. Joy to supervise film production and advise the studios when changes or cuts were required.
The Code was divided into two parts. The first was a set of "general principles" which mostly concerned morality. The second was a set of "particular applications" which was an exacting list of items that could not be depicted. Some restrictions, such as the ban on homosexuality or the use of specific curse words, were never directly mentioned but were assumed to be understood without clear demarcation. Miscegenation, better known as the mixing of the races, was forbidden. It also stated that the notion of an "adults-only policy" would be a dubious, ineffective strategy that would be difficult to enforce. However, it did allow that, "maturer minds may easily understand and accept without harm subject matter in plots which does younger people positive harm." If children were supervised and the events implied elliptically, the code allowed "the possibility of a cinematically inspired thought crime."
The Code sought not only to determine what could be portrayed on screen, but also to promote traditional values. Sexual relations outside of marriage could not be portrayed as attractive and beautiful, presented in a way that might arouse passion, nor be made to seem right and permissible. All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience. Authority figures had to be treated respectfully, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear they were the exception to the rule. The entire document contained Catholic undertones and stated that art must be handled carefully because it could be "morally evil in its effects" and because its "deep moral significance" was unquestionable. The Catholic influence on the Code was initially decided to be kept secret. A recurring theme was "That throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong and good is right." The Code also contained an addendum commonly referred to as the Advertising Code, which regulated advertising copy and imagery.
published the entire contents of the Code and predicted that state film censorship boards would soon become obsolete. However, the men obligated to enforce the code, Jason Joy, who was the head of the Committee until 1932, and his successor, Dr. James Wingate, were generally ineffective. The very first film the office reviewed, The Blue Angel, which was passed by Joy without revision, was considered indecent by a California censor. Although there were several instances where Joy negotiated cuts from films, and there were indeed definite — albeit loose — constraints, a significant amount of lurid material made it to the screen. Joy had to review 500 films a year using a small staff and little power. The Hays office did not have the authority to order studios to remove material from a film in 1930, but instead worked by reasoning and sometimes pleading with them. Complicating matters, the appeals process ultimately put the responsibility for making the final decision in the hands of the studios themselves.
One factor in ignoring the Code was the fact that some found such censorship prudish, due to the libertine social attitudes of the 1920s and early 1930s. This was a period in which the Victorian era
was sometimes ridiculed as being naïve and backward. When the Code was announced The Nation
, a liberal periodical, attacked it. The publication stated that if crime were never presented in a sympathetic light, then, taken literally, "law" and "justice" would become the same. Therefore, events such as the Boston Tea Party
could not be portrayed. And if clergy were always to be presented positively, then hypocrisy could not be examined either. The Outlook
agreed and unlike Variety, predicted from the beginning that the Code would be difficult to enforce. Additionally, the Great Depression
of the 1930s led many studios to seek income by any way possible. As films containing racy and violent content resulted in high ticket sales, it seemed reasonable to continue producing such films. Soon, the flouting of the code became an open secret. In 1931, the Hollywood Reporter mocked the code, and Variety followed suit in 1933. In the same year as theVariety article, a noted screenwriter stated that "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's just a memory."
responded by collaborating on a list they called the "Don’ts and Be Carefuls", based on items that were challenged by local censor boards, and which consisted of eleven subjects best avoided, and twenty-six to be handled very carefully. The Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) approved the list, and Hays created the SRC to oversee its implementation. But there was still no way to enforce these tenets. The controversy surrounding film standards came to a head in 1929.
Cecil B. DeMille
more than any other director, was responsible for the increasing discussion of sex in cinema in the 1920s. Starting with 1919's Male and Female
he made a series of films that examined sex and were highly successful. Films featuring Hollywood's original "It girl
" Clara Bow
such as The Saturday Night Kid
(released four days before the October 29, 1929, market crash) highlighted Bow's sexual attractiveness. 1920s stars such as Bow, Gloria Swanson
, and Norma Talmadge
freely displayed their sexuality in a straightforward fashion.
and traditional concepts of personal achievement, self-reliance, and the overcoming of odds lost great currency. Due to the constant empty economic reassurances from politicians in the early years of the depression, the American public developed an increasingly jaded attitude. The cynicism, challenging of traditional beliefs, and political controversy of Hollywood films during this period mirrored the attitudes of many of its patrons. Also gone was the carefree and adventurous lifestyle of the 1920s. "After two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the war" F. Scott Fitzgerald
commented in 1931.
In the sense noted by Fitzgerald, understanding the moral climate of the early 1930s is complex. Although films experienced an unprecedented level of freedom, and dared to portray things that would be kept hidden for decades later, many in America looked upon the stock market crash as a product of the excesses of the previous decade. In looking back upon the 1920s, events were increasingly often seen as occurring in prelude to the market crash. In 1931's Dance, Fools, Dance
, lurid party scenes featuring 1920s flappers are played to excess and looked at in amazement and a sense of moral disgust. Joan Crawford
ultimately reforms her ways and is saved; less fortunate is William Bakewell
who continues on his careless path, which ultimately leads to his self-destruction.
For the 1930 film Rain or Shine
, Milton Ager
and Jack Yellin composed the song "Happy Days Are Here Again
", a premature celebration if one ever existed. The song was repeated sarcastically by characters in several films such as 1932's Under 18
and 1933's 20,000 Years in Sing Sing
. Less comical was the picture of the United States' future presented in Heroes for Sale
where a hobo looks into a depressing night and proclaims, "It's the end of America." Heroes for Sale was directed by prolific Pre-Code director William Wellman and featured silent film star Richard Barthelmess
as a World War I veteran cast onto the streets with a morphine addiction from his Hospital stay. Harsher still was Wild Boys of the Road, in which Frankie Darrow led a group of dispossessed juvenile drifters who frequently brawl with the police. Gangs like Darrow's were common; around 250,000 youths traveled the country hopping trains or hitchhiking in search of better economic circumstances in the early 1930s.
Complicating matters for the studios, the advent of sound film
in 1927 required an immense expenditure in high-priced new equipment such as sound stages, recording booths, cameras, movie-theater sound systems, etc., not to mention the new-found artistic complications of producing in a radically altered medium. The studios were in a difficult financial position even before the market crash as the sound conversion process and some risky purchases of theater chains had pushed their finances near the breaking point. These economic circumstances led to a loss of nearly half of the weekly attendance numbers and closure of almost a third of the country's theaters in the first few years of the depression. Even so, 60 million Americans were still going to the theaters every week.
Apart from the economic realities of the conversion to sound, were the artistic considerations. Early sound films were often noted for being too verbose. In 1930, Carl Laemmle
criticized the wall-to-wall banter of sound pictures, and director Ernst Lubitsch
wondered what the camera was intended for if the characters were going to narrate all the onscreen action. The film industry also withstood competition from the home radio, and often characters in films went to great lengths to belittle the medium. The film industry was not above using the new medium to broadcast commercials for its projects however, and occasionally turned radio stars into short feature performers to take advantage of their built-in following.
Seething beneath the surface of American life in the Depression was the fear of the angry mob, portrayed in panicked hysteria in films such as Gabriel Over the White House
, The Mayor of Hell
, and American Madness
. Massive wide shots of angry hordes, comprising sometimes hundreds of men, rush into action in terrifyingly efficient uniformity. Groups of agitated men either standing in breadlines, loitering in hobo camps, or marching the streets in protest became a prevalent sight during the Great Depression. The Bonus Army
protests of World War I veterans on the US Capital, which Hoover turned into a violent fiasco, prompted many of the Hollywood depictions. Although social issues were examined more directly in the Pre-Code era, Hollywood still largely ignored the Great Depression, as many films sought to ameliorate patrons, rather than incite them.
Will Hays remarked in 1932:
" in the Pre-Code era. However the MPPDA took the opposite stance when questioned about certain so-called "message" films before Congress in 1932, claiming the audiences' desire for realism led to certain unsavory social, legal, and political issues being portrayed in film.
The length of Pre-Code films was usually little over an hour. But short running time often required tighter material, and did not affect the impact of message films. Take for instance 1933's Employees' Entrance
, of which Jonathan Rosenbaum
writes: "As an attack on ruthless capitalism, it goes a lot further than more recent efforts such as Wall Street, and it's amazing how much plot and character are gracefully shoehorned into 75 minutes." The film featured Pre-Code megastar Warren William (later dubbed "the king of Pre-Code"), "at his magnetic worst" playing a vile department store manager who threatens to fire Loretta Young
's character unless she sleeps with him, and who also attempts to ruin her husband.
Films that in any way stated a position about a social issue were usually labeled either "propaganda films" or "preachment yarns". In contrast to Goldwyn and MGM's definitively Republican stance on social issue films, Warner Brothers, led by New Deal cheerleader Jack L. Warner, was the most prominent maker of these types of pictures and preferred they be called "Americanism stories". Pre-Code historian Thomas Doherty felt that two recurring elements marked the so-called preachment yarns. "The first is the exculpatory preface; the second is the Jazz Age prelude." The preface was essentially a softened version of a disclaimer that intended to calm any in the audience who disagreed with the film's message. The Jazz Age prelude was almost singularly used to cast shame on the boisterous behavior of the 1920s.
Cabin in the Cotton, released in 1932, is a message film about the evils of capitalism. The film takes place in an unspecified southern state where workers are given barely enough to survive and taken advantage of in the form of exorbitant interest rates and high prices by unconscionable landowners. The film is decidedly anti-capitalist, however its preface claims otherwise:
In the end however, the planters admit their wrongdoing and agree to a more equitable distribution of Capital. The avaricious businessman remained a recurring character in Pre-Code cinema. In 1932's The Match King
, Warren William played an industrialist based on the Swedish entrepreneur Ivar Kreuger
, himself nicknamed "Match King", who attempts to corner the global market on match
es. William's vile character, Paul Kroll, commits every crime from robbery, fraud, and murder on his way from a janitorial position to captain of industry. When the market collapses in the 1929 crash, Williams is ruined and commits suicide to avoid imprisonment. Williams again played an unscrupulous businessman in 1932's Skyscraper Souls
, this time portraying David Dwight, a wealthy banker. Dwight owns a building named after himself that is larger than the Empire State Building
, and fools everyone he knows into poverty so that he may accumulate their wealth. His moral character is equally revolting and he is shot by his secretary, whom he has betrayed, at the end of the film.
America's distrust of lawyers during the depression was also a frequent topic of dissection in social problem films such Lawyer Man
, State's Attorney
, and The Mouthpiece
. In films like Paid
, innocent characters are turned into criminals by the legal system. The life of Joan Crawford
's character is ruined and her romantic interest is executed so that she may live free—even though she is innocent of the crime of which the district attorney wants to convict her. Even religious hypocrisy was not spared in films such as The Miracle Woman
starring Barbara Stanwyck
and directed by Frank Capra
. Stanwyck also portrayed a noble nurse attempting to heal two sick children while surrounded by nefarious characters (including Clark Gable
as child endangering chauffeur) in Night Nurse
.
Countless films dealt with the economic realities of a country struggling to find its next meal. In Blonde Venus
, Marlene Dietrich
resorts to prostitution to feed her child, and Claudette Colbert
's character in It Happened One Night
gets her comeuppance for throwing food into the sea. Joan Blondell's character in Big City Blues
complains that as a chorus girl
, diamonds and pearls used to be common gifts, but now she is content with a corn beef sandwich. In Union Depot
, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. puts a luscious meal as the first order of business on his itinerary after coming into money.
Warren William is again enlisted, this time to get an imbecile, who is accidentally in the running for Governor, elected. Despite incessant, embarrassing mishaps by the candidate, he wins the election. Washington Merry-Go-Round portrayed the state of a political system stuck in neutral. Columbia Pictures
nearly released the film with a scene of the public execution of a politician as the climax before deciding to cut the lynching. Cecil B. DeMille
released This Day and Age
in 1933, and it stands in stark contrast to his other films of the period. Filmed shortly after DeMille had completed a five-month tour of the Soviet Union
, This Day and Age takes place in America and features several children torturing a gangster who got away with the murder of a popular local shopkeeper. The children lower the gangster into a vat of rats and when the police arrive, the cops encourage the kids to continue. In the film's ending, the children take the gangster to a local judge and force the magistrate to conduct a trial in which the outcome is never in doubt.
The need for strong leaders who could take charge and steer America out of its crisis is seen in Gabriel Over the White House
, a strange, surreal film about a benevolent dictator who takes control of the United States. Walter Huston
stars as a weak willed, ineffectual president, likely modeled after Hoover, who upon being knocked unconscious is inhabited by the archangel Gabriel
. The spirit's behavior is similar to that of Abraham Lincoln
. The president then solves the nation's unemployment crisis and executes a criminal based on Al Capone who has continually flouted the law. Dictators were not just glorified in fiction. Columbia's Mussolini Speaks
(1933) was a 76-minute paean to the Fascist
leader. NBC radio commentator Lowell Thomas
narrates the film. After showing some of the progress Italy has made during Il Duce's ten year reign, Thomas opines, "This is a time when a dictator comes in handy!" The film was viewed by over 175,000 jubilant people during its first two weeks at the cavernous Palace Theater
in New York.
The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) in 1932 quelled the public affection for dictators. As the country became increasingly enthralled with FDR, who was featured in countless newsreel
s, it exhibited less desire for alternative forms of government. Many Hollywood films reflected this new optimism. Heroes for Sale, despite being a tremendously bleak and at times anti-American film, ends on a positive note as the New Deal appears as a sign of optimism. When Wild Boys of the Road, a 1933 film directed by William Wellman the most prolific Pre-Code director, reaches its conclusion, a dispossessed juvenile delinquent is in court expecting a jail sentence. However the judge lets the boy go free, revealing to him the symbol of the New Deal behind his desk, and tells him "[t]hings are going to be better here now, not only here in New York, but all over the country." A box office casualty of this hopefulness was Gabriel over the White House, which entered production during the Hoover era malaise and sought to capitalize on it. By the time the film was released on March 31, 1933, Roosevelt's election had produced a level of hopefulness in America that rendered the film's message obsolete.
Adolf Hitler
's rise to power in Germany and his regime's anti-Semitic policies significantly affected American Pre-Code film making. Although Hitler had become unpopular in many parts of the United States, Germany was still a voluminous importer of American films, and the studios wanted to appease the German Government. The ban on Jews and negative portrayals of Germany in the Fatherland, even led to a significant reduction in work for Jews in Hollywood until after World War II. As a result, only two social problem films released by independent film companies addressed the mania in Germany during the Pre-Code era — Are We Civilized?
and Hitler's Reign of Terror
. In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz
and producer Sam Jaffe
announced they were working on a picture titled Mad Dog of Europe that was intended to be a full-scale attack on Hitler. Jaffe had quit his job at RKO Pictures
to make the film. Hays summoned the pair to his office and told them to cease production as they were causing needless headaches for the studios.
's 1912 film The Musketeers of Pig Alley
is one of the earliest American films to feature urban organized crime. Prohibition's arrival in 1920 created an environment where anyone who wanted to drink had to consort with criminals, especially in urban areas. Nonetheless, the urban crime genre was mostly ignored until 1927 when the film Underworld
, which is recognized as the first gangster movie, became a surprise hit. According to the Encyclopedia of Hollywoods entry on Underworld, "The film established the fundamental elements of the gangster movie: a hoodlum hero; ominous, night-shrouded city streets; floozies; and a blazing finale in which the cops cut down the protagonist." Gangster films such as Thunderbolt
, and Doorway to Hell were released to capitalize on Underworld's popularity, with Thunderbolt being described as "a virtual remake" of the film. Other late 1920s crime films investigated the connection between mobsters and Broadway
productions in movies such as 1928's Lights of New York
, and 1929's Tenderloin
, and Broadway
.
The Hays Office had never officially recommended banning violence in any form in the 1920s — unlike profanity, the drug trade or prostitution — but advised that it be handled carefully. New York's censor board was more thorough that of any other state, missing only around 50 of the country's 1,000 to 1,300 annual releases. In 1927–8 the violent scenes they most removed were all instances where the gun was pointed at the camera, some instances where guns were pointed "at or into the body of another character", many shots where machine guns were featured, scenes where criminals shot at law enforcement officers, some scenes involving stabbing or knife brandishing (audiences considered stabbings more disturbing than shootings), most whippings, several involving choking, torture, or electrocution, and scenes which could be considered educational in their depiction of crime methods. Sadistic violence, and reaction shots showing the faces of individuals on the receiving end of violence were considered especially sensitive areas. The Code later recommended against scenes showing "robbery", "theft", "safe-cracking", "arson", "the use of firearms", "dynamiting of trains, machines, and buildings", and "brutal killings" on the basis that they would be rejected by local censors.
and John Dillinger
. Gangsters like Capone had transformed the perception of entire towns. Capone gave Chicago its..."reputation as the locus classicus of American gangsterdom, a cityscape where bullet-proof roadsters with tommygun-toting hoodlums on running boards careened around State Street spraying fusillades of slugs into flower shop windows and mowing down the competition in blood-spattered garages." Capone appeared on the cover of Time
magazine in 1930. He was even offered seven figure sums by two major Hollywood studios to appear in a film but declined. Dillinger became a national celebrity as a bank robber who eluded arrest and escaped confinement several times. He had become the most celebrated public outlaw since Jesse James
. His father appeared in a popular series of newsreels giving police homespun advice on how to catch his son. Dillinger's popularity rose so quickly that Variety joked "if Dillinger remains at large much longer and more such interviews are obtained, there may be some petitions circulated to make him our president." Hays wrote a cablegram to all the studios in March 1934 mandating that Dillinger not be portrayed in any motion picture.
The genre entered a new level following the release of the 1931 film Little Caesar
, which featured Edward G. Robinson in a career defining performance as gangster Rico Bandello. Caesar, along with The Public Enemy
starring James Cagney
as Tom Powers and Scarface
featuring Paul Muni
as Tony Comante, were incredibly violent films that created a new type of anti-hero. Nine gangster films were released in 1930, 26 in 1931, 28 in 1932, and 15 in 1933, when the genre's popularity began to subside after the end of Prohibition. The backlash against gangster pictures was swift. In 1931, Jack L. Warner announced that his studio would stop making them, and that he had never let his 15-year-old son see them.
Generally considered the grandfather of gangster films, in Caesar Robinson as Rico and his close friend Joe Massara (played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
) move to Chicago. Joe wants to go straight and meets a woman. Rico, however, seeks a life of crime and joins the gang of Sam Vettori. He rises to the rank of boss of the crime family. After becoming concerned his friend will betray him he threatens him, at which point Joe's girlfriend goes to the police. Unable to bring himself to kill Joe and thus eliminate the witness against him, he goes into hiding. He is coaxed out by the police who publish that he is a coward to the press. Rico is killed in a blaze of gunfire and as he is dying says "Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?" Originally, Robinson was cast in a small role but persuaded the film's producer to let him play the lead role. Wingate, then the head of New York's censor board, told Hays that he was flooded with complaints from people who saw kids in theaters nationwide "applaud the gang leader as a hero." Caesar's success inspired Fox's The Secret Six
and Quick Millions
, and Paramount's City Streets
, but the next big Hollywood gangster came from another Warners picture.
William Wellman's The Public Enemy was released by Warner Brothers the following year and features another career defining performance, this time James Cagney
as Tom Powers. The film is similar to the template set in Caesar in that it follows Powers from his rise to his eventual fall in the world of crime. The film was partially based on the real life of Chicago gangster Dean O'Banion
. Cagney's character contrasts his puritanical brother who wants him to go straight, while their mother is at the center of the conflict. Tom Powers is egotistical, amoral, heartless, ruthless, and extremely violent. The most famous scene in the picture is referred to as the "grapefruit scene"; when Cagney is eating breakfast, his girlfriend (Mae Clarke
) angers him and he shoves half a grapefruit in her face. The film's trailer featured no scenes from the film; instead, it contained a voice over warning of the picture's intensity, and showed a gun being fired directly at the camera.
Cagney was even more violent towards women in his 1933 gangster film Picture Snatcher
, where he knocks out an amorous woman he is not interested in and violently throws her into the back seat of his car. In April 1931, the same month as the release of The Public Enemy, Hays recruited former police chief August Vollmer to conduct a study on the effect gangster pictures had on children. After he had finished his work, Vollmer stated that gangster films were innocuous and even too favorable in their depiction of the police. Although Hays used the results to defend the film industry, the New York State censorship board was not impressed and from 1930 to 1932 removed 2,200 crime scenes from pictures.
The most incendiary Pre-Code gangster film was undoubtedly Scarface. Directed by Howard Hawks
and starring Muni as Tony Comante, the film is partially based on the life of Al Capone and incorporates details of Capone's biography into the storyline. When the film begins, Comante works for Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins
) but is unhappy being a subordinate and is attracted to Lovo's girlfriend Poppy (Karen Morley
). He has a deep love for his promiscuous sister, who he expects to remain chaste, that has often been deemed incestuous. Lovo warns Comante to leave the North Side alone as it is controlled by a rival mob. Comante ignores this warning and begins a series of executions and extortions that result in a war with the North side gang. Comante then forcefully takes the gang over from Lovo, at which point Lovo tries to kill him but fails. Comante murders Lovo and Poppy happily becomes his girl. When Comante finds his missing sister and his closest friend, the coin flipping gangster Guino Rinaldo (played by George Raft
), in a hotel room, he goes into a rage and kills Rinaldo. After he finds out that they had become married and wanted to surprise Comante he becomes despondent. In the film's ending, first Comante's sister, then Comante are gunned down by police.
The production of Scarface was troubled from the start. The Hays office warned Howard Hughes
, the film's producer, not to make the film. When the film was completed in late 1931, the Hays office demanded numerous changes including a conclusion where Comante was captured, tried, convicted, and hung, and that the film carry the subtitle Shame of a Nation. Hughes sent the film to numerous state censorship boards, saying that he hoped to show that the film was made to combat the "gangster menace". After being unable to get the film past the New York State censor board (then headed by Wingate) even after the changes, Hughes sued the NY board and won, allowing him to release the film in a version close to its intended form. When other local censors refused to release the edited version, the Hays Office sent Jason Joy around to them to assure them that the cycle of gangster films of this nature was ending.
Scarface provoked outrage mainly because of its unprecedented violence, but also because of its shifts of tone from serious to comedic. Dave Kehr
, writing in the Chicago Reader, stated that the film blends "comedy and horror in a manner that suggests Chico Marx let loose with a live machine gun." In one particular scene, Comante is inside a cafe while a torrent of machine gun fire from the car of a rival gang is headed his way. And after the barrage is over, Comante picks up one of the newly released tommy gun
s the gangsters dropped and exhibits child like wonder and unrestrained excitement over the new toy. Civic leaders became furious that gangsters like Capone (who was also the blatant inspiration for Little Caesar) were being applauded in movie houses all across America. Some of the biographical details that were used for Muni's character in Scarface were so obviously taken from Capone, and the detail so close, that it was impossible not to draw the parallels.
One of the factors that made gangster pictures so subversive was that in the difficult economic times of the Depression there already existed the viewpoint that the only way to get financial success was through crime. The Kansas City Times
argued that while adults may not be particularly affected by these films, they were "misleading, contaminating, and often demoralizing to children and youth." Exacerbating the problem, local theater owners advertised gangster pictures with a singular irresponsibility. Real-life murders were tied into promotions and "theater lobbies displayed tommy guns and blackjacks
". The situation reached such a nexus that the studios had to ask exhibitors to tone down the gimmickry in their promotions.
is considered the seminal film of the chain gang genre. Although the chain gang film Hell's Highway had beaten Fugitive to the screen two months earlier, it exerted nowhere near the influence.
In The Big House Robert Montgomery
plays a squirmy inmate who is sentences to six years after committing vehicular manslaughter while under the influence. His cellmates are a murderer played by Wallace Beery
and a forger played by Chester Morris
. The picture features future genre staples such as solitary confinement, informers, riots, visitations, an escape, and the codes of prison life. The protagonist, Montgomery, ends up being a loathsome character, a coward who will sell anyone in the prison out to get an early release. The film was banned in Ohio, the site of the deadly prison riots that inspired it. Numbered Men, The Criminal Code
, Shadow of the Law
, and others, from no less than seven studios, followed. However, prison films only appealed to men for the most part, and had weak box office performances as a result. Studios also produced children's prison films that addressed the juvenile delinquency problems of America in the Depression. The Mayor of Hell featured kids killing a murderously abusive reform school overseer without retribution.
I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, based on the true story of Robert. E. Burns, is the most famous of the chain gang films of the early 1930s. Highly decorated veteran James Allen (Paul Muni
) returns from World War I a changed man, and seeks an alternative to the tedious job that he left behind. He travels the country in poverty seeking various jobs and hoping to become involved in construction planning. Allen follows a hobo he has just met at a homeless shelter into a cafe, taking him up on his offer of a free meal. When the hobo attempts to rob the place, he is charged as an accessory, convicted of stealing a few dollars, and sentenced to ten years in a chain gang. The men are chained together and transported to a quarry to break rocks every day. Even when unchained from each other, shackles always remain around their ankles. Allen convinces a large black prisoner who has particularly good aim to hit the shackles on his ankles with a sledgehammer to bend them. He removes his feet from the bent shackles and in a famous sequence, escapes through the woods while being chased by bloodhounds. On the outside, he develops a new identity and becomes a respected developer in Chicago. He is blackmailed into marriage by a woman he does not love who knows his secret. When he threatens to leave her for a young woman he has fallen in love with, she turns him in. His case becomes a cause célèbre
and he agrees to turn himself in under the agreement that he will serve only 90 days. He is tricked however and not let free at the agreed upon time. This forces him to escape again, and he seeks out the young woman he loves, telling her they cannot be together because he will always be hunted. The films end with her asking him how he survives, and his ominous reply from the darkness; "I Steal".
Although based on reality, Chain Gang changes the facts slightly to appeal to Depression era audiences by making Allen's return home one to a country that is struggling economically, even though Burns returned to the roaring twenties. The film's bleak, anti-establishment ending shocked audiences. Laughter in Hell is a 1933 film directed by Edward L. Cahn and starring Pat O'Brien
, who plays a railroad engineer who kills his wife and her lover in a jealous rage and is sent to prison. The dead man's brother ends up being the prison warden and torments the engineer. O'Brien and several other characters revolt, killing the warden and escaping from the prison. The film drew controversy for a scene in which several black men were lynched
. Reports vary if the blacks were hung separately or alongside other white men. The film critic for New Age
(an African American weekly newspaper) praised the scene for being courageous enough to depict the atrocities that were occurring in some southern states.
. In 1932, Warner Brothers formed an official policy decreeing that "two out of five stories should be hot", and that nearly all films could benefit by "adding something having to do with ginger." Filmmakers even began putting in suggestive material they knew would never reach theaters. MGM screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart
said that "[Joy and Wingate] wouldn't want to take out too much, so you would give them five things to take out to satisfy the Hays Office — and you would get away with murder with what they left in." Films such as Laughing Sinners
, Safe in Hell, The Devil is Driving
, Free Love, Merrily We Go to Hell
, Laughter in Hell
, and The Road to Ruin were provocative in their mere titles. Studios marketed their films, sometimes dishonestly, by inventing suggestive tag lines and lurid titles, even going so far as to hold in house contests for thinking up provocative titles for screenplays. Commonly labeled "sex films" by the censors, these pictures offended taste in more categories than just sexuality. According to a Variety analysis of 440 pictures produced in 1932–33, 352 had "some sex slant", with 145 possessing "questionable sequences", and 44 being "critically sexual". The trade paper summarized that "over 80% of the world's chief picture output was ... flavored with bedroom essence." Attempts to create films for adults only (dubbed "pinking") only served to bring large audiences of all ages to the cineplex.
Posters and publicity photos were often tantalizing. Woman appeared in poses and garb not even glimpsed in the films themselves. In some cases actresses with small parts in films, or in the case of Dolores Murray in her publicity still for The Common Law, no part at all, appeared barely clothed. Hays became outraged at the steamy pictures circulating in newspapers around the country. The original Hays Code contained an often-ignored note about advertising imagery, but he wrote an entirely new advertising screed in the style of the Ten Commandments
that contained a set of twelve prohibitions. The first seven addressed imagery. They prohibited women in undergarments, women raising their skirts, suggestive poses, kissing, necking, and other suggestive material. The last five concerned advertising copy and prohibited misrepresentation of the film's contents, "salacious copy", and the word "courtesan
". Soon, studios found their way around the restrictions and published increasingly racy imagery. Ultimately this backfired in 1934 when a billboard in Philadelphia was placed outside Cardinal Thomas Dougherty's home. Severely offended, Dougherty helped launch the motion picture boycott that later facilitated the enforcement of the Code. A commonly repeated theme by those supporting censorship, and one mentioned in the Code itself, was the notion that the common people needed to be saved from themselves by the more refined cultural elite.
Despite the obvious attempts to appeal to red-blooded American males, most of the patrons of sex pictures were female. Variety squarely blamed women for the increase in vice pictures: Pre-Code female audiences liked to indulge in the carnal lifestyles of mistresses and adulteresses while at the same time taking joy in their usually inevitable downfall in the closing scenes of the picture. And while gangster pictures were claimed to corrupt the morals of young boys, vice films were blamed for threatening the purity of adolescent women.
once told Wingate that he was ordered by Warner Brothers' New York corporate office to reserve 20% of the studio's output for "women's pictures, which inevitably means sex pictures." Vice films typically tacked on endings where the most sin-filled characters were either punished or redeemed. Films explored Code-defying subjects in an unapologetic manner with the premise that an end-reel moment could redeem all that had gone before. The concept of marriage was often tested in films such as 1931's The Prodigal
, in which a woman is having an affair with a seedy character, and later falls in love with her brother-in-law. When her mother-in-law steps in at the end of the film, it is to encourage one son to grant his wife a divorce so she can marry his brother, with whom she is obviously in love. The older woman proclaims the message of the film in a line near the end: "This the twentieth century. Go out into the world and get what happiness you can." In Madame Satan (1930), adultery is explicitly condoned and used as a sign for a wife that she needs to act in a more enticing way to maintain her husband's interest. And in the 1933 film Secrets
a husband admits to serial adultery, only this time he repents and the marriage is saved. The films took aim at what was already a damaged institution. During the Great Depression, relations between spouses often deteriorated due to financial strain, marriages lessened, and husbands abandoned their families in increased numbers. Marriage rates continually declined in the early 1930s, finally rising in 1934, the final year of the Pre-Code era, and although divorce rates lowered, this is likely because desertion was a more likely method of separation. Consequently, female characters in pictures such as Ruth Chatterton
's in Female
, live promiscuous bachelorette lifestyles, and control their own financial destiny (Chatterton supervises an auto factory) without regret.
One of the most prominent examples of punishment for immoral transgressions in vice film can be seen in The Story of Temple Drake
, based on the William Faulkner
novel Sanctuary
. In Drake, the title character (played by Miriam Hopkins
), a cold, vapid "party girl", the daughter of a judge, is raped and forced into prostitution by a backwoods character, and according to Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty, the film implies that the deeds done to her are in recompense for her immorality. Later, in court, she confesses that she killed the man who raped and kept her. She faints after this confession, upon which her lawyer carries her out, leading to a "happy ending". In the RKO film Christopher Strong
, Katharine Hepburn
plays an aviator who becomes pregnant from an affair with a married man. She commits suicide by flying her plane directly upwards until she breaks the world altitude record, at which point she takes off her oxygen mask and plummets to Earth. Strong female characters often ended films as "reformed" feminists, after experiencing situations in which their progressive outlook proved faulty.
Female protagonists in aggressively sexual vice films were usually of two general kinds: the bad girl or the fallen woman. In so-called "bad girl" pictures, female characters profited from promiscuity and immoral behavior. Jean Harlow
, an actress who was by all reports a lighthearted, kind person off the screen, frequently played bad girl characters and dubbed them "sex vultures". Two of the most prominent examples of bad girl films, Red-Headed Woman
and Baby Face
, featured Harlow and Stanwyck. In Red-Headed Woman Harlow plays a secretary determined to sleep her way into a more luxurious lifestyle, and in Baby Face Stanwyck is an abused runaway determined to use sex to advance herself financially. In Baby Face Stanwyck moves to New York and sleeps her way to the top of Gotham Trust. Her progress is illustrated in a recurring visual metaphor of the movie camera panning ever upward along the front of Gotham Trust's skyscraper. Men are driven mad with lust over her and they commit murder, attempt suicide, and are ruined financially for associating with her before she mends her ways in the final reel. In another departure from post Code films, Stanwyck's sole companion for the duration of the picture is a black woman named Chico (Theresa Harris
), whom she took with her when she ran away from home at age 14. Red-Headed Woman begins with Harlow seducing her boss Bill LeGendre and intentionally breaking up his marriage. During her seductions, he tries to resist and slaps her, at which point she looks at him deliriously and says "Do it again, I like it! Do it again!" They eventually marry but Harlow seduces a wealthy aged industrialist who is in business with her husband so that she can move to New York. Although this plan succeeds, she is cast aside when she is discovered having an affair with her chauffeur, in essence cheating on her paramour. Harlow shoots LeGendre, nearly killing him. When she is last seen in the film, she is in France in the back seat of a limousine with an elderly wealthy gentleman being driven along by the same chauffeur. The film was a boon to Harlow's career and has been described as a "trash masterpiece".
Cinema classified as "fallen woman" films was often inspired by real-life hardships women endured in the early Depression era workplace. The men in power in these pictures frequently sexually harassed the women working for them. Remaining employed often became a question of a woman's virtue. In She Had to Say Yes
, a struggling department store offers dates with its female stenographers as an incentive to customers. And Employees' Entrance was marketed with the tag line "See what out of work girls are up against these days." Joy complained in 1932 of another genre, the "kept woman" film, which presented adultery as an alternative to the tedium of an unhappy marriage.
Homosexuals were portrayed in several Pre-Code films such as Our Betters
, Footlight Parade
, Only Yesterday
, Sailor's Luck
, and Cavalcade. Although the topic was dealt with much more openly than in the decades that followed, the characterizations of gay and lesbian characters were usually derogatory. Gay male characters were portrayed as possessing a high tone voice and a flighty personality. They existed merely as buffoonish supporting characters. In films like Ladies They Talk About
lesbians were portrayed as rough, burly characters, but in DeMille's The Sign of the Cross
a female Christian slave is brought in front of a Roman prefect and seduced in dance by a statuesque lesbian dancer. Fox nearly became the first American studio to use the word "gay" to refer to homosexuality, but the SRC made the studio muffle the word in the soundtrack of all reels that reached theaters. Bisexual actress Marlene Dietrich
cultivated a cross-gender fan base and started a trend when she began wearing men's suits, a style which was an anachronism for the 1930s. She caused a commotion when she appeared at the premiere of the 1932 Pre-Code film The Sign of the Cross
in a tuxedo replete with top hat and cane. The backlash against homosexual characters appearing in films was rapid. In 1933 Hays declared that all gay male characters would be removed from pictures, and Paramount took advantage of the negative publicity Dietrich generated by signing a largely meaningless agreement stating that they would not portray women in male attire.
, whose slow-witted comedic character was only meant to be successful in an unintentional manner, with himself as the punchline.
The New York stage was filled with ribald humor and sexually offensive comedy. And when movie producers started to put wisecracks in their sound pictures, they sought New York performers. Popular comics such as Mae West and the Marx Brothers
got their start on Broadway in front of live audiences. Censors complained when they had to keep up with the deluge of jokes in pictures in the early 1930s, some of which were designed to go over their heads. The comic banter of some early sound films was rapid-fire, non-stop, and frequently exhausting for the audience by the final reel.
Mae West
had already established herself as a comedic performer when her 1926 Broadway show Sex made national headlines. She was tried and convicted of indecency by the New York District Attorney for the show, and served eight days in prison. West carefully constructed a stage persona and carried it over into her interviews and personal appearances. Despite her voluptuous physique, most of her appeal lay in her suggestive manner. She became a wordsmith in the art of the come-on and the seductive line, and despite her obvious appeal to male audiences, was popular with women as well. Over the cries of film censors, West got her start in the film Night after Night
as a supporting character at the request of actor George Raft. She only appeared in the film when the producers agreed to let her write her own lines. In her first line on film, a hat check girl remarks to her "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds", to which West replies, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." George Raft
later wrote, "In this picture, Mae West stole everything but the cameras." She went on to make She Done Him Wrong in 1933, which became a huge box office hit, grossing $3 million against a $200,000 budget, and then nine months later wrote and starred in I'm No Angel
. She became such a success that her career saved Paramount from financial ruin.
The arrival of sound film created a new job market for writers of screen dialogue. Many newspaper journalists moved to California and become studio-employed screenwriters. This resulted in a series of fast-talking comedy pictures featuring newsmen. The Front Page
, later re-made as the much less cynical and more sentimental His Girl Friday
in 1940, was adapted from the Broadway play by Chicago
newsmen, and Hollywood screenwriters, Ben Hecht
and Charles MacArthur
. It was based on Hecht's experiences working as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal.
The Marx Brothers had been stage performers since the early 1900s. By the 1930s, their act consisted of wisecracking leader Groucho
, the chronically silent Harpo
, the overly ethnic Chico
, and the strangely normal Zeppo
. The plot of their seminal 1933 comedy Duck Soup is difficult to describe. Groucho's plebeian character is named king of the fictional Freedonia, and he is pursued by two bumbling spies played by Chico and Harpo. Zeppo plays a typically normal secretary. Groucho's con artist character leads Freedonia into war with neighboring Sylvania. The plot essentially exists to provide a framework to fit several comedic bits and long sketches into. The film was unsuccessful at the box office, and the anarchic zaniness and subversive nature of the comedy in the film would be unmatched in the brothers' post-Code work, which was more standardly burlesque.
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Unlike silent era sex and crime pictures, silent horror movies, despite being produced in the hundreds, were never a major concern for censors or civic leaders. When sound horror films were released however, they quickly caused controversy. Sound provided "atmospheric music and sound effects, creepy-voiced macabre dialogue and a liberal dose of blood-curdling screams" which intensified its effects on audiences, and consequently on moral crusaders. The Hays Code did not mention gruesomeness, and Pre-Code filmmakers took advantage of this oversight. However, the state boards usually had no set guidelines, and could object to any material they found indecent. Even though films like Frankenstein
and Freaks
caused controversy when they were released, they had already been re-cut to comply with censors.
Comprising the nascent motion picture genres of horror
and science fiction
(sci-fi), the nightmare picture provoked individual psychological terror in its horror incarnations, while embodying group sociological terror in its science fiction manifestations. The two main types of Pre-Code horror pictures were the single monster movie, and films where masses of hideous beasts rose up and attacked their betters. Frankenstein and Freaks exemplified both genres.
The Pre-Code horror cycle was similar to many Pre-Code cycles in that its boom was motivated by financial necessity. Universal in particular buoyed itself with the production of horror hits such as 1931's Dracula
and Frankenstein, then followed those successes up with Murders in the Rue Morgue
, The Mummy
, and The Old Dark House
in 1932. Other majors soon responded with their own productions. Much like the crime film cycle however, the intense boom of the horror cycle was ephemeral, and had fallen off at the box office by the end of the Pre-Code era.
At the beginning of Frankenstein, Dr. Henry Frankenstein, and his faithful, moronic assistant Fritz are excavating graves for human body parts. Frankenstein sends Fritz to the local college to acquire a fresh brain. After dropping the only normal brain on the ground, Fritz leaves the college with an abnormal one. Meanwhile, Frankenstein's "insane ambition to create life" worries his fiancée, Elizabeth, and his close friends. To allay their fears, and prove to them he is not insane, Frankenstein shows them his science project—a sewn together corpse lying on a medical slab, covered by a cloth—and asks them to watch him "endow it with life." Raising the monster upwards, the extending slab reaches the sky through a hole in the roof, and the monster is struck by lightning. Endowed with life by the magical electricity, it twitches its arm, at which point Dr. Frankenstein deliriously screams, "It's alive! It's alive!" The creature begins walking out of its cell in the next scene, and Fritz, upset that his position as the doctor's freak companion may be usurped, torments the monster by waving a torch at it. After the monster kills Fritz, Frankenstein has second thoughts about his creation and instructs a medical colleague to euthanize
it. His conscience clear, Frankenstein prepares to marry his fiancée in a lavish ceremony. The monster lives however, and after escaping captivity, it meets a little girl. The girl is throwing flowers into a lake and watching them float. Convinced that pretty things float, he throws her into the lake where she drowns. The creature then arrives at the doctor's house, and in an act of revenge abducts and kills the doctor's fiancée, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke
). The entire town, pitchforks and torches in hand, search for the monster that has absconded with the doctor. Finding them at a windmill, the doctor escapes, and the villagers burn the creature to death. While Joy declared Dracula "quite satisfactory from the standpoint of the Code" before it was released, and the film had little trouble reaching theaters, Frankenstein was a different story. New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts removed the drowning scene and lines that referenced Dr. Frankenstein's God complex. Kansas in particular objected to the film. The state's censor board requested the cutting of 32 scenes, which if removed, would have halved the length of the film.
Paramount's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide
played to the Freudian theories popular with the audience of its time. Fredric March
played the split personality title character. Jekyll represented the composed super-ego, and Hyde the lecherous id. Miriam Hopkins
's coquettish prostitute sexually teases March's Jekyll character early in the film by showing her parts of her legs and bosom. Joy felt the scene had been "dragged in simply to titillate the audience." Hyde coerces her with the threat of violence into becoming his paramour and beats her when she attempts to stop seeing him. She is contrasted with his wholesome fiancée (Rose Hobart
), whose chaste nature dissatisfies March's baser alter ego. Employing adventurous first person
camera techniques, and a high brow background — Robert Louis Stevenson
wrote the source novella — the film is considered the "most honored of the Pre-Code horror films." March won the Academy Award for best actor for his performance, a rarity for a performer in a horror movie. Many of the graphic scenes between Hyde and Ivy were cut by local censors because of their suggestiveness. Sex was intimately tied to horror in many Pre-Code horror movies. In Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe
's classic tale
which has little in common with the source material, Bela Lugosi
plays a mad scientist who tortures and kills women trying to mix human blood with ape blood during his experiments. His prized experiment, an intelligent ape named Erik, breaks into a woman's second floor apartment through her window and rapes her.
In Freaks director Tod Browning
of Dracula fame helms a picture that depicts a traveling circus populated by a group of deformed carnival freaks. Browning populated the movie with actual carnival sideshow performers including "midgets, dwarfs, hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, and, most awful, the armless and legless man billed as the "living torso"." There is also a group of Pinheads, who are fortunate in that they are not mentally capable enough to understand that they disgust people. The freaks are the victim of the story with a circus strongman Hercules and a beautiful high-wire artist Cleopatra, the villains. Cleopatra intends to marry and then poison Hans, a midget who has inherited a fortune and is enamored with her. At a dinner celebrating their union, one of the freaks dances on the table and they chant "gooble-gobble, gobble, gobble, one of us, one of us, now she is like one of us." Disgusted, Cleopatra insults Hans and makes out with Hercules in front of him. When the freaks discover her plot, they exact revenge by mutilating Cleopatra into a freak. Although circus freaks were common in the early 1930s, the film was their first depiction on screen. Browning took care to linger over shots of the deformed, disabled performers with long takes of them including one of the "living torso" lighting a match and then a cigarette with his mouth. The film was accompanied by a sensational marketing campaign that asked sexual questions such as "Do the Siamese Twins make love?", "What sex is the half-man half-woman?", and "Can a full grown woman truly love a midget?" Surprisingly, given its reaction to Frankenstein, Kansas
objected to nothing in Freaks. Other states such as Georgia however, were repulsed by the film and it was not shown in many locales. The film later became a cult classic spurred by midnight movie showings, but upon its original release, it was a box-office bomb.
In the 1933 film, Island of Lost Souls
, an adaptation of H. G. Wells
science fiction novel The Island of Doctor Moreau
, Charles Laughton
plays yet another mad scientist with a God complex. Laughton, as Moreau, creates a mad scientist's island paradise; an unmonitored haven where he is free to create a race of man-beasts and a beast-woman, Lota, which he wants to mate with a normal human male. A castaway lands on his island, providing him an opportunity to see how far his science experiment, the barely clothed, attractive Lota, has come. The castaway discovers Moreau vivisecting one of the beast-men and attempts to leave the island. He runs into the camp of the man-beasts and Moreau beats them back with a whip. The film ends with Lota dead, the castaway rescued, and the man-beasts chanting, "Are we not men?" as they attack and then vivisect Moreau. The film has been described as "a rich man's Freaks" due to its esteemed source material. Wells, however, despised the movie for its lurid excesses. It was rejected by 14 local censor boards in the US, and considered "against nature" in Great Britain and banned there until 1958.
, a 1931 film which depicted a blonde woman abducted by a savage tribe of Africans, was not that she was kidnapped, but that she enjoys living among the tribe. The lack of black characters in films highlights their status in Jim Crow America
.
The white protagonist in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) is the "King of the [African] Jungle". Tarzan is a monosyllabic half-naked jungle creature whose attractiveness is derived from his physical prowess; throughout the movie, he saves Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan
) from danger and she gratefully swoons in his arms. When Jane's father warns her "[h]e's not like us" she retorts "[h]e's white" as evidence to the contrary. In the racy sequel, Tarzan and His Mate
(the last word meaning both a status and a biological function), men come from America with fancy gowns and other accoutrements to woo and clothe the bra-less, barely clothed Jane, again played by O'Sullivan, hoping to lure her away from the savage Tarzan. He detests the fancier clothing and tears it off. The black characters of the film are treated poorly; when one of them refuses to go forward on a march in the jungle, the white ivory
hunter shoots him on the spot, and moves on. The film included a skinny-dipping scene with extensive nudity in which a body double stands in for actress O'Sullivan. Breen, then head of the SRC, objected to the scene, and MGM, the movie's producer, decided to take their case to the appeals review board. The board consisted of the heads of Fox, RKO, and Universal. After watching the scene "several times", the board sided with Breen and the MPPDA, and the scene was removed, but MGM still allowed some uncut trailers and a few reels to stay in circulation. MGM marketed the film primarily towards women using taglines such as the following:
Ethnic characters were portrayed against stereotype in 1934's Massacre
. The protagonist (Richard Barthelmess
) is a Native American who performs in a Wild West Show
in full Indian garb, but then slips into a suit and speaks in American slang once the show is over. He has a black butler who is atypically intelligent; his character merely plays dumb by slipping into a stereotypical slow-witted "negro" character when it suits him, rather than being genuinely unintelligent.
The exoticism of the Far East was explored in films such as 1932's The Mask of Fu Manchu
and 1933's The Bitter Tea of General Yen
, however it was done using white actors in the lead roles, not Asians. When a white actor donned the yellow-face makeup, they frequently looked absurd next to genuine Asians, so the studios would cast all the Asian parts white. In Manchu, Karloff plays a mad scientist who wants to find the sword and mask of Genghis Khan
as they will give him the power to control the "countless hordes" into battle versus the West. Manchu is a sexual deviant, who engages in ritual torture, and has occult powers. In a scene cut from the film due to its miscegenation, he shows a man the image of Manchu's depraved daughter (Myrna Loy
) violating one of the chaste good characters. He is eventually conquered, but not before he temporarily lays his hand on the sword and proclaims to his men: "Would you have maidens like this[ Karen Morley
] for your wives? Then conquer and breed! Kill the white man and take his women!" Frank Capra
's The Bitter Tea of General Yen was not quite the same type of film. In that movie, Stanwyck plays a missionary who goes to civil-war-torn China and meets the titular general (played by Nils Asther
) after his car kills the driver of her rickshaw. She is knocked unconscious in a riot, and he takes her out of the rabble, and onto a train car. She has lurid, horror themed, symbolic dreams about the General, in which she is both titillated and repulsed by him. The film breaks precedent by developing into an interracial love story, but his army ends in ruins. Yen kills himself at the film's conclusion — by drinking poisoned tea — rather than be captured and killed. Capra adored the script, and disregarded the risk of making a film that broke California's (and 29 other states') laws concerning the portrayal of miscegenation. Cinematographer Joseph Walker
tested a new technique he created, which he dubbed "Variable Diffusion", in filming the picture. This rendered the entire picture in very soft focus
.
, who provided voice over during the clips, often delivering hackneyed jokes while delineating the on-screen action. Sound newsreel interviews and monologues featured famous subjects unaccustomed to the new medium. These clips changed public perception of important historical figures depending on their elocution, the sound of their previously unheard voices, and their composure in front of the camera. Soon, around 12 "newsreel theaters" were created around America, the most successful being the Embassy Newsreel Theater on Broadway
. The Embassy was a 578-seat facility that presented fourteen 45–50 minute programs a day, running from 10 in the morning until midnight. It was noted for its discerning, intellectual audience, many of which did not attend motion picture theaters.
The most gripping news story of the Pre-Code era was the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby
on the evening of March 1, 1932. As the child was already enormously famous before the kidnapping, the event created a media circus, with news coverage more intense than anything since World War I. Newsreels featuring private family photos of the child (the first time private pictures had been "conscripted for public service"), asked spectators to report any sight of him. On May 12, 1932, the child's body was found less than five miles the Lindberghs' home. Although newsreels covered the most important topics of the day, they also presented human-interest stories
(such as the immensely popular coverage of the Dionne quintuplets
), and entertainment news, at times in greater detail than more pressing political and social matters.
Some of the images' impact belies their historical accuracy; nearly all ceremonies and public events that were filmed for newsreels in the early sound era were staged, and in some cases even reenacted. In one instance when FDR signed an important bill, a member of his cabinet was called away before the staged reenactment began, so the video shows him absent at the time of the signing, even though he had been present. The newsreels of FDR were staged to hide his hobbled gait caused by polio. Caught between the desire to present accurate hard-hitting news stories and the need to keep an audience in the mood for the upcoming entertainment, newsreels often soft-pedaled the difficulties Americans faced during the early years of the Great Depression. FDR in particular received favorable treatment from Hollywood, with all five of the majors producing pro-FDR shorts by late 1933. These shorts featured some of the studios' lesser contract talent extolling the virtues of FDR created government and social programs. Roosevelt himself was a natural before the camera. The newsreels were instrumental to the success of his initial campaign, and his enduring popularity while in office. He was described by Variety as the "Barrymore of the Capital", and actress Miriam Howell said his timbre
was "almost as good as Walter Huston."
Taking advantage of the existence of thirty years of newsreels archives were filmmakers who made early sound era documentaries. World War I was a popular topic of these pictures and spawned the following 1933 documentaries; The Big Drive, World in Revolt, This is America, and Hell's Holiday. The most prescient Pre-Code WWI documentary was 1934's aptly titled The First World War. The most critically and commercially successful documentary of the era, the film is presented in eleven chapters, much like a book. The picture combined a multitude of new motion picture techniques such as commentative music, voice-over narration, and slow-motion photography with a sense of when to speak for the images on screen and when to allow the images to speak for themselves. The New York Times described it as "a memorable and infinitely important document which should be distributed in every civilized country."
Filmmakers also made feature length documentaries that covered the dark recesses of the globe including the Amazon Rainforest
, Native American settlements, the Pacific Islands, and most everywhere in between. Taking advantage of audiences voyeuristic impulses, aided by the allowance of nudity in tribal documentaries, the filming of lands untouched by modernity, and the presentation of locales never before filmed, these movies placated Depression era American audiences by showing them lifestyles more difficult than their own. Also captured were Arctic expeditions in films such 90° South and With Byrd at the South Pole
, and deepest Africa in the safari films of Martin and Osa Johnson
, among others. Some exploitation style documentaries purported to show actual events but were instead staged, elaborate ruses. The most prominent of which was Ingagi
, a 1931 film which claimed to show a ritual where African women were given over to gorillas as sex slaves, but instead was mostly filmed in Los Angeles using local blacks in place of natives. Douglas Fairbanks
mocked the phoniness of many Pre-Code documentaries in his parody Around the World with Douglas Fairbanks, where in one scene he filmed himself wrestling a stuffed tiger doll, then a tiger skin rug. Opposing these films was the travelogue
which was shown before features and served as a short saccharine form of cinematic tourism.
(later renamed the National Legion of Decency
), was established to control and enforce decency standards and boycott films they deemed offensive. They created a rating system for films that started at "harmless" and ended at "condemned", with the latter denoting a film that was a sin to watch. The Legion spurred several million Catholics across the country to sign up for the boycott and allowed local religious leaders to determine which films to protest. Conservative Protestants tended to support much of the crackdown, particularly in the South, where anything relating to the state of race relations or miscegenation could not be portrayed. Although the Central Conference of American Rabbis joined in the protest, it was an uneasy alliance as there had always been whispers that at least some of the vitriol from the Christian groups occurred because many studio executives were Jewish.
Hays had originally been opposed to direct censorship, considering it "Un-American". He had stated that although there were some tasteless films in his estimation, working with filmmakers was better than direct oversight, and that, overall, films were not harmful to children. Hays blamed some of the more prurient films on the difficult economic times which exerted "tremendous commercial pressure" on the studios more than a flouting of the code. Catholic groups became enraged with Hays and as early as July 1934 were demanding that he resign from his position.
The Payne Study and Experiment Fund
was created in 1927 by Frances Payne Bolton to support a study of the influence of fiction on children. The Payne Fund Studies
, a series of eight books published from 1933 to 1935 which detailed five years of research aimed specifically at cinema's effects on children, were also gaining publicity at this time, and became a great concern to Hays. Hays had said certain pictures might alter "...that sacred thing, the mind of a child...that clean, virgin thing, that unmarked state" and have "the same responsibility, the same care about the thing put on it that the best clergyman or the most inspired teacher would have." Despite its initial reception, the main findings of the study were largely innocuous. It found that cinema's effect on individuals varied with age and social position, and that pictures reinforced audiences' existing beliefs. The Motion Picture Research Council (MPRC, led by honorary vice president Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR's mother and executive director, the Rev. William H. Short), which funded the study, was not pleased. An "alarmist summary" of the study's results written by Henry James Forman
appeared in McCall's
, a leading women's magazine of the time, and Forman's book, Our Movie Made Children
, which became a best-seller, publicized the Payne Fund's results, emphasizing its more negative aspects.
The social environment created by the publicity of the Payne Fund Studies and religious protests reached such a fever pitch that a member of the Hays Office described it as a "state of war". However, newspapers including The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio
), New Orleans Times Picayune, Chicago Daily News
, Atlanta Journal, Saint Paul Dispatch
, the Philadelphia Record
and Public Ledger
, the Boston American
and New York's Daily News
, Daily Mirror
, and Evening Post
all lambasted the studies. When discussing the Supreme Court's 1915 decision, film historian Gregory Black argues that the efforts of reformers might have been lessened had "filmmakers been willing to produce films for specialized audiences (adults only, family, no children)... but the movers and shakers of the industry wanted or needed the largest possible market." The most provocative pictures were the most profitable, with the 25% of the motion picture industry's output that was the most sensational supporting the cleaner 75%
By 1932, there was an increasing movement for government control. By mid-1934 when Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia called for a Catholic boycott of all films, and Raymond Cannon
was privately preparing a congressional bill supported by both Democrats and Republicans which would introduce Government oversight, the studios decided they had had enough. They re-organized the enforcement procedures giving Hays and the recently appointed Joseph I. Breen
, a devout Roman Catholic, head of the new Production Code Administration
(PCA), greater control over censorship. The studios agreed to disband their appeals committee and to impose a $25,000 fine for producing, distributing, or exhibiting any film without PCA approval. Hays had originally hired Breen, who had worked in public relations, in 1930 to handle Production Code publicity, and the latter was popular among Catholics. Joy began working solely for Fox Studios, and Wingate had been bypassed in favor of Breen in December 1933. Hays became a functionary, while Breen handled the business of censoring films. Breen was a rabid anti-Semite, who was quoted as stating that Jews "are, probably, the scum of the earth." When Breen died in 1965, the trade magazine Variety stated, "More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture."
Although the Legion's impact on the more effective enforcement of the code is unquestionable, its influence on the general populace is harder to gauge. A study done by Hays after the Code was finally fully implemented found that audiences were doing the exact opposite of what the Legion had recommended. Each time the Legion protested a film it meant increased ticket sales; unsurprisingly, Hays kept these results to himself and they were not revealed until many years later. In contrast to big cities, boycotts in smaller towns were more effective and theater owners complained of the harassment they received when they exhibited salacious films.
Many actors and actresses, such as Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck, and Clark Gable, continued their careers apace after the Code was enforced. However, stars like Ruth Chatterton, Lyle Talbot, and Warren William, who excelled during this period, struggled and are mostly forgotten today. Mae West in particular had a difficult time transferring her bawdy persona over into the new era. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst
went to great lengths to denigrate actresses such as West (whose name he later banned from all Hearst publications) in his papers, further lessening their prospects.
Termed by Breen as "Compensating moral value", the maxim was that "any theme must contain at least sufficient good in the story to compensate for, and to counteract, any evil which relates." Hollywood could present evil behavior, but only if it were eradicated by the end of the film, "with the guilty punished, and the sinner redeemed." Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty summarized the practical effects:
The censors thus expanded their jurisdiction from what was seen to what was implied in the spectator's mind. In The Office Wife
, a 1930 film featuring Joan Blondell
, not only were several of Blondell's disrobing maneuvers strictly forbidden, but the implied image of the actress being naked just off-screen, was deemed too suggestive even though it relied upon the audience using their imaginations. Later, similar scenes were blurred or rendered indistinct if allowed at all.
After the July 1934 decision by the studios put the power over film censorship in Breen's hands he appeared in a series of newsreel clips promoting the new order of business, assuring Americans that the motion picture industry would be removed of "the vulgar, the cheap, and the tawdry" and that pictures would be made "vital and wholesome entertainment." All scripts now went through PCA, and several films playing in theaters were ordered withdrawn. The first film Breen censored in the production stage was the Joan Crawford film, Forsaking All Others
. Although Independent film producers vowed that they would give "no thought to Mr. Joe Breen or anything he represents," they caved on their stance within one month of making it. The fact remained that the major studios owned most of the successful theaters in the country. And studio heads such as Harry Cohn
of Columbia Pictures
had already agreed to stop making indecent films. In several large cities audiences booed when the Production seal appeared before films. The Catholic Church was pleased, however, and in 1936, Pope Pius XI
stated that the U.S. film industry "has recognized and accepts its responsibility before society." The Legion condemned zero films produced by the MPPDA between 1936 and 1943.
A coincidental upswing in the fortunes of several studios was publicly explained by Code proponents such as the Motion Picture Herald as proof positive that the code was working. Another fortunate coincidence for Code supporters was the torrent of famous criminals such as John Dillinger
, Baby Face Nelson
, and Bonnie and Clyde
that were killed by police shortly after the PCA took power. Corpses of the outlaws were shown in newsreels around the country, alongside clips of Al Capone
and Machine Gun Kelly
in Alcatraz. Among the unarguably positive aspects of the Code being enforced was the money it saved studios in having to edit, cut, and alter films to get approval from the various state boards and censors. The money saved was in the millions annually. A spate of more wholesome family films featuring performers such as Shirley Temple
took off. Stars such as James Cagney redefined their images. Cagney played a series of patriots, and his gangster in 1937's Angels with Dirty Faces
purposefully acts like a coward when he is executed so that children who look up to him will cease their admiration. Breen in essence neutered Groucho Marx, removing most of his jokes which directly referenced sex, although some sexual references slipped through unnoticed in the Marx Brothers post-Code pictures. And in the political realm films such Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
where James Stewart
tries to change the American system from within while reaffirming its core values, stand in stark contrast to decidedly anti-American cinema like Gabriel over the White House where a dictator is needed to cure America's woes.
Some Pre-Code movies suffered irreparable damage from censorship after 1934. When studios attempted to re-issue films from the 1920s and early 1930s, they were forced to make extensive cuts. Films such as Animal Crackers
(1930), Mata Hari (1931), Arrowsmith
(1931), and A Farewell to Arms
(1932) exist only in their censored versions. Many other films survived intact because they were too controversial to be re-released, such as The Maltese Falcon (1931)
(which was remade a decade later), and consequently never had their master negatives edited. In the case of Convention City
(1933), the entire film was destroyed because the Breen Office refused to budge.
programmer Bruce Goldstein
held the first film festivals featuring Pre-Code films. Goldstein is also credited by San Francisco film critic Mick LaSalle
as the person to bring the term "Pre-Code" into general use.
In the 1990s MGM released several Pre-Code films on laserdisc and VHS. "The Forbidden Hollywood Collection" included: Baby Face
; Beauty and the Boss; Big Business Girl; Blessed Event
; Blonde Crazy
; Bombshell
; Dance, Fools, Dance
; Employee's Entrance; Ex-Lady
; Female
; Havana Widows
; Heroes for Sale
; Illicit; I've Got Your Number
; Ladies They Talk About
; Madam Satan
; Night Nurse
; Our Modern Maidens
; The Purchase Price
; Red-Headed Woman
; Scarlet Dawn
; Skyscraper Souls
; The Strange Love of Molly Louvain
; They Call It Sin; and Three on a Match
.
MGM also released other Pre-Code films such as The Divorcee
, Doctor X
, A Free Soul
, Little Caesar
, Mystery of the Wax Museum, Possessed, The Public Enemy
, Red Dust
, and Riptide
under other labels.
UCLA ran several series of pre-Code films during the 2000s, showcasing films which had not been seen for decades, and not available on any home media. In 1999, the Roan Group/Troma Entertainment released two Pre-Code DVD collections. These were Pre-Code Hollywood: The Risqué Years #1, featuring Of Human Bondage
, Millie
and Kept Husbands
and Pre-Code Hollywood 2, featuring Bird of Paradise
and The Lady Refuses.
Warner Bros. Home Video has released several of their Pre-Code films on DVD under the Forbidden Hollywood banner. To date, three volumes have been released:
Universal Home Video followed suit with Pre-Code Hollywood Collection: Universal Backlot Series. Released on April 7, 2009, the box set includes The Cheat, Merrily We Go to Hell
, Hot Saturday
, Torch Singer
, Murder at the Vanities
, and Search for Beauty
, together with a copy of the entire Hays Code.
Film industry
The film industry consists of the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking: i.e. film production companies, film studios, cinematography, film production, screenwriting, pre-production, post production, film festivals, distribution; and actors, film directors and other film crew...
between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.
As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, references to homosexuality, miscegenation
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
, illegal drug use, infidelity, abortion and intense violence. Strong women dominated films such as Female
Female (film)
Female is a 1933 Warner Bros. pre-code film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Ruth Chatterton and George Brent. It is based on the novel of the same name by Donald Henderson Clarke.-Plot:...
, Baby Face
Baby Face (film)
Baby Face is a 1933 American dramatic film directed by Alfred E. Green, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent. Based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck , this sexually-charged, Pre-Code Hollywood film is about an attractive young woman who uses sex to advance her social and financial status...
, and Red-Headed Woman
Red-Headed Woman
Red-Headed Woman is a 1932 Pre-Code comedy film, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, based on a novel by Katherine Brush, and with a screenplay by Anita Loos. It was directed by Jack Conway, and stars Jean Harlow as a woman who uses sex to advance her social position...
. Gangsters in films like The Public Enemy
The Public Enemy
The Public Enemy is a 1931 American Pre-Code crime film starring James Cagney and directed by William A. Wellman. The film relates the story of a young man's rise in the criminal underworld in prohibition-era urban America...
, Little Caesar
Little Caesar (film)
Little Caesar is a 1931 Warner Bros. Pre-Code crime film. It tells the story of a hoodlum who ascends the ranks of organized crime until he reaches its upper echelons. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, the film stars Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.. The story was adapted by Francis Edward...
, and Scarface
Scarface (1932 film)
Scarface is a 1932 American gangster film starring Paul Muni and George Raft, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, and written by Ben Hecht based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Armitage Trail...
were more heroic than evil. Along with featuring stronger female characters, films examined female subject matters that were not revisited until much later in Hollywood history. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions, and drug use was a topic of several films.
The Pre-Code era featured shorter films, usually running little more than an hour. Many of Hollywood's biggest stars such as Clark Gable
Clark Gable
William Clark Gable , known as Clark Gable, was an American film actor most famous for his role as Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh...
, Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra...
, and Edward G. Robinson
Edward G. Robinson
Edward G. Robinson was a Romanian-born American actor. A popular star during Hollywood's Golden Age, he is best remembered for his roles as gangsters, such as Rico in his star-making film Little Caesar and as Rocco in Key Largo...
got their start in the era. But it also contained stars like Ruth Chatterton
Ruth Chatterton
Ruth Chatterton was an American actress, novelist, and early aviatrix.- Early life :Chatterton was born in New York City, on Christmas Eve 1892, to Walter Smith and Lillian Reed Chatterton...
, Lyle Talbot
Lyle Talbot
Lyle Talbot , born Lisle Henderson, was an American actor on stage and screen, best known for his long career in movies from 1931 to 1960 and for his frequent appearances on TV in the 1950s and '60s, including his decade-long role as Joe Randolph on television's The Adventures of Ozzie and...
, and Warren William
Warren William
Warren William was a Broadway and Hollywood actor, popular during the early 1930s, who was later nicknamed the "king of Pre-Code". He was born Warren William Krech in Aitkin, Minnesota to parents Freeman E. and Frances Krech. He had a certain physical resemblance to John Barrymore. He attended the...
(the so-called "king of Pre-Code") who excelled during this period but are mostly forgotten today.
Beginning in late 1933, and escalating throughout the first half of 1934, American Catholics launched a campaign against what they deemed the immorality of American cinema. This, plus a potential government takeover of film censorship and social research seeming to indicate that so-called "bad" movies could promote bad behavior, was enough pressure to force the studios to capitulate to greater oversight.
Origins of the Code
Will H. Hays
William Harrison Hays, Sr. , was the namesake of the Hays Code for censorship of American films, chairman of the Republican National Committee and U.S. Postmaster General from 1921 to 1922....
to rehabilitate Hollywood's image. Hays, who was later nicknamed the motion picture "Czar", quickly tarnished his sterling image by lying before the U.S. Senate, although the American people seemed unconcerned that Hays was less noble than imagined. Hollywood in the 1920s was expected to be somewhat corrupt, and many felt the movie industry had always been morally questionable. Hays was paid the then-lavish sum of $100,000 a year. Hays, Postmaster General
United States Postmaster General
The United States Postmaster General is the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Postal Service. The office, in one form or another, is older than both the United States Constitution and the United States Declaration of Independence...
under Warren G. Harding
Warren G. Harding
Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th President of the United States . A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential self-made newspaper publisher. He served in the Ohio Senate , as the 28th Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and as a U.S. Senator...
and former head of the Republican National Committee
Republican National Committee
The Republican National Committee is an American political committee that provides national leadership for the Republican Party of the United States. It is responsible for developing and promoting the Republican political platform, as well as coordinating fundraising and election strategy. It is...
, served for 25 years as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
Motion Picture Association of America
The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. , originally the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America , was founded in 1922 and is designed to advance the business interests of its members...
(MPPDA), where he "defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing nostrum s, and negotiated treaties to cease hostilities." The move mimicked the decision Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
had made in hiring judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis
Kenesaw Mountain Landis
Kenesaw Mountain Landis was an American jurist who served as a federal judge from 1905 to 1922 and as the first Commissioner of Baseball from 1920 until his death...
as League Commissioner the previous year to quell questions about the integrity of baseball in wake of the 1919 World Series gambling scandal
Black Sox Scandal
The Black Sox Scandal took place around and during the play of the American baseball 1919 World Series. Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were banned for life from baseball for intentionally losing games, which allowed the Cincinnati Reds to win the World Series...
; The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
even called Hays the "screen Landis". Hays introduced a set of recommendations dubbed "The Formula" in 1924, which the studios were advised to heed, and asked filmmakers to describe to his office the plots of pictures they were planning to make. The Supreme Court had already decided unanimously in 1915 in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio
Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio
Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 , was a court case decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1915, in which, in a 9-0 vote, the Court ruled that the free speech protection of the Ohio Constitution — which was substantially similar to the First...
that free speech did not extend to motion pictures, and while there had been token attempts to clean up the movies before, such as when the studios formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry
National Association of the Motion Picture Industry
The National Association of the Motion Picture Industry was a regulatory body created by the Hollywood studios in 1916 to answer demands of censorship. The system consisted of a series of "Thirteen Points", a list of subjects and storylines they promised to avoid...
(NAMPI) in 1916, little had come of the efforts.
Creation of the Code and its contents
In 1929, lay Catholic Martin Quigley, editor of the Motion Picture HeraldMotion Picture Herald
The Motion Picture Herald was an American film industry trade paper published from 1931 to December 1972. It was replaced by the QP Herald, which only lasted until May 1973.In 1915, Martin Quigley founded the Exhibitors Herald...
, a prominent trade paper, and Jesuit
Society of Jesus
The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...
priest Father Daniel A. Lord
Daniel A. Lord
Daniel Aloysius Lord, S.J. was a popular American Catholic writer. His most influential work was possibly in drafting the 1930 Production Code for motion pictures....
, created a code of standards (which Hays liked immensely), and submitted it to the studios. Lord's concerns centered on the effects sound film had on children, whom he considered especially susceptible to their allure. Several studio heads including Irving Thalberg
Irving Thalberg
Irving Grant Thalberg was an American film producer during the early years of motion pictures. He was called "The Boy Wonder" for his youth and his extraordinary ability to select the right scripts, choose the right actors, gather the best production staff and make very profitable films.-Life and...
of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...
(MGM), met with Lord and Quigley in February 1930. After some revisions, they agreed to the stipulations of the Code. One of the main motivating factors in adopting the Code was to avoid direct government intervention. It was the responsibility of the SRC headed by Colonel Jason S. Joy to supervise film production and advise the studios when changes or cuts were required.
The Code was divided into two parts. The first was a set of "general principles" which mostly concerned morality. The second was a set of "particular applications" which was an exacting list of items that could not be depicted. Some restrictions, such as the ban on homosexuality or the use of specific curse words, were never directly mentioned but were assumed to be understood without clear demarcation. Miscegenation, better known as the mixing of the races, was forbidden. It also stated that the notion of an "adults-only policy" would be a dubious, ineffective strategy that would be difficult to enforce. However, it did allow that, "maturer minds may easily understand and accept without harm subject matter in plots which does younger people positive harm." If children were supervised and the events implied elliptically, the code allowed "the possibility of a cinematically inspired thought crime."
The Code sought not only to determine what could be portrayed on screen, but also to promote traditional values. Sexual relations outside of marriage could not be portrayed as attractive and beautiful, presented in a way that might arouse passion, nor be made to seem right and permissible. All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience. Authority figures had to be treated respectfully, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear they were the exception to the rule. The entire document contained Catholic undertones and stated that art must be handled carefully because it could be "morally evil in its effects" and because its "deep moral significance" was unquestionable. The Catholic influence on the Code was initially decided to be kept secret. A recurring theme was "That throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong and good is right." The Code also contained an addendum commonly referred to as the Advertising Code, which regulated advertising copy and imagery.
Enforcement
On February 19, 1930, VarietyVariety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
published the entire contents of the Code and predicted that state film censorship boards would soon become obsolete. However, the men obligated to enforce the code, Jason Joy, who was the head of the Committee until 1932, and his successor, Dr. James Wingate, were generally ineffective. The very first film the office reviewed, The Blue Angel, which was passed by Joy without revision, was considered indecent by a California censor. Although there were several instances where Joy negotiated cuts from films, and there were indeed definite — albeit loose — constraints, a significant amount of lurid material made it to the screen. Joy had to review 500 films a year using a small staff and little power. The Hays office did not have the authority to order studios to remove material from a film in 1930, but instead worked by reasoning and sometimes pleading with them. Complicating matters, the appeals process ultimately put the responsibility for making the final decision in the hands of the studios themselves.
One factor in ignoring the Code was the fact that some found such censorship prudish, due to the libertine social attitudes of the 1920s and early 1930s. This was a period in which the Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
was sometimes ridiculed as being naïve and backward. When the Code was announced The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, a liberal periodical, attacked it. The publication stated that if crime were never presented in a sympathetic light, then, taken literally, "law" and "justice" would become the same. Therefore, events such as the Boston Tea Party
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a direct action by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government and the monopolistic East India Company that controlled all the tea imported into the colonies...
could not be portrayed. And if clergy were always to be presented positively, then hypocrisy could not be examined either. The Outlook
The Outlook (New York)
The Outlook was a weekly magazine, published in New York City.-History:In 1900, the ranking weekly journals of news and opinion were The Independent , The Nation , the Outlook , and in a different class or with a different emphasis, The Literary Digest .-Notable contributors:*Theodore Roosevelt...
agreed and unlike Variety, predicted from the beginning that the Code would be difficult to enforce. Additionally, the Great Depression
Great Depression in the United States
The Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October, 1929 and rapidly spread worldwide. The market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement...
of the 1930s led many studios to seek income by any way possible. As films containing racy and violent content resulted in high ticket sales, it seemed reasonable to continue producing such films. Soon, the flouting of the code became an open secret. In 1931, the Hollywood Reporter mocked the code, and Variety followed suit in 1933. In the same year as theVariety article, a noted screenwriter stated that "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's just a memory."
Early sound film era
Although the liberalization of sexuality in American film had increased during the entire 1920s, the Pre-Code era is either dated to the start of the sound film era, or more generally to March 1930 when the Hays Code was first written. Over the protests of NAMPI, New York became the first state to take advantage of the Supreme Court's decision in Mutual film vs. Ohio by instituting a censorship board in 1921. Virginia followed suit the following year, and eight individual states had a board by the advent of sound film. But many of these were ineffectual. By the 1920s, the New York Stage, a frequent source of subsequent screen material, had topless shows, performances filled with curse words, mature subject matters, and sexually suggestive dialogue. Early in the sound system conversion process, it became apparent that what might be acceptable in New York would not be so in Kansas. In 1927, Hays suggested studio executives form a committee to discuss film censorship. Irving G. Thalberg of Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Sol Wurtzel of Fox, and E. H. Allen of ParamountParamount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
responded by collaborating on a list they called the "Don’ts and Be Carefuls", based on items that were challenged by local censor boards, and which consisted of eleven subjects best avoided, and twenty-six to be handled very carefully. The Federal Trade Commission
Federal Trade Commission
The Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act...
(FTC) approved the list, and Hays created the SRC to oversee its implementation. But there was still no way to enforce these tenets. The controversy surrounding film standards came to a head in 1929.
Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil Blount DeMille was an American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound films. He was renowned for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies...
more than any other director, was responsible for the increasing discussion of sex in cinema in the 1920s. Starting with 1919's Male and Female
Male and Female
Male and Female is a 1919 silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Its main themes are gender relations and social class. It is based on the J. M. Barrie play "The Admirable Crichton".-Plot:...
he made a series of films that examined sex and were highly successful. Films featuring Hollywood's original "It girl
It girl
"It girl" is a term for a young woman who possess the quality "It", absolute attraction.The early usage of the concept "it" in this meaning may be seen in a story by Rudyard Kipling: "It isn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just 'It'."...
" Clara Bow
Clara Bow
Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who rose to stardom in the silent film era of the 1920s. It was her appearance as a spunky shopgirl in the film It that brought her global fame and the nickname "The It Girl." Bow came to personify the roaring twenties and is described as its leading sex...
such as The Saturday Night Kid
The Saturday Night Kid
The Saturday Night Kid is an early talking romantic comedy film about two sisters and the man they both want. It stars Clara Bow, Jean Arthur, and James Hall. The film was based on the play Love 'Em and Leave 'Em by George Abbott and John V. A. Weaver...
(released four days before the October 29, 1929, market crash) highlighted Bow's sexual attractiveness. 1920s stars such as Bow, Gloria Swanson
Gloria Swanson
Gloria Swanson was an American actress, singer and producer. She was one of the most prominent stars during the silent film era as both an actress and a fashion icon, especially under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille, made dozens of silents and was nominated for the first Academy Award in the...
, and Norma Talmadge
Norma Talmadge
Norma Talmadge was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.Her most famous film was Smilin’ Through , but she also...
freely displayed their sexuality in a straightforward fashion.
Hollywood during the Great Depression
The Great Depression presented a unique time for film making in the United States. The economic disaster brought on by the 1929 Stock Market Crash, changed American values and beliefs in various ways. American exceptionalismAmerican exceptionalism
American exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other countries. In this view, America's exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming "the first new nation," and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty,...
and traditional concepts of personal achievement, self-reliance, and the overcoming of odds lost great currency. Due to the constant empty economic reassurances from politicians in the early years of the depression, the American public developed an increasingly jaded attitude. The cynicism, challenging of traditional beliefs, and political controversy of Hollywood films during this period mirrored the attitudes of many of its patrons. Also gone was the carefree and adventurous lifestyle of the 1920s. "After two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the war" F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
commented in 1931.
In the sense noted by Fitzgerald, understanding the moral climate of the early 1930s is complex. Although films experienced an unprecedented level of freedom, and dared to portray things that would be kept hidden for decades later, many in America looked upon the stock market crash as a product of the excesses of the previous decade. In looking back upon the 1920s, events were increasingly often seen as occurring in prelude to the market crash. In 1931's Dance, Fools, Dance
Dance, Fools, Dance
Dance, Fools, Dance is a pre-code Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature film starring Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Lester Vail in a story about a reporter investigating the murder of a colleague. Story and dialogue were created by Aurania Rouverol, and the film was directed by Harry Beaumont...
, lurid party scenes featuring 1920s flappers are played to excess and looked at in amazement and a sense of moral disgust. Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford , born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre....
ultimately reforms her ways and is saved; less fortunate is William Bakewell
William Bakewell
William Bakewell , also known as Billy Bakewell, was an American actor, who achieved his greatest fame as one of the premiere juvenile performers of the late 1920s and early 1930s.-Life and career:...
who continues on his careless path, which ultimately leads to his self-destruction.
For the 1930 film Rain or Shine
Rain or Shine (film)
Rain or Shine is a 1930 film directed by Frank Capra and starring Joe Cook and Louise Fazenda. A woman inherits her father's struggling traveling circus, and looks to the circus's manager, Smiley, to save the day when the performers conspire to strike during a performance.The film was adapted from...
, Milton Ager
Milton Ager
Milton Ager was an American composer.Ager was born in Chicago, Illinois, the sixth of nine children. Leaving school with only three years of formal high-school education, he taught himself to play the piano and embarked on a career as a musician. After spending time as an accompanist to silent...
and Jack Yellin composed the song "Happy Days Are Here Again
Happy Days Are Here Again
"Happy Days Are Here Again" is a song copyrighted in 1929 by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen and published by EMI Robbins Catalog, Inc./Advanced Music Corp...
", a premature celebration if one ever existed. The song was repeated sarcastically by characters in several films such as 1932's Under 18
Under 18
Under 18 is a romantic drama film starring Marian Marsh, Anita Page, Regis Toomey, and Warren William. It is based on the short story "Sky Life" by Frank Mitchell Dazey and Agnes Christine Johnston...
and 1933's 20,000 Years in Sing Sing
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
20,000 Years in Sing Sing is a 1932 American black-and-white drama film set in Sing Sing Penitentary, the notorious maximum security prison in New York State. This movie was directed by Michael Curtiz, and it starred the noted actors Spencer Tracy as the main convict, and Bette Davis as his...
. Less comical was the picture of the United States' future presented in Heroes for Sale
Heroes for Sale
Heroes for Sale is a Depression-era film directed by William Wellman, starring Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, and Loretta Young, and released by Warner Bros. A veteran of World War I, Thomas Holmes, struggles to make his way in civilian life in almost every way imaginable...
where a hobo looks into a depressing night and proclaims, "It's the end of America." Heroes for Sale was directed by prolific Pre-Code director William Wellman and featured silent film star Richard Barthelmess
Richard Barthelmess
Richard Semler "Dick" Barthelmess was an Oscar-nominated silent film star.-Early life:Barthelmess was educated at Hudson River Military Academy at Nyack and Trinity College at Hartford, Connecticut...
as a World War I veteran cast onto the streets with a morphine addiction from his Hospital stay. Harsher still was Wild Boys of the Road, in which Frankie Darrow led a group of dispossessed juvenile drifters who frequently brawl with the police. Gangs like Darrow's were common; around 250,000 youths traveled the country hopping trains or hitchhiking in search of better economic circumstances in the early 1930s.
Sound film
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades would pass before sound motion pictures were made commercially...
in 1927 required an immense expenditure in high-priced new equipment such as sound stages, recording booths, cameras, movie-theater sound systems, etc., not to mention the new-found artistic complications of producing in a radically altered medium. The studios were in a difficult financial position even before the market crash as the sound conversion process and some risky purchases of theater chains had pushed their finances near the breaking point. These economic circumstances led to a loss of nearly half of the weekly attendance numbers and closure of almost a third of the country's theaters in the first few years of the depression. Even so, 60 million Americans were still going to the theaters every week.
Apart from the economic realities of the conversion to sound, were the artistic considerations. Early sound films were often noted for being too verbose. In 1930, Carl Laemmle
Carl Laemmle
Carl Laemmle , born in Laupheim, Württemberg, Germany, was a pioneer in American film making and a founder of one of the original major Hollywood movie studios - Universal...
criticized the wall-to-wall banter of sound pictures, and director Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
wondered what the camera was intended for if the characters were going to narrate all the onscreen action. The film industry also withstood competition from the home radio, and often characters in films went to great lengths to belittle the medium. The film industry was not above using the new medium to broadcast commercials for its projects however, and occasionally turned radio stars into short feature performers to take advantage of their built-in following.
Seething beneath the surface of American life in the Depression was the fear of the angry mob, portrayed in panicked hysteria in films such as Gabriel Over the White House
Gabriel Over the White House
Gabriel Over the White House is a 1933 American Pre-Code film variously described as a "bizarre political fantasy" or a "comedy drama" that "is surprisingly socialist in tone " and which "posits a favorable view of fascism."The film stars Walter Huston, Karen Morley, Franchot Tone, C. Henry Gordon,...
, The Mayor of Hell
The Mayor of Hell
The Mayor of Hell is a Warner Brothers film starring James Cagney. The film was remade in 1938 as Crime School with Humphrey Bogart taking over James Cagney's role and Hell's Kitchen with Ronald Reagan.-Plot:...
, and American Madness
American Madness
American Madness is a 1932 American film directed by Frank Capra and starring Walter Huston as a New York banker embroiled in scandal. The story thematically anticipates Capra's 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life, in which Capra repeats the "run on the bank" scene...
. Massive wide shots of angry hordes, comprising sometimes hundreds of men, rush into action in terrifyingly efficient uniformity. Groups of agitated men either standing in breadlines, loitering in hobo camps, or marching the streets in protest became a prevalent sight during the Great Depression. The Bonus Army
Bonus Army
The Bonus Army was the popular name of an assemblage of some 43,000 marchers—17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups—who gathered in Washington, D.C., in the spring and summer of 1932 to demand immediate cash-payment redemption of their service certificates...
protests of World War I veterans on the US Capital, which Hoover turned into a violent fiasco, prompted many of the Hollywood depictions. Although social issues were examined more directly in the Pre-Code era, Hollywood still largely ignored the Great Depression, as many films sought to ameliorate patrons, rather than incite them.
Will Hays remarked in 1932:
Social problem films
Hays and others, such as Samuel Goldwyn obviously felt that motion pictures presented a form of escapism that served a palliative effect on American moviegoers. Goldwyn had coined the famous dictum, "If you want to send a message, call Western UnionWestern Union
The Western Union Company is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters is in Englewood, Colorado. Up until 2006, Western Union was the best-known U.S...
" in the Pre-Code era. However the MPPDA took the opposite stance when questioned about certain so-called "message" films before Congress in 1932, claiming the audiences' desire for realism led to certain unsavory social, legal, and political issues being portrayed in film.
Employees' Entrance
Employees' Entrance is a 1933 Pre-Code film about the manager of a New York department store and an employee .-Plot:Kurt Anderson is the utterly ruthless, hard-driving general manager of the Monroe department store...
, of which Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...
writes: "As an attack on ruthless capitalism, it goes a lot further than more recent efforts such as Wall Street, and it's amazing how much plot and character are gracefully shoehorned into 75 minutes." The film featured Pre-Code megastar Warren William (later dubbed "the king of Pre-Code"), "at his magnetic worst" playing a vile department store manager who threatens to fire Loretta Young
Loretta Young
Loretta Young was an American actress. Starting as a child actress, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953...
's character unless she sleeps with him, and who also attempts to ruin her husband.
Films that in any way stated a position about a social issue were usually labeled either "propaganda films" or "preachment yarns". In contrast to Goldwyn and MGM's definitively Republican stance on social issue films, Warner Brothers, led by New Deal cheerleader Jack L. Warner, was the most prominent maker of these types of pictures and preferred they be called "Americanism stories". Pre-Code historian Thomas Doherty felt that two recurring elements marked the so-called preachment yarns. "The first is the exculpatory preface; the second is the Jazz Age prelude." The preface was essentially a softened version of a disclaimer that intended to calm any in the audience who disagreed with the film's message. The Jazz Age prelude was almost singularly used to cast shame on the boisterous behavior of the 1920s.
Cabin in the Cotton, released in 1932, is a message film about the evils of capitalism. The film takes place in an unspecified southern state where workers are given barely enough to survive and taken advantage of in the form of exorbitant interest rates and high prices by unconscionable landowners. The film is decidedly anti-capitalist, however its preface claims otherwise:
In the end however, the planters admit their wrongdoing and agree to a more equitable distribution of Capital. The avaricious businessman remained a recurring character in Pre-Code cinema. In 1932's The Match King
The Match King
The Match King is a 1932 film made by First National Pictures, directed by William Keighley and Howard Bretherton, and starring Warren William and Lili Damita. The film closely follows the rise and fall of Swedish safety match tycoon Ivar Kreuger.-Plot:...
, Warren William played an industrialist based on the Swedish entrepreneur Ivar Kreuger
Ivar Kreuger
Ivar Kreuger was a Swedish civil engineer, financier, entrepreneur and industrialist. In 1908 Kreuger co-founded the construction company Kreuger & Toll Byggnads AB which specialized in new building techniques. By aggressive investments and innovative financial instruments he built a global match...
, himself nicknamed "Match King", who attempts to corner the global market on match
Match
A match is a tool for starting a fire under controlled conditions. A typical modern match is made of a small wooden stick or stiff paper. One end is coated with a material that can be ignited by frictional heat generated by striking the match against a suitable surface...
es. William's vile character, Paul Kroll, commits every crime from robbery, fraud, and murder on his way from a janitorial position to captain of industry. When the market collapses in the 1929 crash, Williams is ruined and commits suicide to avoid imprisonment. Williams again played an unscrupulous businessman in 1932's Skyscraper Souls
Skyscraper Souls
Skyscraper Souls is a Pre-Code 1932 drama film starring Warren William and Maureen O'Sullivan. The film was directed by Edgar Selwyn and is based upon the novel Skyscraper by Faith Baldwin.-Plot:...
, this time portraying David Dwight, a wealthy banker. Dwight owns a building named after himself that is larger than the Empire State Building
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building is a 102-story landmark skyscraper and American cultural icon in New York City at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet , and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft high. Its name is derived...
, and fools everyone he knows into poverty so that he may accumulate their wealth. His moral character is equally revolting and he is shot by his secretary, whom he has betrayed, at the end of the film.
America's distrust of lawyers during the depression was also a frequent topic of dissection in social problem films such Lawyer Man
Lawyer Man
Lawyer Man is a 1933 Warner Bros. drama film directed by William Dieterle. The story is based on the novel by Max Trell and the film stars William Powell and Joan Blondell....
, State's Attorney
State's Attorney
In the United States, the State's Attorney is, most commonly, an elected official who represents the State in criminal prosecutions and is often the chief law enforcement officer of their respective county, circuit...
, and The Mouthpiece
The Mouthpiece
The Mouthpiece is a 1932 crime drama film directed by James Flood and Elliott Nugent.-Selected cast:*Warren William as Vincent 'Vince' Day*Sidney Fox as Celia Farraday*Aline MacMahon as Miss Hickey, Day's secretary*John Wray as Mr. Barton...
. In films like Paid
Paid (1930 film)
Paid is a 1930 American drama film starring Joan Crawford, Robert Armstrong, and Kent Douglass in a story about a wrongly accused ex-convict who seeks revenge, within the law, on those who sent her to prison. The film was adapted by Lucien Hubbard and Charles MacArthur from the play, Within the...
, innocent characters are turned into criminals by the legal system. The life of Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford , born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre....
's character is ruined and her romantic interest is executed so that she may live free—even though she is innocent of the crime of which the district attorney wants to convict her. Even religious hypocrisy was not spared in films such as The Miracle Woman
The Miracle Woman
The Miracle Woman is a film released by Columbia Pictures about a woman preacher and the blind man who loves her . Directed by Frank Capra, it was the second of his five film collaborations with Stanwyck...
starring Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra...
and directed by Frank Capra
Frank Capra
Frank Russell Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s...
. Stanwyck also portrayed a noble nurse attempting to heal two sick children while surrounded by nefarious characters (including Clark Gable
Clark Gable
William Clark Gable , known as Clark Gable, was an American film actor most famous for his role as Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh...
as child endangering chauffeur) in Night Nurse
Night Nurse (1931 film)
Night Nurse is a 1931 Pre-Code, Prohibition-era, Warner Bros. crime drama and mystery film directed by William A. Wellman and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell and Clark Gable. The film was considered risqué at the time of its release, particularly the scene where Stanwyck and...
.
Countless films dealt with the economic realities of a country struggling to find its next meal. In Blonde Venus
Blonde Venus
Blonde Venus is a 1932 is a Pre-Code drama film starring Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant. The movie was produced and directed for Paramount Pictures by Josef von Sternberg with a screenplay by Jules Furthman and S. K. Lauren adapted from a story by Furthman and von Sternberg. The music score was by W...
, Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer.Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films...
resorts to prostitution to feed her child, and Claudette Colbert
Claudette Colbert
Claudette Colbert was a French-born American-based actress of stage and film.Born in Paris, France and raised in New York City, Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the 1920s, progressing to film with the advent of talking pictures...
's character in It Happened One Night
It Happened One Night
It Happened One Night is a 1934 American romantic comedy film with elements of screwball comedy directed by Frank Capra, in which a pampered socialite tries to get out from under her father's thumb, and falls in love with a roguish reporter . The plot was based on the story Night Bus by Samuel...
gets her comeuppance for throwing food into the sea. Joan Blondell's character in Big City Blues
Big City Blues (1932 film)
Big City Blues is a 1932 Warner Bros. drama film directed by Mervyn LeRoy. The story is based on the play by Ward Morehouse and the film stars Joan Blondell.-Plot:...
complains that as a chorus girl
Chorus Girl
A chorus girl is a female performer in a chorus or chorus line.It may also refer to:*Chorus Girl , a compilation from Atomic Records*Chorus Girls , a 1981 musical*"The Chorus Girl", a story by Anton Chekhov...
, diamonds and pearls used to be common gifts, but now she is content with a corn beef sandwich. In Union Depot
Union Depot (film)
Union Depot is a Pre-Code film starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Joan Blondell, directed by Alfred E. Green for Warner Brothers, and based upon an unpublished play by Joe Laurie, Jr., Gene Fowler, and Douglas Durkin....
, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. puts a luscious meal as the first order of business on his itinerary after coming into money.
Political releases
Not surprisingly given the social circumstances, politically oriented social problem films ridiculed politicians and portrayed them as incompetent bumblers, scoundrels, and liars. In The Dark HorseThe Dark Horse (film)
The Dark Horse is a 1932 film starring Warren William and Bette Davis. The movie was directed by Alfred E. Green.-Synopsis:The Progressive Party convention is deadlocked for governor, and so both sides nominate the dark horse Zachary Hicks...
Warren William is again enlisted, this time to get an imbecile, who is accidentally in the running for Governor, elected. Despite incessant, embarrassing mishaps by the candidate, he wins the election. Washington Merry-Go-Round portrayed the state of a political system stuck in neutral. Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...
nearly released the film with a scene of the public execution of a politician as the climax before deciding to cut the lynching. Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil Blount DeMille was an American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound films. He was renowned for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies...
released This Day and Age
This Day and Age (film)
This Day and Age is a 1933 film directed by Cecil B. DeMille. It is one of his rarest films and has not been released on DVD. In his book Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood, author Robert S...
in 1933, and it stands in stark contrast to his other films of the period. Filmed shortly after DeMille had completed a five-month tour of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, This Day and Age takes place in America and features several children torturing a gangster who got away with the murder of a popular local shopkeeper. The children lower the gangster into a vat of rats and when the police arrive, the cops encourage the kids to continue. In the film's ending, the children take the gangster to a local judge and force the magistrate to conduct a trial in which the outcome is never in doubt.
The need for strong leaders who could take charge and steer America out of its crisis is seen in Gabriel Over the White House
Gabriel Over the White House
Gabriel Over the White House is a 1933 American Pre-Code film variously described as a "bizarre political fantasy" or a "comedy drama" that "is surprisingly socialist in tone " and which "posits a favorable view of fascism."The film stars Walter Huston, Karen Morley, Franchot Tone, C. Henry Gordon,...
, a strange, surreal film about a benevolent dictator who takes control of the United States. Walter Huston
Walter Huston
Walter Thomas Huston was a Canadian-born American actor. He was the father of actor and director John Huston and the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.-Life and career:...
stars as a weak willed, ineffectual president, likely modeled after Hoover, who upon being knocked unconscious is inhabited by the archangel Gabriel
Gabriel
In Abrahamic religions, Gabriel is an Archangel who typically serves as a messenger to humans from God.He first appears in the Book of Daniel, delivering explanations of Daniel's visions. In the Gospel of Luke Gabriel foretells the births of both John the Baptist and of Jesus...
. The spirit's behavior is similar to that of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
. The president then solves the nation's unemployment crisis and executes a criminal based on Al Capone who has continually flouted the law. Dictators were not just glorified in fiction. Columbia's Mussolini Speaks
Mussolini Speaks
Mussolini Speaks is a 1933 documentary film highlight the first 10 years of Benito Mussolini’s rule as Prime Minister of Italy. The film, narrated by U.S...
(1933) was a 76-minute paean to the Fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
leader. NBC radio commentator Lowell Thomas
Lowell Thomas
Lowell Jackson Thomas was an American writer, broadcaster, and traveler, best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous...
narrates the film. After showing some of the progress Italy has made during Il Duce's ten year reign, Thomas opines, "This is a time when a dictator comes in handy!" The film was viewed by over 175,000 jubilant people during its first two weeks at the cavernous Palace Theater
Palace Theatre (Albany, New York)
The Palace Theatre is an entertainment venue, in downtown Albany, New York, located on the corner of Clinton Avenue and North Pearl Street . The 2,844 seat theater is owned by the City of Albany and presents various music, drama, film and comedy performances...
in New York.
The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) in 1932 quelled the public affection for dictators. As the country became increasingly enthralled with FDR, who was featured in countless newsreel
Newsreel
A newsreel was a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs and entertainment for millions of moviegoers...
s, it exhibited less desire for alternative forms of government. Many Hollywood films reflected this new optimism. Heroes for Sale, despite being a tremendously bleak and at times anti-American film, ends on a positive note as the New Deal appears as a sign of optimism. When Wild Boys of the Road, a 1933 film directed by William Wellman the most prolific Pre-Code director, reaches its conclusion, a dispossessed juvenile delinquent is in court expecting a jail sentence. However the judge lets the boy go free, revealing to him the symbol of the New Deal behind his desk, and tells him "[t]hings are going to be better here now, not only here in New York, but all over the country." A box office casualty of this hopefulness was Gabriel over the White House, which entered production during the Hoover era malaise and sought to capitalize on it. By the time the film was released on March 31, 1933, Roosevelt's election had produced a level of hopefulness in America that rendered the film's message obsolete.
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's rise to power in Germany and his regime's anti-Semitic policies significantly affected American Pre-Code film making. Although Hitler had become unpopular in many parts of the United States, Germany was still a voluminous importer of American films, and the studios wanted to appease the German Government. The ban on Jews and negative portrayals of Germany in the Fatherland, even led to a significant reduction in work for Jews in Hollywood until after World War II. As a result, only two social problem films released by independent film companies addressed the mania in Germany during the Pre-Code era — Are We Civilized?
Are We Civilized?
Are We Civilized? is an independently released 1934 Pre-Code American social problem film directed by Edwin Carewe which constituted a veiled attack on Adolf Hitler. The film was given a negative review by Time magazine upon its release.- Cast :...
and Hitler's Reign of Terror
Hitler's Reign of Terror
Hitler's Reign of Terror is an independently released 1934 Pre-Code social problem film that attacked Adolf Hitler. The film is a combination of live action and documentary. Despite the fact that the New York state censor board refused the film a license, it played for two weeks in New York City in...
. In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz
Herman J. Mankiewicz
Herman Jacob Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter, who, with Orson Welles, wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane . Earlier, he was the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the drama critic for The New York Times and The New Yorker. Alexander Woollcott, said that Herman Mankiewicz was...
and producer Sam Jaffe
Sam Jaffe (producer)
Sam Jaffe was, at different points in his career in the motion picture industry, an agent, a producer and a studio executive. He was brother-in-law to B.P...
announced they were working on a picture titled Mad Dog of Europe that was intended to be a full-scale attack on Hitler. Jaffe had quit his job at RKO Pictures
RKO Pictures
RKO Pictures is an American film production and distribution company. As RKO Radio Pictures Inc., it was one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chains and Joseph P...
to make the film. Hays summoned the pair to his office and told them to cease production as they were causing needless headaches for the studios.
Crime films
In the early 1900s, America was still primarily a rural country, especially in self-identity. D. W. GriffithD. W. Griffith
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...
's 1912 film The Musketeers of Pig Alley
The Musketeers of Pig Alley
The Musketeers of Pig Alley is a 1912 American short drama film credited as the first gangster film in history. It is directed by D. W. Griffith and written by Griffith and Anita Loos. It is also credited for its early use of follow focus, a fundamental tool in cinematography.The film was released...
is one of the earliest American films to feature urban organized crime. Prohibition's arrival in 1920 created an environment where anyone who wanted to drink had to consort with criminals, especially in urban areas. Nonetheless, the urban crime genre was mostly ignored until 1927 when the film Underworld
Underworld (1927 film)
Underworld is a 1927 silent crime film directed by Josef von Sternberg.-Plot:Boisterous gangster kingpin Bull Weed rehabilitates his former lawyer from his alcoholic haze, but complications arise when he falls for Weed's girlfriend.-Cast:* George Bancroft as "Bull" Weed* Evelyn Brent as "Feathers"...
, which is recognized as the first gangster movie, became a surprise hit. According to the Encyclopedia of Hollywoods entry on Underworld, "The film established the fundamental elements of the gangster movie: a hoodlum hero; ominous, night-shrouded city streets; floozies; and a blazing finale in which the cops cut down the protagonist." Gangster films such as Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt (1929 film)
Thunderbolt is a 1929 proto-noir which tells the story of a criminal, facing execution, who wants to kill the man in the next cell for being in love with his girlfriend. It stars George Bancroft, Fay Wray, Richard Arlen, Tully Marshall and Eugenie Besserer....
, and Doorway to Hell were released to capitalize on Underworld's popularity, with Thunderbolt being described as "a virtual remake" of the film. Other late 1920s crime films investigated the connection between mobsters and Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
productions in movies such as 1928's Lights of New York
Lights of New York (1928 film)
Lights of New York was the first all-talking feature film, released by Warner Brothers and directed by Bryan Foy. The film, which cost only $23,000 to produce, grossed over $1,000,000. It was also the first film to define the crime genre...
, and 1929's Tenderloin
Tenderloin (film)
Tenderloin is a crime film directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Dolores Costello. It was produced and released by Warner Brothers. Tenderloin is considered a lost film, with no prints currently known to exist.-Cast:...
, and Broadway
Broadway (1929 film)
Broadway is a 1929 film directed by Pál Fejös from the play of the same name by George Abbott and Philip Dunning. It stars Glenn Tryon, Evelyn Brent, Paul Porcasi, Robert Ellis, Merna Kennedy and Thomas E...
.
The Hays Office had never officially recommended banning violence in any form in the 1920s — unlike profanity, the drug trade or prostitution — but advised that it be handled carefully. New York's censor board was more thorough that of any other state, missing only around 50 of the country's 1,000 to 1,300 annual releases. In 1927–8 the violent scenes they most removed were all instances where the gun was pointed at the camera, some instances where guns were pointed "at or into the body of another character", many shots where machine guns were featured, scenes where criminals shot at law enforcement officers, some scenes involving stabbing or knife brandishing (audiences considered stabbings more disturbing than shootings), most whippings, several involving choking, torture, or electrocution, and scenes which could be considered educational in their depiction of crime methods. Sadistic violence, and reaction shots showing the faces of individuals on the receiving end of violence were considered especially sensitive areas. The Code later recommended against scenes showing "robbery", "theft", "safe-cracking", "arson", "the use of firearms", "dynamiting of trains, machines, and buildings", and "brutal killings" on the basis that they would be rejected by local censors.
Birth of the Hollywood gangster
In the early 1930s, several real life criminals became celebrities. Two in particular captured the American imagination: Al CaponeAl Capone
Alphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone was an American gangster who led a Prohibition-era crime syndicate. The Chicago Outfit, which subsequently became known as the "Capones", was dedicated to smuggling and bootlegging liquor, and other illegal activities such as prostitution, in Chicago from the early...
and John Dillinger
John Dillinger
John Herbert Dillinger, Jr. was an American bank robber in Depression-era United States. He was charged with, but never convicted of, the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana police officer during a shoot-out. This was his only alleged homicide. His gang robbed two dozen banks and four police stations...
. Gangsters like Capone had transformed the perception of entire towns. Capone gave Chicago its..."reputation as the locus classicus of American gangsterdom, a cityscape where bullet-proof roadsters with tommygun-toting hoodlums on running boards careened around State Street spraying fusillades of slugs into flower shop windows and mowing down the competition in blood-spattered garages." Capone appeared on the cover of Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine in 1930. He was even offered seven figure sums by two major Hollywood studios to appear in a film but declined. Dillinger became a national celebrity as a bank robber who eluded arrest and escaped confinement several times. He had become the most celebrated public outlaw since Jesse James
Jesse James
Jesse Woodson James was an American outlaw, gang leader, bank robber, train robber, and murderer from the state of Missouri and the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang. He also faked his own death and was known as J.M James. Already a celebrity when he was alive, he became a legendary...
. His father appeared in a popular series of newsreels giving police homespun advice on how to catch his son. Dillinger's popularity rose so quickly that Variety joked "if Dillinger remains at large much longer and more such interviews are obtained, there may be some petitions circulated to make him our president." Hays wrote a cablegram to all the studios in March 1934 mandating that Dillinger not be portrayed in any motion picture.
The genre entered a new level following the release of the 1931 film Little Caesar
Little Caesar (film)
Little Caesar is a 1931 Warner Bros. Pre-Code crime film. It tells the story of a hoodlum who ascends the ranks of organized crime until he reaches its upper echelons. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, the film stars Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.. The story was adapted by Francis Edward...
, which featured Edward G. Robinson in a career defining performance as gangster Rico Bandello. Caesar, along with The Public Enemy
The Public Enemy
The Public Enemy is a 1931 American Pre-Code crime film starring James Cagney and directed by William A. Wellman. The film relates the story of a young man's rise in the criminal underworld in prohibition-era urban America...
starring James Cagney
James Cagney
James Francis Cagney, Jr. was an American actor, first on stage, then in film, where he had his greatest impact. Although he won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances, he is best remembered for playing "tough guys." In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eighth...
as Tom Powers and Scarface
Scarface (1932 film)
Scarface is a 1932 American gangster film starring Paul Muni and George Raft, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, and written by Ben Hecht based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Armitage Trail...
featuring Paul Muni
Paul Muni
Paul Muni was an Austrian-Hungarian-born American stage and film actor...
as Tony Comante, were incredibly violent films that created a new type of anti-hero. Nine gangster films were released in 1930, 26 in 1931, 28 in 1932, and 15 in 1933, when the genre's popularity began to subside after the end of Prohibition. The backlash against gangster pictures was swift. In 1931, Jack L. Warner announced that his studio would stop making them, and that he had never let his 15-year-old son see them.
Generally considered the grandfather of gangster films, in Caesar Robinson as Rico and his close friend Joe Massara (played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Douglas Elton Fairbanks, Jr. KBE was an American actor and a highly decorated naval officer of World War II.-Early life:...
) move to Chicago. Joe wants to go straight and meets a woman. Rico, however, seeks a life of crime and joins the gang of Sam Vettori. He rises to the rank of boss of the crime family. After becoming concerned his friend will betray him he threatens him, at which point Joe's girlfriend goes to the police. Unable to bring himself to kill Joe and thus eliminate the witness against him, he goes into hiding. He is coaxed out by the police who publish that he is a coward to the press. Rico is killed in a blaze of gunfire and as he is dying says "Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?" Originally, Robinson was cast in a small role but persuaded the film's producer to let him play the lead role. Wingate, then the head of New York's censor board, told Hays that he was flooded with complaints from people who saw kids in theaters nationwide "applaud the gang leader as a hero." Caesar's success inspired Fox's The Secret Six
The Secret Six
For the DC comic book see Secret Six .The Secret Six is a fast-paced 1931 Pre-Code crime film starring Wallace Beery as "Slaughterhouse Scorpio", a character very loosely based on Al Capone, and featuring Lewis Stone, John Mack Brown, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Marjorie Rambeau and Ralph Bellamy. ...
and Quick Millions
Quick Millions
Quick Millions is a 1931 Pre-Code crime film directed by Rowland Brown. The film involves a truck driver and the wealthy woman that he covets, and also features George Raft and Leon Ames in supporting roles.-Cast:...
, and Paramount's City Streets
City Streets (film)
City Streets is a 1931 Pre-Code crime film based upon a story written by Dashiell Hammett, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, and starring Gary Cooper, Sylvia Sidney, Paul Lukas and Guy Kibbee.-Plot:...
, but the next big Hollywood gangster came from another Warners picture.
William Wellman's The Public Enemy was released by Warner Brothers the following year and features another career defining performance, this time James Cagney
James Cagney
James Francis Cagney, Jr. was an American actor, first on stage, then in film, where he had his greatest impact. Although he won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances, he is best remembered for playing "tough guys." In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eighth...
as Tom Powers. The film is similar to the template set in Caesar in that it follows Powers from his rise to his eventual fall in the world of crime. The film was partially based on the real life of Chicago gangster Dean O'Banion
Dean O'Banion
Charles Dean O'Banion was an Irish-American mobster who was the main rival of Johnny Torrio and Al Capone during the brutal Chicago bootlegging wars of the 1920s...
. Cagney's character contrasts his puritanical brother who wants him to go straight, while their mother is at the center of the conflict. Tom Powers is egotistical, amoral, heartless, ruthless, and extremely violent. The most famous scene in the picture is referred to as the "grapefruit scene"; when Cagney is eating breakfast, his girlfriend (Mae Clarke
Mae Clarke
Mae Clarke was an American actress most noted for playing Frankenstein's bride, chased by Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, and having a grapefruit smashed into her face by James Cagney in The Public Enemy, both released in 1931.-Early life and career:Clarke was born Violet Mary Klotz in...
) angers him and he shoves half a grapefruit in her face. The film's trailer featured no scenes from the film; instead, it contained a voice over warning of the picture's intensity, and showed a gun being fired directly at the camera.
Picture Snatcher
Picture Snatcher is a 1933 Pre-Code drama film starring James Cagney as a gangster who decides to quit to pursue his dream.-Plot:After getting out of prison, Danny Kean shocks the gang he leads by quitting. He wants his first stint in jail to be his last, and he has always dreamed of becoming a...
, where he knocks out an amorous woman he is not interested in and violently throws her into the back seat of his car. In April 1931, the same month as the release of The Public Enemy, Hays recruited former police chief August Vollmer to conduct a study on the effect gangster pictures had on children. After he had finished his work, Vollmer stated that gangster films were innocuous and even too favorable in their depiction of the police. Although Hays used the results to defend the film industry, the New York State censorship board was not impressed and from 1930 to 1932 removed 2,200 crime scenes from pictures.
The most incendiary Pre-Code gangster film was undoubtedly Scarface. Directed by Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
and starring Muni as Tony Comante, the film is partially based on the life of Al Capone and incorporates details of Capone's biography into the storyline. When the film begins, Comante works for Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins
Osgood Perkins
Osgood Perkins was an American actor.-Life and career:Perkins was born James Ripley Osgood Perkins in West Newton, Massachusetts, the son of Helen Virginia and Henry Phelps Perkins. He is a descendant of a Mayflower passenger John Howland. Perkins made his Broadway debut in 1924 in the George S...
) but is unhappy being a subordinate and is attracted to Lovo's girlfriend Poppy (Karen Morley
Karen Morley
-Life and career:Born Mildred Linton in Ottumwa, Iowa, Morley lived there until she was thirteen years old. When she came to Hollywood, she attended Hollywood High School, and she later graduated from UCLA....
). He has a deep love for his promiscuous sister, who he expects to remain chaste, that has often been deemed incestuous. Lovo warns Comante to leave the North Side alone as it is controlled by a rival mob. Comante ignores this warning and begins a series of executions and extortions that result in a war with the North side gang. Comante then forcefully takes the gang over from Lovo, at which point Lovo tries to kill him but fails. Comante murders Lovo and Poppy happily becomes his girl. When Comante finds his missing sister and his closest friend, the coin flipping gangster Guino Rinaldo (played by George Raft
George Raft
George Raft was an American film actor and dancer identified with portrayals of gangsters in crime melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s...
), in a hotel room, he goes into a rage and kills Rinaldo. After he finds out that they had become married and wanted to surprise Comante he becomes despondent. In the film's ending, first Comante's sister, then Comante are gunned down by police.
The production of Scarface was troubled from the start. The Hays office warned Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...
, the film's producer, not to make the film. When the film was completed in late 1931, the Hays office demanded numerous changes including a conclusion where Comante was captured, tried, convicted, and hung, and that the film carry the subtitle Shame of a Nation. Hughes sent the film to numerous state censorship boards, saying that he hoped to show that the film was made to combat the "gangster menace". After being unable to get the film past the New York State censor board (then headed by Wingate) even after the changes, Hughes sued the NY board and won, allowing him to release the film in a version close to its intended form. When other local censors refused to release the edited version, the Hays Office sent Jason Joy around to them to assure them that the cycle of gangster films of this nature was ending.
Scarface provoked outrage mainly because of its unprecedented violence, but also because of its shifts of tone from serious to comedic. Dave Kehr
Dave Kehr
Dave Kehr is an American film critic. A critic at the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune for many years, he writes a weekly column for The New York Times on DVD releases, in addition to contributing occasional pieces on individual films or filmmakers.-Early life and education:Dave Kehr did...
, writing in the Chicago Reader, stated that the film blends "comedy and horror in a manner that suggests Chico Marx let loose with a live machine gun." In one particular scene, Comante is inside a cafe while a torrent of machine gun fire from the car of a rival gang is headed his way. And after the barrage is over, Comante picks up one of the newly released tommy gun
Tommy Gun
Tommy Gun may refer to:*Thompson submachine gun or Tommy gun, a submachine gun*"Tommy Gun" , a song by The Clash...
s the gangsters dropped and exhibits child like wonder and unrestrained excitement over the new toy. Civic leaders became furious that gangsters like Capone (who was also the blatant inspiration for Little Caesar) were being applauded in movie houses all across America. Some of the biographical details that were used for Muni's character in Scarface were so obviously taken from Capone, and the detail so close, that it was impossible not to draw the parallels.
One of the factors that made gangster pictures so subversive was that in the difficult economic times of the Depression there already existed the viewpoint that the only way to get financial success was through crime. The Kansas City Times
Kansas City Times
The Kansas City Times was a morning newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri, that was published from 1867 to 1990.The morning Kansas City Times, under ownership of afternoon The Kansas City Star, won two Pulitzer Prizes and was actually bigger than its parent when its name was changed to the...
argued that while adults may not be particularly affected by these films, they were "misleading, contaminating, and often demoralizing to children and youth." Exacerbating the problem, local theater owners advertised gangster pictures with a singular irresponsibility. Real-life murders were tied into promotions and "theater lobbies displayed tommy guns and blackjacks
Baton (law enforcement)
A truncheon or baton is essentially a club of less than arm's length made of wood, plastic, or metal...
". The situation reached such a nexus that the studios had to ask exhibitors to tone down the gimmickry in their promotions.
Prison films
In contrast to the crumbling social system outside their walls, the prison film portrayed a universe where the state was orderly and all-powerful. Sparked by the Ohio penitentiary fire on April 21, 1930 in which guards refused to release prisoners from their cells causing 300 deaths, the films depicted the inhumane conditions in prisons in the early 1930s. The genre was composed of two archetypes: the prison film and the chain gang film. In the prison film, large hordes of men move about in identical uniforms, resigned to their fate, they live by a well-defined code. In the chain gang film, Southern prisoners were subjected to a draconian system in the usually blazing outdoors where they were treated terribly by their ruthless captors. The prototype of the prison genres was 1930's The Big House. 1932's I am a Fugitive from a Chain GangI Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is a Pre-Code crime/drama film starring Paul Muni as a wrongfully convicted convict on a chain gang who escapes to Chicago. The film was written by Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes from Robert Elliott Burns's autobiography, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain...
is considered the seminal film of the chain gang genre. Although the chain gang film Hell's Highway had beaten Fugitive to the screen two months earlier, it exerted nowhere near the influence.
In The Big House Robert Montgomery
Robert Montgomery (actor)
Robert Montgomery was an American actor and director.- Early life :Montgomery was born Henry Montgomery, Jr. in Beacon, New York, then known as "Fishkill Landing", the son of Mary Weed and Henry Montgomery, Sr. His early childhood was one of privilege, since his father was president of the New...
plays a squirmy inmate who is sentences to six years after committing vehicular manslaughter while under the influence. His cellmates are a murderer played by Wallace Beery
Wallace Beery
Wallace Fitzgerald Beery was an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler, as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, as Pancho Villa in Viva Villa!, and his titular role in The Champ, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor...
and a forger played by Chester Morris
Chester Morris
Chester Morris was an American actor, who starred in the Boston Blackie detective series of the 1940s.-Career:...
. The picture features future genre staples such as solitary confinement, informers, riots, visitations, an escape, and the codes of prison life. The protagonist, Montgomery, ends up being a loathsome character, a coward who will sell anyone in the prison out to get an early release. The film was banned in Ohio, the site of the deadly prison riots that inspired it. Numbered Men, The Criminal Code
The Criminal Code
The Criminal Code is a Hollywood crime film, directed by Howard Hawks, based on a play by Martin Flavin with cinematic adaptation by screenwriters Seton I...
, Shadow of the Law
Shadow of the law
Bargaining under the shadow of the law refers to settling cases or making plea bargains in a way that takes into account what would happen at trial. It has been argued that criminal trials resolve such a small percentage of criminal cases "that their shadows are faint and hard to discern."...
, and others, from no less than seven studios, followed. However, prison films only appealed to men for the most part, and had weak box office performances as a result. Studios also produced children's prison films that addressed the juvenile delinquency problems of America in the Depression. The Mayor of Hell featured kids killing a murderously abusive reform school overseer without retribution.
I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, based on the true story of Robert. E. Burns, is the most famous of the chain gang films of the early 1930s. Highly decorated veteran James Allen (Paul Muni
Paul Muni
Paul Muni was an Austrian-Hungarian-born American stage and film actor...
) returns from World War I a changed man, and seeks an alternative to the tedious job that he left behind. He travels the country in poverty seeking various jobs and hoping to become involved in construction planning. Allen follows a hobo he has just met at a homeless shelter into a cafe, taking him up on his offer of a free meal. When the hobo attempts to rob the place, he is charged as an accessory, convicted of stealing a few dollars, and sentenced to ten years in a chain gang. The men are chained together and transported to a quarry to break rocks every day. Even when unchained from each other, shackles always remain around their ankles. Allen convinces a large black prisoner who has particularly good aim to hit the shackles on his ankles with a sledgehammer to bend them. He removes his feet from the bent shackles and in a famous sequence, escapes through the woods while being chased by bloodhounds. On the outside, he develops a new identity and becomes a respected developer in Chicago. He is blackmailed into marriage by a woman he does not love who knows his secret. When he threatens to leave her for a young woman he has fallen in love with, she turns him in. His case becomes a cause célèbre
Cause célèbre
A is an issue or incident arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning and heated public debate. The term is particularly used in connection with celebrated legal cases. It is a French phrase in common English use...
and he agrees to turn himself in under the agreement that he will serve only 90 days. He is tricked however and not let free at the agreed upon time. This forces him to escape again, and he seeks out the young woman he loves, telling her they cannot be together because he will always be hunted. The films end with her asking him how he survives, and his ominous reply from the darkness; "I Steal".
Although based on reality, Chain Gang changes the facts slightly to appeal to Depression era audiences by making Allen's return home one to a country that is struggling economically, even though Burns returned to the roaring twenties. The film's bleak, anti-establishment ending shocked audiences. Laughter in Hell is a 1933 film directed by Edward L. Cahn and starring Pat O'Brien
Pat O'Brien (actor)
Pat O’Brien was an American film actor with more than one hundred screen credits.-Early life:O’Brien was born William Joseph Patrick O’Brien to an Irish-American Catholic family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He served as an altar boy at Gesu Church while growing up near 13th and Clybourn streets...
, who plays a railroad engineer who kills his wife and her lover in a jealous rage and is sent to prison. The dead man's brother ends up being the prison warden and torments the engineer. O'Brien and several other characters revolt, killing the warden and escaping from the prison. The film drew controversy for a scene in which several black men were lynched
Lynching
Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that...
. Reports vary if the blacks were hung separately or alongside other white men. The film critic for New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
(an African American weekly newspaper) praised the scene for being courageous enough to depict the atrocities that were occurring in some southern states.
Sex films
Promotion
As films featuring prurient elements performed well at the box office, after the crack down on crime films, Hollywood increased its production of pictures featuring the seven deadly sinsSeven deadly sins
The 7 Deadly Sins, also known as the Capital Vices or Cardinal Sins, is a classification of objectionable vices that have been used since early Christian times to educate and instruct followers concerning fallen humanity's tendency to sin...
. In 1932, Warner Brothers formed an official policy decreeing that "two out of five stories should be hot", and that nearly all films could benefit by "adding something having to do with ginger." Filmmakers even began putting in suggestive material they knew would never reach theaters. MGM screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart
Donald Ogden Stewart
Donald Ogden Stewart was an American author and screenwriter.-Life:His hometown was Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Yale University, where he became a brother to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity , in 1916 and was in the Naval Reserves in World War I.After the war he started to write and found...
said that "[Joy and Wingate] wouldn't want to take out too much, so you would give them five things to take out to satisfy the Hays Office — and you would get away with murder with what they left in." Films such as Laughing Sinners
Laughing Sinners
Laughing Sinners Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature film starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable in a story about a cafe entertainer who experiences spiritual redemption. The dialogue by Martin Flavin was based upon the play, Torch Song by Kenyon Nicholson. The film was directed by Harry Beaumont...
, Safe in Hell, The Devil is Driving
The Devil is Driving
The Devil is Driving is a 1932 Pre-Code film directed by Ben Stoloff and starring Edmund Lowe. The film's title was typical of the sensationalistic titles of many Pre-Code films. It runs a mere 63 minutes, and like many Pre-Code movies deals openly with issues like sex and violence. Lowe plays a...
, Free Love, Merrily We Go to Hell
Merrily We Go to Hell
Merrily We Go to Hell is a 1932 Pre-Code film starring Academy Award winning actor Fredric March and Sylvia Sidney. The film was directed by Dorothy Arzner. The film's title is an example of the sensationalistic titles that were common in the Pre-Code era. Many newspapers refused to publicize the...
, Laughter in Hell
Laughter in Hell
Laughter in Hell is a 1933 Pre-Code film directed by Edward L. Cahn and starring Pat O'Brien. The film's title was typical of the sensationalistic titles of many Pre-Code films. The film was inspired in part by I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and was part of a series of movies depicting men in...
, and The Road to Ruin were provocative in their mere titles. Studios marketed their films, sometimes dishonestly, by inventing suggestive tag lines and lurid titles, even going so far as to hold in house contests for thinking up provocative titles for screenplays. Commonly labeled "sex films" by the censors, these pictures offended taste in more categories than just sexuality. According to a Variety analysis of 440 pictures produced in 1932–33, 352 had "some sex slant", with 145 possessing "questionable sequences", and 44 being "critically sexual". The trade paper summarized that "over 80% of the world's chief picture output was ... flavored with bedroom essence." Attempts to create films for adults only (dubbed "pinking") only served to bring large audiences of all ages to the cineplex.
Posters and publicity photos were often tantalizing. Woman appeared in poses and garb not even glimpsed in the films themselves. In some cases actresses with small parts in films, or in the case of Dolores Murray in her publicity still for The Common Law, no part at all, appeared barely clothed. Hays became outraged at the steamy pictures circulating in newspapers around the country. The original Hays Code contained an often-ignored note about advertising imagery, but he wrote an entirely new advertising screed in the style of the Ten Commandments
Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments, also known as the Decalogue , are a set of biblical principles relating to ethics and worship, which play a fundamental role in Judaism and most forms of Christianity. They include instructions to worship only God and to keep the Sabbath, and prohibitions against idolatry,...
that contained a set of twelve prohibitions. The first seven addressed imagery. They prohibited women in undergarments, women raising their skirts, suggestive poses, kissing, necking, and other suggestive material. The last five concerned advertising copy and prohibited misrepresentation of the film's contents, "salacious copy", and the word "courtesan
Courtesan
A courtesan was originally a female courtier, which means a person who attends the court of a monarch or other powerful person.In feudal society, the court was the centre of government as well as the residence of the monarch, and social and political life were often completely mixed together...
". Soon, studios found their way around the restrictions and published increasingly racy imagery. Ultimately this backfired in 1934 when a billboard in Philadelphia was placed outside Cardinal Thomas Dougherty's home. Severely offended, Dougherty helped launch the motion picture boycott that later facilitated the enforcement of the Code. A commonly repeated theme by those supporting censorship, and one mentioned in the Code itself, was the notion that the common people needed to be saved from themselves by the more refined cultural elite.
Despite the obvious attempts to appeal to red-blooded American males, most of the patrons of sex pictures were female. Variety squarely blamed women for the increase in vice pictures: Pre-Code female audiences liked to indulge in the carnal lifestyles of mistresses and adulteresses while at the same time taking joy in their usually inevitable downfall in the closing scenes of the picture. And while gangster pictures were claimed to corrupt the morals of young boys, vice films were blamed for threatening the purity of adolescent women.
Content
In Pre-Code Hollywood the sex film became synonymous with women's pictures—Darryl F. ZanuckDarryl F. Zanuck
Darryl Francis Zanuck was an American producer, writer, actor, director and studio executive who played a major part in the Hollywood studio system as one of its longest survivors...
once told Wingate that he was ordered by Warner Brothers' New York corporate office to reserve 20% of the studio's output for "women's pictures, which inevitably means sex pictures." Vice films typically tacked on endings where the most sin-filled characters were either punished or redeemed. Films explored Code-defying subjects in an unapologetic manner with the premise that an end-reel moment could redeem all that had gone before. The concept of marriage was often tested in films such as 1931's The Prodigal
The Prodigal (1931 film)
The Prodigal is a Pre-Code early talkie film, which starred Lawrence Tibbett, Roland Young and Hedda Hopper. The film was extremely provocative in its time in that it viewed adultery in a non-judgmental, even positive light.-Sources:...
, in which a woman is having an affair with a seedy character, and later falls in love with her brother-in-law. When her mother-in-law steps in at the end of the film, it is to encourage one son to grant his wife a divorce so she can marry his brother, with whom she is obviously in love. The older woman proclaims the message of the film in a line near the end: "This the twentieth century. Go out into the world and get what happiness you can." In Madame Satan (1930), adultery is explicitly condoned and used as a sign for a wife that she needs to act in a more enticing way to maintain her husband's interest. And in the 1933 film Secrets
Secrets (film)
Secrets is a 1933 Western film directed by Frank Borzage and starring Mary Pickford in her last film role. The film is a remake of Secrets , a silent film starring Norma Talmadge....
a husband admits to serial adultery, only this time he repents and the marriage is saved. The films took aim at what was already a damaged institution. During the Great Depression, relations between spouses often deteriorated due to financial strain, marriages lessened, and husbands abandoned their families in increased numbers. Marriage rates continually declined in the early 1930s, finally rising in 1934, the final year of the Pre-Code era, and although divorce rates lowered, this is likely because desertion was a more likely method of separation. Consequently, female characters in pictures such as Ruth Chatterton
Ruth Chatterton
Ruth Chatterton was an American actress, novelist, and early aviatrix.- Early life :Chatterton was born in New York City, on Christmas Eve 1892, to Walter Smith and Lillian Reed Chatterton...
's in Female
Female (film)
Female is a 1933 Warner Bros. pre-code film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Ruth Chatterton and George Brent. It is based on the novel of the same name by Donald Henderson Clarke.-Plot:...
, live promiscuous bachelorette lifestyles, and control their own financial destiny (Chatterton supervises an auto factory) without regret.
One of the most prominent examples of punishment for immoral transgressions in vice film can be seen in The Story of Temple Drake
The Story of Temple Drake
The Story of Temple Drake is a 1933 Pre-Code drama film adapted from the highly controversial novel Sanctuary by William Faulkner. Though watered down, the movie was still so scandalous, it was one of reasons for the introduction of the Hays Code...
, based on the William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
novel Sanctuary
Sanctuary (novel)
Sanctuary is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. It is considered one of his more controversial, given its theme of rape. First published in 1931, it was Faulkner's commercial and critical breakthrough, establishing his literary reputation...
. In Drake, the title character (played by Miriam Hopkins
Miriam Hopkins
Ellen Miriam Hopkins was an American actress known for her versatility in a wide variety of roles.Hopkins was born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised in Bainbridge, a town in the state's southwest near the Alabama border...
), a cold, vapid "party girl", the daughter of a judge, is raped and forced into prostitution by a backwoods character, and according to Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty, the film implies that the deeds done to her are in recompense for her immorality. Later, in court, she confesses that she killed the man who raped and kept her. She faints after this confession, upon which her lawyer carries her out, leading to a "happy ending". In the RKO film Christopher Strong
Christopher Strong
Christopher Strong is a 1933 RKO film, directed by Dorothy Arzner and starring Katharine Hepburn in her second screen role. The screenplay by Zoë Akins is adapted from the novel by Gilbert Frankau.-Synopsis:...
, Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress of film, stage, and television. In a career that spanned 62 years as a leading lady, she was best known for playing strong-willed, sophisticated women in both dramas and comedies...
plays an aviator who becomes pregnant from an affair with a married man. She commits suicide by flying her plane directly upwards until she breaks the world altitude record, at which point she takes off her oxygen mask and plummets to Earth. Strong female characters often ended films as "reformed" feminists, after experiencing situations in which their progressive outlook proved faulty.
Female protagonists in aggressively sexual vice films were usually of two general kinds: the bad girl or the fallen woman. In so-called "bad girl" pictures, female characters profited from promiscuity and immoral behavior. Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow was an American film actress and sex symbol of the 1930s. Known as the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde" , Harlow was ranked as one of the greatest movie stars of all time by the American Film Institute...
, an actress who was by all reports a lighthearted, kind person off the screen, frequently played bad girl characters and dubbed them "sex vultures". Two of the most prominent examples of bad girl films, Red-Headed Woman
Red-Headed Woman
Red-Headed Woman is a 1932 Pre-Code comedy film, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, based on a novel by Katherine Brush, and with a screenplay by Anita Loos. It was directed by Jack Conway, and stars Jean Harlow as a woman who uses sex to advance her social position...
and Baby Face
Baby Face (film)
Baby Face is a 1933 American dramatic film directed by Alfred E. Green, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent. Based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck , this sexually-charged, Pre-Code Hollywood film is about an attractive young woman who uses sex to advance her social and financial status...
, featured Harlow and Stanwyck. In Red-Headed Woman Harlow plays a secretary determined to sleep her way into a more luxurious lifestyle, and in Baby Face Stanwyck is an abused runaway determined to use sex to advance herself financially. In Baby Face Stanwyck moves to New York and sleeps her way to the top of Gotham Trust. Her progress is illustrated in a recurring visual metaphor of the movie camera panning ever upward along the front of Gotham Trust's skyscraper. Men are driven mad with lust over her and they commit murder, attempt suicide, and are ruined financially for associating with her before she mends her ways in the final reel. In another departure from post Code films, Stanwyck's sole companion for the duration of the picture is a black woman named Chico (Theresa Harris
Theresa Harris
Theresa Harris was an American television and film actress.-Early life and career:Harris was born on New Year's Eve, 1906 in Houston, Texas to Isaiah and Mable Harris, both of whom were former sharecroppers from Louisiana.In 1929, she came out to Hollywood and lent her singing voice to the...
), whom she took with her when she ran away from home at age 14. Red-Headed Woman begins with Harlow seducing her boss Bill LeGendre and intentionally breaking up his marriage. During her seductions, he tries to resist and slaps her, at which point she looks at him deliriously and says "Do it again, I like it! Do it again!" They eventually marry but Harlow seduces a wealthy aged industrialist who is in business with her husband so that she can move to New York. Although this plan succeeds, she is cast aside when she is discovered having an affair with her chauffeur, in essence cheating on her paramour. Harlow shoots LeGendre, nearly killing him. When she is last seen in the film, she is in France in the back seat of a limousine with an elderly wealthy gentleman being driven along by the same chauffeur. The film was a boon to Harlow's career and has been described as a "trash masterpiece".
Cinema classified as "fallen woman" films was often inspired by real-life hardships women endured in the early Depression era workplace. The men in power in these pictures frequently sexually harassed the women working for them. Remaining employed often became a question of a woman's virtue. In She Had to Say Yes
She Had to Say Yes
She Had to Say Yes is a 1933 pre-Code film directed by George Amy and Busby Berkley. It was Berkley's directorial debut. Loretta Young stars as a secretary who receives unwanted sexual advances when she is sent out on dates with her employer's clients...
, a struggling department store offers dates with its female stenographers as an incentive to customers. And Employees' Entrance was marketed with the tag line "See what out of work girls are up against these days." Joy complained in 1932 of another genre, the "kept woman" film, which presented adultery as an alternative to the tedium of an unhappy marriage.
Homosexuals were portrayed in several Pre-Code films such as Our Betters
Our Betters
Our Betters is a 1933 American satirical comedy film directed by George Cukor. The screenplay by Jane Murfin and Harry Wagstaff Gribble is based on the 1923 play of the same title by W. Somerset Maugham.-Plot:...
, Footlight Parade
Footlight Parade
-Cast:*James Cagney as Chester Kent, creator of musical prologues*Joan Blondell as Nan Prescott, his secretary*Ruby Keeler as Bea Thorn, dancer turned secretary turned dancer*Dick Powell as Scott 'Scotty' Blair, juvenile lead, former protege of Mrs...
, Only Yesterday
Only Yesterday (1933 film)
Only Yesterday is a 1933 drama film about a young woman who becomes pregnant by her boyfriend before he rushes off to fight in World War I. It stars Margaret Sullavan and John Boles. The film was based on the novel Briefe einer unbekannten by Stefan Zweig, though he was not credited...
, Sailor's Luck
Sailor's Luck
Sailor's Luck is a 1933 Pre-Code film which openly depicted homosexuality.-References:*Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press 1999. ISBN 0-231-11094-4*Smith, Sarah. Children, Cinema and...
, and Cavalcade. Although the topic was dealt with much more openly than in the decades that followed, the characterizations of gay and lesbian characters were usually derogatory. Gay male characters were portrayed as possessing a high tone voice and a flighty personality. They existed merely as buffoonish supporting characters. In films like Ladies They Talk About
Ladies They Talk About
Ladies They Talk About is a 1933 Pre-Code women in prison film about a woman sent to San Quentin. Based on the play Women in Prison by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles, the film stars Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, and Lillian Roth.-Plot:...
lesbians were portrayed as rough, burly characters, but in DeMille's The Sign of the Cross
The Sign of the Cross (film)
The Sign of the Cross is a pre-Code epic film released by Paramount Pictures, produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille from a screenplay by Waldemar Young and Sidney Buchman, and based on the original 1895 play by Wilson Barrett....
a female Christian slave is brought in front of a Roman prefect and seduced in dance by a statuesque lesbian dancer. Fox nearly became the first American studio to use the word "gay" to refer to homosexuality, but the SRC made the studio muffle the word in the soundtrack of all reels that reached theaters. Bisexual actress Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer.Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films...
cultivated a cross-gender fan base and started a trend when she began wearing men's suits, a style which was an anachronism for the 1930s. She caused a commotion when she appeared at the premiere of the 1932 Pre-Code film The Sign of the Cross
The Sign of the Cross (film)
The Sign of the Cross is a pre-Code epic film released by Paramount Pictures, produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille from a screenplay by Waldemar Young and Sidney Buchman, and based on the original 1895 play by Wilson Barrett....
in a tuxedo replete with top hat and cane. The backlash against homosexual characters appearing in films was rapid. In 1933 Hays declared that all gay male characters would be removed from pictures, and Paramount took advantage of the negative publicity Dietrich generated by signing a largely meaningless agreement stating that they would not portray women in male attire.
Comedy
In the harsh economic times of the early Depression, films and performers often featured an alienated, cynical, and socially dangerous comic style. As with political films, comedy softened with the election of FDR and the optimism of the New Deal. Characters in the Pre-Code era frequently engaged in comedic duels of escalating sexual innuendo. In Employee's Entrance, a woman enters the office of another scoundrel played by Warren William and he remarks, "Oh, it's you—I didn't recognize you with all your clothes on." Racial stereotypes were usually employed when ethnic characters appeared. Blacks in particular were usually the butt of the wisecrack, never the author. The most acknowledged black comedian was Stepin FetchitStepin Fetchit
Stepin Fetchit was the stage name of American comedian and film actor Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry....
, whose slow-witted comedic character was only meant to be successful in an unintentional manner, with himself as the punchline.
The New York stage was filled with ribald humor and sexually offensive comedy. And when movie producers started to put wisecracks in their sound pictures, they sought New York performers. Popular comics such as Mae West and the Marx Brothers
Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act, originally from New York City, that enjoyed success in Vaudeville, Broadway, and motion pictures from the early 1900s to around 1950...
got their start on Broadway in front of live audiences. Censors complained when they had to keep up with the deluge of jokes in pictures in the early 1930s, some of which were designed to go over their heads. The comic banter of some early sound films was rapid-fire, non-stop, and frequently exhausting for the audience by the final reel.
Mae West
Mae West was an American actress, playwright, screenwriter and sex symbol whose entertainment career spanned seven decades....
had already established herself as a comedic performer when her 1926 Broadway show Sex made national headlines. She was tried and convicted of indecency by the New York District Attorney for the show, and served eight days in prison. West carefully constructed a stage persona and carried it over into her interviews and personal appearances. Despite her voluptuous physique, most of her appeal lay in her suggestive manner. She became a wordsmith in the art of the come-on and the seductive line, and despite her obvious appeal to male audiences, was popular with women as well. Over the cries of film censors, West got her start in the film Night after Night
Night After Night
Night After Night is a 1932 American drama film starring George Raft, Constance Cummings, and Mae West in her first movie role. Others in the cast include Wynne Gibson, Alison Skipworth, Roscoe Karns, Louis Calhern, and Bradley Page....
as a supporting character at the request of actor George Raft. She only appeared in the film when the producers agreed to let her write her own lines. In her first line on film, a hat check girl remarks to her "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds", to which West replies, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." George Raft
George Raft
George Raft was an American film actor and dancer identified with portrayals of gangsters in crime melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s...
later wrote, "In this picture, Mae West stole everything but the cameras." She went on to make She Done Him Wrong in 1933, which became a huge box office hit, grossing $3 million against a $200,000 budget, and then nine months later wrote and starred in I'm No Angel
I'm No Angel
I'm No Angel is Mae West's third motion picture. West received sole story and screenplay credit. A young Cary Grant plays her leading man for the second time. Being Pre-Code, this was one of the few Mae West movies that was not subjected to heavy censorship...
. She became such a success that her career saved Paramount from financial ruin.
The arrival of sound film created a new job market for writers of screen dialogue. Many newspaper journalists moved to California and become studio-employed screenwriters. This resulted in a series of fast-talking comedy pictures featuring newsmen. The Front Page
The Front Page (1931 film)
The Front Page is a 1931 American comedy film, directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien. Based on a Broadway play of the same name, the film was produced by Howard Hughes, written by Bartlett Cormack and Charles Lederer, and distributed by United Artists. The...
, later re-made as the much less cynical and more sentimental His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday is a 1940 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur of the play The Front Page by Hecht and MacArthur...
in 1940, was adapted from the Broadway play by Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
newsmen, and Hollywood screenwriters, Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. Called "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films and as a prolific storyteller, authored 35 books and created some of...
and Charles MacArthur
Charles MacArthur
Charles Gordon MacArthur was an American playwright and screenwriter.-Biography:Charles MacArthur was the second youngest of seven children born to stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. He early developed a passion for reading...
. It was based on Hecht's experiences working as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal.
The Marx Brothers had been stage performers since the early 1900s. By the 1930s, their act consisted of wisecracking leader Groucho
Groucho Marx
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was an American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit. His rapid-fire delivery of innuendo-laden patter earned him many admirers. He made 13 feature films with his siblings the Marx Brothers, of whom he was the third-born...
, the chronically silent Harpo
Harpo Marx
Adolph "Harpo" Marx was an American comedian and film star. He was the second oldest of the Marx Brothers. His comic style was influenced by clown and pantomime traditions. He wore a curly reddish wig, and never spoke during performances...
, the overly ethnic Chico
Chico Marx
Leonard "Chico" Marx was an American comedian and film star as part of the Marx Brothers. His persona in the act was that of a dim-witted albeit crafty con artist, seemingly of rural Italian origin, who wore shabby clothes, and sported a curly-haired wig and Tyrolean hat.As the first-born of the...
, and the strangely normal Zeppo
Zeppo Marx
Herbert Manfred "Zeppo" Marx was an American film star, musician, engineer, theatrical agent and businessman. He was the youngest of the five Marx Brothers. He appeared in the first five Marx Brothers feature films, from 1929 to 1933, but then left the act to start his second career as an...
. The plot of their seminal 1933 comedy Duck Soup is difficult to describe. Groucho's plebeian character is named king of the fictional Freedonia, and he is pursued by two bumbling spies played by Chico and Harpo. Zeppo plays a typically normal secretary. Groucho's con artist character leads Freedonia into war with neighboring Sylvania. The plot essentially exists to provide a framework to fit several comedic bits and long sketches into. The film was unsuccessful at the box office, and the anarchic zaniness and subversive nature of the comedy in the film would be unmatched in the brothers' post-Code work, which was more standardly burlesque.
Horror and science fiction
Frankenstein (1931 film)
Frankenstein is a 1931 Pre-Code Horror Monster film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley. The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff, and features...
and Freaks
Freaks
Freaks is a 1932 American Pre-Code horror film about sideshow performers, directed and produced by Tod Browning and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a cast mostly composed of actual carnival performers. The film was based on Tod Robbins' 1923 short story "Spurs"...
caused controversy when they were released, they had already been re-cut to comply with censors.
Comprising the nascent motion picture genres of horror
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
and science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
(sci-fi), the nightmare picture provoked individual psychological terror in its horror incarnations, while embodying group sociological terror in its science fiction manifestations. The two main types of Pre-Code horror pictures were the single monster movie, and films where masses of hideous beasts rose up and attacked their betters. Frankenstein and Freaks exemplified both genres.
The Pre-Code horror cycle was similar to many Pre-Code cycles in that its boom was motivated by financial necessity. Universal in particular buoyed itself with the production of horror hits such as 1931's Dracula
Dracula (1931 film)
Dracula is a 1931 vampire-horror film directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi as the title character. The film was produced by Universal and is based on the stage play of the same name by Hamilton Deane and John L...
and Frankenstein, then followed those successes up with Murders in the Rue Morgue
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932 film)
Murders in the Rue Morgue is a 1932 horror film, loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Bela Lugosi portrays a lunatic scientist who abducts women and injects them with blood from his ill-tempered caged ape...
, The Mummy
The Mummy (1932 film)
The Mummy is a 1932 horror film from Universal Studios directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff as a revived ancient Egyptian priest. The movie also features Zita Johann, David Manners and Edward Van Sloan...
, and The Old Dark House
The Old Dark House
The Old Dark House is an American comedy horror film directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff, produced just one year after their success with Frankenstein, also released by Universal Studios.-Background:...
in 1932. Other majors soon responded with their own productions. Much like the crime film cycle however, the intense boom of the horror cycle was ephemeral, and had fallen off at the box office by the end of the Pre-Code era.
At the beginning of Frankenstein, Dr. Henry Frankenstein, and his faithful, moronic assistant Fritz are excavating graves for human body parts. Frankenstein sends Fritz to the local college to acquire a fresh brain. After dropping the only normal brain on the ground, Fritz leaves the college with an abnormal one. Meanwhile, Frankenstein's "insane ambition to create life" worries his fiancée, Elizabeth, and his close friends. To allay their fears, and prove to them he is not insane, Frankenstein shows them his science project—a sewn together corpse lying on a medical slab, covered by a cloth—and asks them to watch him "endow it with life." Raising the monster upwards, the extending slab reaches the sky through a hole in the roof, and the monster is struck by lightning. Endowed with life by the magical electricity, it twitches its arm, at which point Dr. Frankenstein deliriously screams, "It's alive! It's alive!" The creature begins walking out of its cell in the next scene, and Fritz, upset that his position as the doctor's freak companion may be usurped, torments the monster by waving a torch at it. After the monster kills Fritz, Frankenstein has second thoughts about his creation and instructs a medical colleague to euthanize
Euthanasia
Euthanasia refers to the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering....
it. His conscience clear, Frankenstein prepares to marry his fiancée in a lavish ceremony. The monster lives however, and after escaping captivity, it meets a little girl. The girl is throwing flowers into a lake and watching them float. Convinced that pretty things float, he throws her into the lake where she drowns. The creature then arrives at the doctor's house, and in an act of revenge abducts and kills the doctor's fiancée, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke
Mae Clarke
Mae Clarke was an American actress most noted for playing Frankenstein's bride, chased by Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, and having a grapefruit smashed into her face by James Cagney in The Public Enemy, both released in 1931.-Early life and career:Clarke was born Violet Mary Klotz in...
). The entire town, pitchforks and torches in hand, search for the monster that has absconded with the doctor. Finding them at a windmill, the doctor escapes, and the villagers burn the creature to death. While Joy declared Dracula "quite satisfactory from the standpoint of the Code" before it was released, and the film had little trouble reaching theaters, Frankenstein was a different story. New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts removed the drowning scene and lines that referenced Dr. Frankenstein's God complex. Kansas in particular objected to the film. The state's censor board requested the cutting of 32 scenes, which if removed, would have halved the length of the film.
Paramount's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931 film)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a 1932 American Pre-Code horror film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March. The film is an adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , the Robert Louis Stevenson tale of a man who takes a potion which turns him from a mild-mannered man of...
played to the Freudian theories popular with the audience of its time. Fredric March
Fredric March
Fredric March was an American stage and film actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr...
played the split personality title character. Jekyll represented the composed super-ego, and Hyde the lecherous id. Miriam Hopkins
Miriam Hopkins
Ellen Miriam Hopkins was an American actress known for her versatility in a wide variety of roles.Hopkins was born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised in Bainbridge, a town in the state's southwest near the Alabama border...
's coquettish prostitute sexually teases March's Jekyll character early in the film by showing her parts of her legs and bosom. Joy felt the scene had been "dragged in simply to titillate the audience." Hyde coerces her with the threat of violence into becoming his paramour and beats her when she attempts to stop seeing him. She is contrasted with his wholesome fiancée (Rose Hobart
Rose Hobart
Rose Hobart was an American actress.-Career:Born in New York City, her father was a cellist in the New York Symphony...
), whose chaste nature dissatisfies March's baser alter ego. Employing adventurous first person
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
camera techniques, and a high brow background — Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
wrote the source novella — the film is considered the "most honored of the Pre-Code horror films." March won the Academy Award for best actor for his performance, a rarity for a performer in a horror movie. Many of the graphic scenes between Hyde and Ivy were cut by local censors because of their suggestiveness. Sex was intimately tied to horror in many Pre-Code horror movies. In Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
's classic tale
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been claimed as the first detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". Two works that share some similarities predate Poe's stories, including Das...
which has little in common with the source material, Bela Lugosi
Béla Lugosi
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó , commonly known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian actor of stage and screen. He was best known for having played Count Dracula in the Broadway play and subsequent film version, as well as having starred in several of Ed Wood's low budget films in the last years of his...
plays a mad scientist who tortures and kills women trying to mix human blood with ape blood during his experiments. His prized experiment, an intelligent ape named Erik, breaks into a woman's second floor apartment through her window and rapes her.
In Freaks director Tod Browning
Tod Browning
Tod Browning was an American motion picture actor, director and screenwriter.Browning's career spanned the silent and talkie eras...
of Dracula fame helms a picture that depicts a traveling circus populated by a group of deformed carnival freaks. Browning populated the movie with actual carnival sideshow performers including "midgets, dwarfs, hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, and, most awful, the armless and legless man billed as the "living torso"." There is also a group of Pinheads, who are fortunate in that they are not mentally capable enough to understand that they disgust people. The freaks are the victim of the story with a circus strongman Hercules and a beautiful high-wire artist Cleopatra, the villains. Cleopatra intends to marry and then poison Hans, a midget who has inherited a fortune and is enamored with her. At a dinner celebrating their union, one of the freaks dances on the table and they chant "gooble-gobble, gobble, gobble, one of us, one of us, now she is like one of us." Disgusted, Cleopatra insults Hans and makes out with Hercules in front of him. When the freaks discover her plot, they exact revenge by mutilating Cleopatra into a freak. Although circus freaks were common in the early 1930s, the film was their first depiction on screen. Browning took care to linger over shots of the deformed, disabled performers with long takes of them including one of the "living torso" lighting a match and then a cigarette with his mouth. The film was accompanied by a sensational marketing campaign that asked sexual questions such as "Do the Siamese Twins make love?", "What sex is the half-man half-woman?", and "Can a full grown woman truly love a midget?" Surprisingly, given its reaction to Frankenstein, Kansas
Kansas
Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...
objected to nothing in Freaks. Other states such as Georgia however, were repulsed by the film and it was not shown in many locales. The film later became a cult classic spurred by midnight movie showings, but upon its original release, it was a box-office bomb.
In the 1933 film, Island of Lost Souls
Island of Lost Souls (1933 film)
Island of Lost Souls is an American science fiction horror film starring Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi and Kathleen Burke as The Panther Woman. Produced by Paramount Pictures in 1933 from a script co-written by science fiction legend Philip Wylie, the movie was the...
, an adaptation of H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
science fiction novel The Island of Doctor Moreau
The Island of Doctor Moreau
The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells. It is told from the point of view of a man named Edward Prendick who is shipwrecked, rescued by a passing boat, and then left at the ship's destination by the crew along with the ship's cargo of exotic animals...
, Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton was an English-American stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and director.-Early life and career:...
plays yet another mad scientist with a God complex. Laughton, as Moreau, creates a mad scientist's island paradise; an unmonitored haven where he is free to create a race of man-beasts and a beast-woman, Lota, which he wants to mate with a normal human male. A castaway lands on his island, providing him an opportunity to see how far his science experiment, the barely clothed, attractive Lota, has come. The castaway discovers Moreau vivisecting one of the beast-men and attempts to leave the island. He runs into the camp of the man-beasts and Moreau beats them back with a whip. The film ends with Lota dead, the castaway rescued, and the man-beasts chanting, "Are we not men?" as they attack and then vivisect Moreau. The film has been described as "a rich man's Freaks" due to its esteemed source material. Wells, however, despised the movie for its lurid excesses. It was rejected by 14 local censor boards in the US, and considered "against nature" in Great Britain and banned there until 1958.
Exotic adventure films
Pre-Code films contained a continual, recurring theme of white racism. In the early 1930s, the studios filmed a series of pictures that aimed to provide viewers a sense of the exotic, an exploration of the unknown and the forbidden. These pictures often imbibed themselves with the allure of interracial sex according to Pre-Code historian Thomas Doherty. "At the psychic core of the genre is the shiver of sexual attraction, the threat and promise of miscegenation." Films like Africa Speaks were directly marketed by referencing interracial sex; moviegoers received small packets labeled "Secrets" which contained pictures of naked black women. As portrayals of historic conditions, these movies are of little educational value, but as artifacts that show Hollywood's attitude towards race and foreign cultures they are enlightening. The central point of interest in The Blonde CaptiveThe Blonde Captive
The Blonde Captive is a 1931 American film directed by Clinton Childs, Ralph P. King, Linus J. Wilson and Paul Withington....
, a 1931 film which depicted a blonde woman abducted by a savage tribe of Africans, was not that she was kidnapped, but that she enjoys living among the tribe. The lack of black characters in films highlights their status in Jim Crow America
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
.
The white protagonist in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) is the "King of the [African] Jungle". Tarzan is a monosyllabic half-naked jungle creature whose attractiveness is derived from his physical prowess; throughout the movie, he saves Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan
Maureen O'Sullivan
Maureen Paula O’Sullivan was an Irish actress.-Early life:O'Sullivan was born in Boyle, County Roscommon, Ireland, the daughter of Roman Catholic parents Mary Lovatt and Charles Joseph O'Sullivan, an officer in The Connaught Rangers who served in The Great War...
) from danger and she gratefully swoons in his arms. When Jane's father warns her "[h]e's not like us" she retorts "[h]e's white" as evidence to the contrary. In the racy sequel, Tarzan and His Mate
Tarzan and His Mate
Tarzan and His Mate is a Tarzan film based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was the second in the Tarzan film series to star Johnny Weissmuller....
(the last word meaning both a status and a biological function), men come from America with fancy gowns and other accoutrements to woo and clothe the bra-less, barely clothed Jane, again played by O'Sullivan, hoping to lure her away from the savage Tarzan. He detests the fancier clothing and tears it off. The black characters of the film are treated poorly; when one of them refuses to go forward on a march in the jungle, the white ivory
Ivory
Ivory is a term for dentine, which constitutes the bulk of the teeth and tusks of animals, when used as a material for art or manufacturing. Ivory has been important since ancient times for making a range of items, from ivory carvings to false teeth, fans, dominoes, joint tubes, piano keys and...
hunter shoots him on the spot, and moves on. The film included a skinny-dipping scene with extensive nudity in which a body double stands in for actress O'Sullivan. Breen, then head of the SRC, objected to the scene, and MGM, the movie's producer, decided to take their case to the appeals review board. The board consisted of the heads of Fox, RKO, and Universal. After watching the scene "several times", the board sided with Breen and the MPPDA, and the scene was removed, but MGM still allowed some uncut trailers and a few reels to stay in circulation. MGM marketed the film primarily towards women using taglines such as the following:
Ethnic characters were portrayed against stereotype in 1934's Massacre
Massacre (film)
Massacre is a 1934 American drama film directed by Alan Crosland. The film stars Richard Barthelmess and Ann Dvorak as its Native American protagonists, and also features Charles Middleton, Sidney Toler, Claire Dodd and Clarence Muse.-Plot:...
. The protagonist (Richard Barthelmess
Richard Barthelmess
Richard Semler "Dick" Barthelmess was an Oscar-nominated silent film star.-Early life:Barthelmess was educated at Hudson River Military Academy at Nyack and Trinity College at Hartford, Connecticut...
) is a Native American who performs in a Wild West Show
Wild West Shows
Wild West Shows were traveling vaudeville performances in the United States and Europe. The first and prototypical wild west show was Buffalo Bill's, formed in 1883 and lasting until 1913...
in full Indian garb, but then slips into a suit and speaks in American slang once the show is over. He has a black butler who is atypically intelligent; his character merely plays dumb by slipping into a stereotypical slow-witted "negro" character when it suits him, rather than being genuinely unintelligent.
The exoticism of the Far East was explored in films such as 1932's The Mask of Fu Manchu
The Mask of Fu Manchu
The Mask of Fu Manchu is a Pre-Code adventure film released in 1932, featuring Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu and Myrna Loy as his daughter. The movie revolves around Fu Manchu's quest for the sword and mask of Genghis Khan. Lewis Stone plays his nemesis...
and 1933's The Bitter Tea of General Yen
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a pre-Code 1933 film, directed by Frank Capra based on the novel by Grace Zaring Stone and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Nils Asther....
, however it was done using white actors in the lead roles, not Asians. When a white actor donned the yellow-face makeup, they frequently looked absurd next to genuine Asians, so the studios would cast all the Asian parts white. In Manchu, Karloff plays a mad scientist who wants to find the sword and mask of Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan , born Temujin and occasionally known by his temple name Taizu , was the founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death....
as they will give him the power to control the "countless hordes" into battle versus the West. Manchu is a sexual deviant, who engages in ritual torture, and has occult powers. In a scene cut from the film due to its miscegenation, he shows a man the image of Manchu's depraved daughter (Myrna Loy
Myrna Loy
Myrna Loy was an American actress. Trained as a dancer, she devoted herself fully to an acting career following a few minor roles in silent films. Originally typecast in exotic roles, often as a vamp or a woman of Asian descent, her career prospects improved following her portrayal of Nora Charles...
) violating one of the chaste good characters. He is eventually conquered, but not before he temporarily lays his hand on the sword and proclaims to his men: "Would you have maidens like this
Karen Morley
-Life and career:Born Mildred Linton in Ottumwa, Iowa, Morley lived there until she was thirteen years old. When she came to Hollywood, she attended Hollywood High School, and she later graduated from UCLA....
Frank Capra
Frank Russell Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s...
's The Bitter Tea of General Yen was not quite the same type of film. In that movie, Stanwyck plays a missionary who goes to civil-war-torn China and meets the titular general (played by Nils Asther
Nils Asther
Nils Anton Alfhild Asther was a Danish-born Swedish actor active in Hollywood from 1926 to the mid 1950s, known for his beautiful face and often called "the male Greta Garbo"...
) after his car kills the driver of her rickshaw. She is knocked unconscious in a riot, and he takes her out of the rabble, and onto a train car. She has lurid, horror themed, symbolic dreams about the General, in which she is both titillated and repulsed by him. The film breaks precedent by developing into an interracial love story, but his army ends in ruins. Yen kills himself at the film's conclusion — by drinking poisoned tea — rather than be captured and killed. Capra adored the script, and disregarded the risk of making a film that broke California's (and 29 other states') laws concerning the portrayal of miscegenation. Cinematographer Joseph Walker
Joseph Walker (cinematographer)
Joseph Walker, A.S.C. was an American cinematographer who worked on 145 films during a career that spanned thirty-three years....
tested a new technique he created, which he dubbed "Variable Diffusion", in filming the picture. This rendered the entire picture in very soft focus
Soft focus
In photography, soft focus is a lens flaw, in which the lens forms images that are blurred due to spherical aberration. A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration in order to give the appearance of blurring the image while retaining sharp edges; it is not the same as an...
.
Newsreels and documentaries
From 1904 until 1967, when television finally killed them off, films were preceded by newsreels. In the early sound film era, they lasted around eight minutes, and featured highlights and clips of the world's biggest stories. They were updated twice a week by the five major studios, and became a highly profitable enterprise; in 1933, newsreels had a total box office take of almost $19.5 million against an outlay of under $10 million. The sound film era created the narrator, among the first was Graham McNameeGraham McNamee
Graham McNamee was a pioneering broadcaster in American radio, the medium's most recognized national personality in its first international decade....
, who provided voice over during the clips, often delivering hackneyed jokes while delineating the on-screen action. Sound newsreel interviews and monologues featured famous subjects unaccustomed to the new medium. These clips changed public perception of important historical figures depending on their elocution, the sound of their previously unheard voices, and their composure in front of the camera. Soon, around 12 "newsreel theaters" were created around America, the most successful being the Embassy Newsreel Theater on Broadway
Broadway (New York City)
Broadway is a prominent avenue in New York City, United States, which runs through the full length of the borough of Manhattan and continues northward through the Bronx borough before terminating in Westchester County, New York. It is the oldest north–south main thoroughfare in the city, dating to...
. The Embassy was a 578-seat facility that presented fourteen 45–50 minute programs a day, running from 10 in the morning until midnight. It was noted for its discerning, intellectual audience, many of which did not attend motion picture theaters.
The most gripping news story of the Pre-Code era was the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby
Lindbergh kidnapping
The kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was the abduction of the son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The toddler, 18 months old at the time, was abducted from his family home in East Amwell, New Jersey, near the town of Hopewell, New Jersey, on the evening of...
on the evening of March 1, 1932. As the child was already enormously famous before the kidnapping, the event created a media circus, with news coverage more intense than anything since World War I. Newsreels featuring private family photos of the child (the first time private pictures had been "conscripted for public service"), asked spectators to report any sight of him. On May 12, 1932, the child's body was found less than five miles the Lindberghs' home. Although newsreels covered the most important topics of the day, they also presented human-interest stories
Human interest story
A human interest story is a feature story that discusses a person or people in an emotional way. It presents people and their problems, concerns, or achievements in a way that brings about interest or sympathy in the reader or viewer....
(such as the immensely popular coverage of the Dionne quintuplets
Dionne quintuplets
The Dionne quintuplets are the first quintuplets known to survive their infancy. The sisters were born just outside Callander, Ontario, Canada near the village of Corbeil.The Dionne girls were born two months premature...
), and entertainment news, at times in greater detail than more pressing political and social matters.
Some of the images' impact belies their historical accuracy; nearly all ceremonies and public events that were filmed for newsreels in the early sound era were staged, and in some cases even reenacted. In one instance when FDR signed an important bill, a member of his cabinet was called away before the staged reenactment began, so the video shows him absent at the time of the signing, even though he had been present. The newsreels of FDR were staged to hide his hobbled gait caused by polio. Caught between the desire to present accurate hard-hitting news stories and the need to keep an audience in the mood for the upcoming entertainment, newsreels often soft-pedaled the difficulties Americans faced during the early years of the Great Depression. FDR in particular received favorable treatment from Hollywood, with all five of the majors producing pro-FDR shorts by late 1933. These shorts featured some of the studios' lesser contract talent extolling the virtues of FDR created government and social programs. Roosevelt himself was a natural before the camera. The newsreels were instrumental to the success of his initial campaign, and his enduring popularity while in office. He was described by Variety as the "Barrymore of the Capital", and actress Miriam Howell said his timbre
Timbre
In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...
was "almost as good as Walter Huston."
Taking advantage of the existence of thirty years of newsreels archives were filmmakers who made early sound era documentaries. World War I was a popular topic of these pictures and spawned the following 1933 documentaries; The Big Drive, World in Revolt, This is America, and Hell's Holiday. The most prescient Pre-Code WWI documentary was 1934's aptly titled The First World War. The most critically and commercially successful documentary of the era, the film is presented in eleven chapters, much like a book. The picture combined a multitude of new motion picture techniques such as commentative music, voice-over narration, and slow-motion photography with a sense of when to speak for the images on screen and when to allow the images to speak for themselves. The New York Times described it as "a memorable and infinitely important document which should be distributed in every civilized country."
Filmmakers also made feature length documentaries that covered the dark recesses of the globe including the Amazon Rainforest
Amazon Rainforest
The Amazon Rainforest , also known in English as Amazonia or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf forest that covers most of the Amazon Basin of South America...
, Native American settlements, the Pacific Islands, and most everywhere in between. Taking advantage of audiences voyeuristic impulses, aided by the allowance of nudity in tribal documentaries, the filming of lands untouched by modernity, and the presentation of locales never before filmed, these movies placated Depression era American audiences by showing them lifestyles more difficult than their own. Also captured were Arctic expeditions in films such 90° South and With Byrd at the South Pole
With Byrd at the South Pole
With Byrd at the South Pole is a 1930 documentary film about Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd and his 1st quest to the South Pole. Which also was at Little America-Exploration Base It is narrated by Floyd Gibbons. It won at the 3rd Academy Awards for Best Cinematography.-Cast:*Richard E....
, and deepest Africa in the safari films of Martin and Osa Johnson
Martin and Osa Johnson
Martin Johnson and his wife Osa Johnson were American adventurers and documentary filmmakers.-Biography:...
, among others. Some exploitation style documentaries purported to show actual events but were instead staged, elaborate ruses. The most prominent of which was Ingagi
Ingagi
Ingagi is a 1931 Pre-Code exploitation film. It purports to be a documentary of Sir Hubert Winstead of London on an expedition to Africa, and it concerns a tribe of gorilla-worshiping women encountered by the explorer. It was produced by Congo Pictures and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures...
, a 1931 film which claimed to show a ritual where African women were given over to gorillas as sex slaves, but instead was mostly filmed in Los Angeles using local blacks in place of natives. Douglas Fairbanks
Douglas Fairbanks
Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was an American actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He was best known for his swashbuckling roles in silent films such as The Thief of Bagdad, Robin Hood, and The Mark of Zorro....
mocked the phoniness of many Pre-Code documentaries in his parody Around the World with Douglas Fairbanks, where in one scene he filmed himself wrestling a stuffed tiger doll, then a tiger skin rug. Opposing these films was the travelogue
Travelogue (films)
Travelogue films, a form of virtual tourism or travel documentary, have been providing information and entertainment about distant parts of the world since the late 19th century.-History:...
which was shown before features and served as a short saccharine form of cinematic tourism.
End of an era
Pre-Code films began to draw the ire of various religious groups, some Protestant but mostly a contingent of Roman Catholic crusaders. Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, apostolic delegate to the Catholic Church in the United States, called upon American Catholics to unite against the surging immorality of films. As a result, in 1933 the Catholic Legion of Decency, headed by the Reverend John T. McNicholasJohn T. McNicholas
John Timothy McNicholas, O.P. was an Irish-born clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church. A Dominican, he served as Bishop of Duluth and Archbishop of Cincinnati .-Early life and education:...
(later renamed the National Legion of Decency
National Legion of Decency
The National Legion of Decency was an organization dedicated to identifying and combating objectionable content, from the point of view of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, in motion pictures...
), was established to control and enforce decency standards and boycott films they deemed offensive. They created a rating system for films that started at "harmless" and ended at "condemned", with the latter denoting a film that was a sin to watch. The Legion spurred several million Catholics across the country to sign up for the boycott and allowed local religious leaders to determine which films to protest. Conservative Protestants tended to support much of the crackdown, particularly in the South, where anything relating to the state of race relations or miscegenation could not be portrayed. Although the Central Conference of American Rabbis joined in the protest, it was an uneasy alliance as there had always been whispers that at least some of the vitriol from the Christian groups occurred because many studio executives were Jewish.
Hays had originally been opposed to direct censorship, considering it "Un-American". He had stated that although there were some tasteless films in his estimation, working with filmmakers was better than direct oversight, and that, overall, films were not harmful to children. Hays blamed some of the more prurient films on the difficult economic times which exerted "tremendous commercial pressure" on the studios more than a flouting of the code. Catholic groups became enraged with Hays and as early as July 1934 were demanding that he resign from his position.
The Payne Study and Experiment Fund
The Payne Fund
The Payne Study and Experiment Fund was started in 1927 by Frances Payne Bolton to support a study of the influence of pulp fiction on young women. Mrs. Bolton was a wealthy mother who was interested in education and started the fund because she was concerned about the media's influence on...
was created in 1927 by Frances Payne Bolton to support a study of the influence of fiction on children. The Payne Fund Studies
Payne Fund Studies
The Payne Fund Studies were a series of studies of the effect of movies on children's behavior. They were paid for by The Payne Fund, a private foundation. They have been criticized as lacking scientific rigor but were the first attempt to rigorously study the media. They were politically...
, a series of eight books published from 1933 to 1935 which detailed five years of research aimed specifically at cinema's effects on children, were also gaining publicity at this time, and became a great concern to Hays. Hays had said certain pictures might alter "...that sacred thing, the mind of a child...that clean, virgin thing, that unmarked state" and have "the same responsibility, the same care about the thing put on it that the best clergyman or the most inspired teacher would have." Despite its initial reception, the main findings of the study were largely innocuous. It found that cinema's effect on individuals varied with age and social position, and that pictures reinforced audiences' existing beliefs. The Motion Picture Research Council (MPRC, led by honorary vice president Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR's mother and executive director, the Rev. William H. Short), which funded the study, was not pleased. An "alarmist summary" of the study's results written by Henry James Forman
Henry James Forman
Henry James Forman was an author famous for his 1933 book Our Movie Made Children, which was a summary of the Payne Fund Studies. The book has been described as an "alarmist tome", and was responsible for publicizing the study's more negative results.-Sources:*Doherty, Thomas Patrick...
appeared in McCall's
McCall's
McCall's was a monthly American women's magazine that enjoyed great popularity through much of the 20th century, peaking at a readership of 8.4 million in the early 1960s. It was established as a small-format magazine called The Queen in 1873...
, a leading women's magazine of the time, and Forman's book, Our Movie Made Children
Our Movie Made Children
Our Movie Made Children was written by Henry James Forman and published in 1935. Commissioned by W.W. Charters, the Chairman of the Committee on Educational Research of the Payne Fund, Forman was "entrusted the task of preparing a popular summary" of the conclusions found by the various scholars...
, which became a best-seller, publicized the Payne Fund's results, emphasizing its more negative aspects.
The social environment created by the publicity of the Payne Fund Studies and religious protests reached such a fever pitch that a member of the Hays Office described it as a "state of war". However, newspapers including The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...
), New Orleans Times Picayune, Chicago Daily News
Chicago Daily News
The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon daily newspaper published between 1876 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.-History:The Daily News was founded by Melville E. Stone, Percy Meggy, and William Dougherty in 1875 and began publishing early the next year...
, Atlanta Journal, Saint Paul Dispatch
Saint Paul Dispatch
The Saint Paul Dispatch was a daily newspaper in Saint Paul, Minnesota from 1868 until 1985. In 1885, The Dispatch Printing Company was formed when George Thompson purchased the Dispatch newspaper. The DPC then bought the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1909 and ran the two newspapers. It was acquired...
, the Philadelphia Record
The Philadelphia Record
The Philadelphia Record was a daily newspaper published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1877 until 1947. The Record was founded in 1877 as a one-cent daily newspaper...
and Public Ledger
Public Ledger (Philadelphia)
The Public Ledger was a daily newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania published from March 25, 1836 to January 1942. Its motto was "Virtue Liberty and Independence". For a time, it was Philadelphia's most popular newspaper, but circulation declined in the mid-1930s.-Early history:Founded by William...
, the Boston American
Boston American
The Boston American was a daily tabloid newspaper published in Boston, Massachusetts from March 21, 1904 until September 30, 1961. The newspaper was part of William Randolph Hearst's chain, and thus was also known as Hearst's Boston American....
and New York's Daily News
New York Daily News
The Daily News of New York City is the fourth most widely circulated daily newspaper in the United States with a daily circulation of 605,677, as of November 1, 2011....
, Daily Mirror
New York Daily Mirror
The New York Daily Mirror was an American morning tabloid newspaper first published on June 24, 1924, in New York City by the William Randolph Hearst organization as a contrast to their mainstream broadsheets, the Evening Journal and New York American, later consolidated into the New York Journal...
, and Evening Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
all lambasted the studies. When discussing the Supreme Court's 1915 decision, film historian Gregory Black argues that the efforts of reformers might have been lessened had "filmmakers been willing to produce films for specialized audiences (adults only, family, no children)... but the movers and shakers of the industry wanted or needed the largest possible market." The most provocative pictures were the most profitable, with the 25% of the motion picture industry's output that was the most sensational supporting the cleaner 75%
By 1932, there was an increasing movement for government control. By mid-1934 when Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia called for a Catholic boycott of all films, and Raymond Cannon
Raymond Joseph Cannon
Raymond Joseph Cannon was an attorney, baseball player and Democratic politician who represented Wisconsin's 4th congressional district in the Congress from 1933 to 1939....
was privately preparing a congressional bill supported by both Democrats and Republicans which would introduce Government oversight, the studios decided they had had enough. They re-organized the enforcement procedures giving Hays and the recently appointed Joseph I. Breen
Joseph Breen
Joseph Breen is an American soap opera actor.He played contract parts on both Guiding Light and Loving before being offered his most front-burner role to date: that of Lisa’s long-lost son, Scott Eldridge, on As the World Turns...
, a devout Roman Catholic, head of the new Production Code Administration
Production Code Administration
The Production Code Administration was established by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1934. The PCA required all filmmakers to submit their films for approval before release.-See also:* Pre-Code* Joseph Breen* Will H. Hays...
(PCA), greater control over censorship. The studios agreed to disband their appeals committee and to impose a $25,000 fine for producing, distributing, or exhibiting any film without PCA approval. Hays had originally hired Breen, who had worked in public relations, in 1930 to handle Production Code publicity, and the latter was popular among Catholics. Joy began working solely for Fox Studios, and Wingate had been bypassed in favor of Breen in December 1933. Hays became a functionary, while Breen handled the business of censoring films. Breen was a rabid anti-Semite, who was quoted as stating that Jews "are, probably, the scum of the earth." When Breen died in 1965, the trade magazine Variety stated, "More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture."
Although the Legion's impact on the more effective enforcement of the code is unquestionable, its influence on the general populace is harder to gauge. A study done by Hays after the Code was finally fully implemented found that audiences were doing the exact opposite of what the Legion had recommended. Each time the Legion protested a film it meant increased ticket sales; unsurprisingly, Hays kept these results to himself and they were not revealed until many years later. In contrast to big cities, boycotts in smaller towns were more effective and theater owners complained of the harassment they received when they exhibited salacious films.
Many actors and actresses, such as Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck, and Clark Gable, continued their careers apace after the Code was enforced. However, stars like Ruth Chatterton, Lyle Talbot, and Warren William, who excelled during this period, struggled and are mostly forgotten today. Mae West in particular had a difficult time transferring her bawdy persona over into the new era. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...
went to great lengths to denigrate actresses such as West (whose name he later banned from all Hearst publications) in his papers, further lessening their prospects.
After the Pre-Code era
Censors like Martin Quigley and Joseph Breen understood that:a private industry code, strictly enforced, is more effective than government censorship as a means of imposing religious dogma. It is secret, for one thing, operating at the pre-production stage. The audience never knows what has been trimmed, cut, revised, or never written. For another, it is uniform — not subject to hundreds of different licensing standards. Finally and most important, private censorship can be more sweeping in its demands, because it is not bound by constitutional due process or free-expression rules — in general, these apply to only the government — or by the command of church-state separation ... there is no question that American cinema today is far freer than in the heyday of the Code, when Joe Breen's blue pencil and the Legion of Decency's ever-present boycott threat combined to assure that films adhered to Catholic Church doctrine.
Termed by Breen as "Compensating moral value", the maxim was that "any theme must contain at least sufficient good in the story to compensate for, and to counteract, any evil which relates." Hollywood could present evil behavior, but only if it were eradicated by the end of the film, "with the guilty punished, and the sinner redeemed." Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty summarized the practical effects:
The Office Wife
The Office Wife is a 1930 American Pre-Code romantic drama film directed by Lloyd Bacon, released by Warner Bros., and based on the novel of the same name by Faith Baldwin. It was the talkie debut for Joan Blondell who would become one of the major Warner Bros...
, a 1930 film featuring Joan Blondell
Joan Blondell
Rose Joan Blondell was an American actress who performed in movies and on television for five decades as Joan Blondell.After winning a beauty pageant, Blondell embarked upon a film career...
, not only were several of Blondell's disrobing maneuvers strictly forbidden, but the implied image of the actress being naked just off-screen, was deemed too suggestive even though it relied upon the audience using their imaginations. Later, similar scenes were blurred or rendered indistinct if allowed at all.
After the July 1934 decision by the studios put the power over film censorship in Breen's hands he appeared in a series of newsreel clips promoting the new order of business, assuring Americans that the motion picture industry would be removed of "the vulgar, the cheap, and the tawdry" and that pictures would be made "vital and wholesome entertainment." All scripts now went through PCA, and several films playing in theaters were ordered withdrawn. The first film Breen censored in the production stage was the Joan Crawford film, Forsaking All Others
Forsaking All Others
Forsaking All Others is a 1934 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by W.S. Van Dyke, and starring Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery. In this "comedy of errors", three friends of long-standing are involved in a love triangle. The screenplay was written by Joseph L....
. Although Independent film producers vowed that they would give "no thought to Mr. Joe Breen or anything he represents," they caved on their stance within one month of making it. The fact remained that the major studios owned most of the successful theaters in the country. And studio heads such as Harry Cohn
Harry Cohn
Harry Cohn was the American president and production director of Columbia Pictures.-Career:Cohn was born to a working-class German-Jewish family in New York City. In later years, he appears to have disparaged his heritage...
of Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...
had already agreed to stop making indecent films. In several large cities audiences booed when the Production seal appeared before films. The Catholic Church was pleased, however, and in 1936, Pope Pius XI
Pope Pius XI
Pope Pius XI , born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, was Pope from 6 February 1922, and sovereign of Vatican City from its creation as an independent state on 11 February 1929 until his death on 10 February 1939...
stated that the U.S. film industry "has recognized and accepts its responsibility before society." The Legion condemned zero films produced by the MPPDA between 1936 and 1943.
A coincidental upswing in the fortunes of several studios was publicly explained by Code proponents such as the Motion Picture Herald as proof positive that the code was working. Another fortunate coincidence for Code supporters was the torrent of famous criminals such as John Dillinger
John Dillinger
John Herbert Dillinger, Jr. was an American bank robber in Depression-era United States. He was charged with, but never convicted of, the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana police officer during a shoot-out. This was his only alleged homicide. His gang robbed two dozen banks and four police stations...
, Baby Face Nelson
Baby Face Nelson
Lester Joseph Gillis , known under the pseudonym George Nelson, was a bank robber and murderer in the 1930s. Gillis was known as Baby Face Nelson, a name given to him due to his youthful appearance and small stature...
, and Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow were well-known outlaws, robbers, and criminals who traveled the Central United States with their gang during the Great Depression. Their exploits captured the attention of the American public during the "public enemy era" between 1931 and 1934...
that were killed by police shortly after the PCA took power. Corpses of the outlaws were shown in newsreels around the country, alongside clips of Al Capone
Al Capone
Alphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone was an American gangster who led a Prohibition-era crime syndicate. The Chicago Outfit, which subsequently became known as the "Capones", was dedicated to smuggling and bootlegging liquor, and other illegal activities such as prostitution, in Chicago from the early...
and Machine Gun Kelly
Machine Gun Kelly
George Kelley Barnes , better known as "Machine Gun Kelly", was an American gangster during the prohibition era. His nickname came from his favorite weapon, a Thompson submachine gun. His most famous crime was the kidnapping of oil tycoon & businessman Charles Urschel in July 1933 for which he,...
in Alcatraz. Among the unarguably positive aspects of the Code being enforced was the money it saved studios in having to edit, cut, and alter films to get approval from the various state boards and censors. The money saved was in the millions annually. A spate of more wholesome family films featuring performers such as Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple Black , born Shirley Jane Temple, is an American film and television actress, singer, dancer, autobiographer, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia...
took off. Stars such as James Cagney redefined their images. Cagney played a series of patriots, and his gangster in 1937's Angels with Dirty Faces
Angels with Dirty Faces
Angels with Dirty Faces is a 1938 American gangster film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, the Dead End Kids and Humphrey Bogart, along with Ann Sheridan and George Bancroft...
purposefully acts like a coward when he is executed so that children who look up to him will cease their admiration. Breen in essence neutered Groucho Marx, removing most of his jokes which directly referenced sex, although some sexual references slipped through unnoticed in the Marx Brothers post-Code pictures. And in the political realm films such Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a 1939 American drama film starring Jean Arthur and James Stewart about one man's effect on American politics. It was directed by Frank Capra and written by Sidney Buchman, based on Lewis R. Foster's unpublished story. Mr...
where James Stewart
James Stewart
James Stewart was a Hollywood movie actor and USAF brigadier general.James Stewart may also refer to:-Noblemen:*James Stewart, 5th High Steward of Scotland*James Stewart, the Black Knight of Lorn James Stewart (1908–1997) was a Hollywood movie actor and USAF brigadier general.James Stewart...
tries to change the American system from within while reaffirming its core values, stand in stark contrast to decidedly anti-American cinema like Gabriel over the White House where a dictator is needed to cure America's woes.
Some Pre-Code movies suffered irreparable damage from censorship after 1934. When studios attempted to re-issue films from the 1920s and early 1930s, they were forced to make extensive cuts. Films such as Animal Crackers
Animal Crackers (film)
Animal Crackers is a 1930 American comedy film, in which mayhem and zaniness ensue when a valuable painting goes missing during a party in honor of famed African explorer Captain Spaulding. The film was both a critical and commercial success upon initial release, and remains one of the Marx...
(1930), Mata Hari (1931), Arrowsmith
Arrowsmith (film)
Arrowsmith is a 1931 film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was written by Sidney Howard from the Sinclair Lewis novel Arrowsmith, and directed by John Ford.-Plot:...
(1931), and A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms (1932 film)
A Farewell to Arms is a 1932 American romantic drama film directed by Frank Borzage, and starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. The screenplay by Oliver H.P...
(1932) exist only in their censored versions. Many other films survived intact because they were too controversial to be re-released, such as The Maltese Falcon (1931)
The Maltese Falcon (1931 film)
The Maltese Falcon is a 1931 American Warner Bros. Pre-Code crime film based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. The movie was directed by Roy Del Ruth and stars Bebe Daniels in the role of Ruth Wonderly and Ricardo Cortez as private detective Sam Spade.Maude Fulton, Brown Holmes,...
(which was remade a decade later), and consequently never had their master negatives edited. In the case of Convention City
Convention City
Convention City is a 1933 pre-Code comedy film produced by First National Pictures and released by Warner Brothers, which has become notorious as a lost film. - Plot :...
(1933), the entire film was destroyed because the Breen Office refused to budge.
Modern popularity resurgence
In the 1980s New York City Film ForumFilm Forum
Film Forum is a nonprofit movie theater located at 209 West Houston Street in New York City. It began in 1970 as an alternative screening space for independent films, with 50 folding chairs, one projector and a US$19,000 annual budget. Karen Cooper became director in 1972 and under her leadership,...
programmer Bruce Goldstein
Bruce Goldstein
Bruce Goldstein is a New York Repertory film programmer, producer, archivist, and historian.Goldstein became the director of repertory programming for New York's Film Forum in 1986. At Film Forum he presented series on Film noir, silent comedy, classic 3-D, Pre-Code movies, science fiction and...
held the first film festivals featuring Pre-Code films. Goldstein is also credited by San Francisco film critic Mick LaSalle
Mick LaSalle
Mick LaSalle is an American Mick LaSalle is an [[United States|American]] Mick LaSalle is an [[United States|American]] [[film reviewer] and the author of two books on pre-[[Motion Picture Production Code|Hays Code]] Hollywood...
as the person to bring the term "Pre-Code" into general use.
In the 1990s MGM released several Pre-Code films on laserdisc and VHS. "The Forbidden Hollywood Collection" included: Baby Face
Baby Face (film)
Baby Face is a 1933 American dramatic film directed by Alfred E. Green, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent. Based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck , this sexually-charged, Pre-Code Hollywood film is about an attractive young woman who uses sex to advance her social and financial status...
; Beauty and the Boss; Big Business Girl; Blessed Event
Blessed Event
Blessed Event is a 1932 comedy-drama film starring Lee Tracy as a newspaper gossip columnist who becomes entangled with a gangster.-Cast:*Lee Tracy as Alvin Roberts*Mary Brian as Gladys Price*Allen Jenkins as Frankie Wells...
; Blonde Crazy
Blonde Crazy
Blonde Crazy is a 1931 film by Roy Del Ruth, starring James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Louis Calhern, Ray Milland, and Guy Kibbee famous for Cagney's line, "That dirty, double-crossin' rat!"- Plot :...
; Bombshell
Bombshell (film)
Bombshell is a Pre-Code film directed by Victor Fleming and starring Jean Harlow, Lee Tracy, Frank Morgan, C. Aubrey Smith, Mary Forbes and Franchot Tone.-Plot:...
; Dance, Fools, Dance
Dance, Fools, Dance
Dance, Fools, Dance is a pre-code Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature film starring Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Lester Vail in a story about a reporter investigating the murder of a colleague. Story and dialogue were created by Aurania Rouverol, and the film was directed by Harry Beaumont...
; Employee's Entrance; Ex-Lady
Ex-Lady
Ex-Lady is a 1933 American comedy film directed by Robert Florey. The screenplay by David Boehm is based on an unproduced play by Edith Fitzgerald and Robert Riskin.-Plot:...
; Female
Female (film)
Female is a 1933 Warner Bros. pre-code film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Ruth Chatterton and George Brent. It is based on the novel of the same name by Donald Henderson Clarke.-Plot:...
; Havana Widows
Havana Widows
Havana Widows is a 1933 Warner Bros. comedy film directed by Ray Enright.-Plot:Sadie and Mae are two friends who are in Havana to seduce wealthy older men. Their target is Deacon Jones, a self-appointed moralist who can't drink without getting drunk...
; Heroes for Sale
Heroes for Sale
Heroes for Sale is a Depression-era film directed by William Wellman, starring Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, and Loretta Young, and released by Warner Bros. A veteran of World War I, Thomas Holmes, struggles to make his way in civilian life in almost every way imaginable...
; Illicit; I've Got Your Number
I've Got Your Number
I've Got Your Number is a 1934 Warner Bros. Pre-Code romantic comedy film directed by Ray Enright.-Plot:Switchboard operator Marie Lawson is conned by admirer Nicky , who tells her it is just a practical joke, into redirecting a phone call. However, Nicky uses what he learns to his own benefit,...
; Ladies They Talk About
Ladies They Talk About
Ladies They Talk About is a 1933 Pre-Code women in prison film about a woman sent to San Quentin. Based on the play Women in Prison by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles, the film stars Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, and Lillian Roth.-Plot:...
; Madam Satan
Madam Satan
Madam Satan is a dramatic pre-Code musical film produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille for MGM, one of the few DeMille made for the Culver City studio...
; Night Nurse
Night Nurse (1931 film)
Night Nurse is a 1931 Pre-Code, Prohibition-era, Warner Bros. crime drama and mystery film directed by William A. Wellman and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell and Clark Gable. The film was considered risqué at the time of its release, particularly the scene where Stanwyck and...
; Our Modern Maidens
Our Modern Maidens
Our Modern Maidens is a 1929 silent film directed by Jack Conway. Starring Joan Crawford in her last silent film role, the film also stars Rod La Rocque, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Anita Page. Our Modern Maidens is the second of three film where Crawford and Page appear together...
; The Purchase Price
The Purchase Price
The Purchase Price is a Pre-Code American film, which was directed by William Wellman and adapted from Arthur Stringer's novel, The Mud Lark .-Plot:...
; Red-Headed Woman
Red-Headed Woman
Red-Headed Woman is a 1932 Pre-Code comedy film, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, based on a novel by Katherine Brush, and with a screenplay by Anita Loos. It was directed by Jack Conway, and stars Jean Harlow as a woman who uses sex to advance her social position...
; Scarlet Dawn
Scarlet Dawn
Scarlet Dawn is a 1932 romantic drama film starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Nancy Carroll as refugees from the Russian Revolution. It is based on the novel Revolt by Mary C. McCall, Jr.-Plot:...
; Skyscraper Souls
Skyscraper Souls
Skyscraper Souls is a Pre-Code 1932 drama film starring Warren William and Maureen O'Sullivan. The film was directed by Edgar Selwyn and is based upon the novel Skyscraper by Faith Baldwin.-Plot:...
; The Strange Love of Molly Louvain
The Strange Love of Molly Louvain
The Strange Love of Molly Louvain is a 1932 film directed by Michael Curtiz....
; They Call It Sin; and Three on a Match
Three on a Match
Three on a Match is a Warner Bros. drama film directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak and Bette Davis. The film also features Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart , Allen Jenkins and Edward Arnold.-Plot:Three friends from childhood, Mary , Ruth , and Vivian , meet...
.
MGM also released other Pre-Code films such as The Divorcee
The Divorcee
The Divorcee is a 1930 American drama film written by Nick Grindé, John Meehan and Zelda Sears, based on the novel Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. It was directed by Robert Z. Leonard, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director...
, Doctor X
Doctor X (film)
Doctor X is a First National/Warner Bros. horror and mystery film based on the play of the same name. It was directed by Michael Curtiz and stars Lee Tracy, Fay Wray, and Lionel Atwill....
, A Free Soul
A Free Soul
A Free Soul is a 1931 Pre-Code film which tells the story of an alcoholic defense attorney who must defend his daughter's ex-boyfriend on a charge of murdering the mobster she had started a relationship with; a mobster whom her father had previously got an acquittal for on a murder charge...
, Little Caesar
Little Caesar (film)
Little Caesar is a 1931 Warner Bros. Pre-Code crime film. It tells the story of a hoodlum who ascends the ranks of organized crime until he reaches its upper echelons. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, the film stars Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.. The story was adapted by Francis Edward...
, Mystery of the Wax Museum, Possessed, The Public Enemy
The Public Enemy
The Public Enemy is a 1931 American Pre-Code crime film starring James Cagney and directed by William A. Wellman. The film relates the story of a young man's rise in the criminal underworld in prohibition-era urban America...
, Red Dust
Red Dust
Red Dust is an American 1932 romantic drama film directed by Victor Fleming. The picture is the second of six movies Clark Gable and Jean Harlow made together and was produced during the Pre-Code era of Hollywood...
, and Riptide
Riptide
A riptide is a dangerous ocean current.Riptide or Rip Tide may also refer to:* Rip Tide, a Doctor Who novella* Riptide , by Douglas Preston and Lincon Child* Riptide , short story anthologies...
under other labels.
UCLA ran several series of pre-Code films during the 2000s, showcasing films which had not been seen for decades, and not available on any home media. In 1999, the Roan Group/Troma Entertainment released two Pre-Code DVD collections. These were Pre-Code Hollywood: The Risqué Years #1, featuring Of Human Bondage
Of Human Bondage
Of Human Bondage is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. It is generally agreed to be his masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although Maugham stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography, though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention." Maugham, who had...
, Millie
Millie (film)
Millie is a Pre-Code drama film directed by John Francis Dillon and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Based on the novel by Donald Henderson Clarke, the movie stars Helen Twelvetrees, Lilyan Tashman, James Hall, and Joan Blondell.-Plot:...
and Kept Husbands
Kept Husbands
- Cast :*Dorothy Mackaill as Dorothea "Dot" Parker Brunton*Joel McCrea as Richard "Dick" Brunton*Ned Sparks as Hughie Hanready*Mary Carr as Mrs. Brunton*Clara Kimball Young as Mrs. Henrietta Post*Robert McWade as Arthur Parker*Bryant Washburn as Charlie Bates...
and Pre-Code Hollywood 2, featuring Bird of Paradise
Bird of paradise
The birds-of-paradise are members of the family Paradisaeidae of the order Passeriformes. The majority of species in this family are found on the island of New Guinea and its satellites, with a few species occurring in the Moluccas and eastern Australia. The family has forty species in 14 genera...
and The Lady Refuses.
Warner Bros. Home Video has released several of their Pre-Code films on DVD under the Forbidden Hollywood banner. To date, three volumes have been released:
- Volume 1, released on December 5, 2006, includes Baby FaceBaby Face (film)Baby Face is a 1933 American dramatic film directed by Alfred E. Green, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent. Based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck , this sexually-charged, Pre-Code Hollywood film is about an attractive young woman who uses sex to advance her social and financial status...
, Red-Headed WomanRed-Headed WomanRed-Headed Woman is a 1932 Pre-Code comedy film, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, based on a novel by Katherine Brush, and with a screenplay by Anita Loos. It was directed by Jack Conway, and stars Jean Harlow as a woman who uses sex to advance her social position...
, and Waterloo BridgeWaterloo Bridge (1931 film)Waterloo Bridge is a 1931 American drama film directed by James Whale. The screenplay by Benn Levy and Tom Reed is based on the 1930 play of the same title by Robert E. Sherwood....
. - Volume 2, released on March 4, 2008, includes The DivorceeThe DivorceeThe Divorcee is a 1930 American drama film written by Nick Grindé, John Meehan and Zelda Sears, based on the novel Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. It was directed by Robert Z. Leonard, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director...
, A Free SoulA Free SoulA Free Soul is a 1931 Pre-Code film which tells the story of an alcoholic defense attorney who must defend his daughter's ex-boyfriend on a charge of murdering the mobster she had started a relationship with; a mobster whom her father had previously got an acquittal for on a murder charge...
, Three on a MatchThree on a MatchThree on a Match is a Warner Bros. drama film directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak and Bette Davis. The film also features Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart , Allen Jenkins and Edward Arnold.-Plot:Three friends from childhood, Mary , Ruth , and Vivian , meet...
, FemaleFemale (film)Female is a 1933 Warner Bros. pre-code film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Ruth Chatterton and George Brent. It is based on the novel of the same name by Donald Henderson Clarke.-Plot:...
, and Night NurseNight Nurse (1931 film)Night Nurse is a 1931 Pre-Code, Prohibition-era, Warner Bros. crime drama and mystery film directed by William A. Wellman and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell and Clark Gable. The film was considered risqué at the time of its release, particularly the scene where Stanwyck and...
. - Volume 3, released on March 24, 2009, featured six films from William WellmanWilliam A. WellmanWilliam Augustus Wellman was an American film director. Although Wellman began his film career as an actor, he worked on over 80 films, as director, producer and consultant but most often as a director, notable for his work in crime, adventure and action genre films, often focusing on aviation...
; Other Men's WomenOther Men's WomenOther Men's Women is a 1931 American film directed by William A. Wellman and written by Maude Fulton. The film is about Bill , a railroad engineer, who falls in love with Lily , the wife of his co-worker Jack . When the two men fight over Lily, Jack is blinded. He dies in a violent storm saving...
, The Purchase PriceThe Purchase PriceThe Purchase Price is a Pre-Code American film, which was directed by William Wellman and adapted from Arthur Stringer's novel, The Mud Lark .-Plot:...
, Frisco JennyFrisco JennyFrisco Jenny is a Pre-Code drama film starring Ruth Chatterton and directed by William A. Wellman.-Plot:In 1906 San Francisco, Frisco Jenny Sandoval , a denizen of the notorious Tenderloin district, wants to marry piano player Dan McAllister , but her saloonkeeper father Jim is adamantly opposed...
, Midnight MaryMidnight MaryMidnight Mary is a 1933 film that reveals in flashbacks the hard life of a woman on trial for murder. It stars Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, and Franchot Tone.-Cast:*Loretta Young as Mary Martin AKA "Midnight Mary"*Ricardo Cortez as Leo Darcy...
, Heroes for SaleHeroes for SaleHeroes for Sale is a Depression-era film directed by William Wellman, starring Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, and Loretta Young, and released by Warner Bros. A veteran of World War I, Thomas Holmes, struggles to make his way in civilian life in almost every way imaginable...
, and Wild Boys of the Road.
Universal Home Video followed suit with Pre-Code Hollywood Collection: Universal Backlot Series. Released on April 7, 2009, the box set includes The Cheat, Merrily We Go to Hell
Merrily We Go to Hell
Merrily We Go to Hell is a 1932 Pre-Code film starring Academy Award winning actor Fredric March and Sylvia Sidney. The film was directed by Dorothy Arzner. The film's title is an example of the sensationalistic titles that were common in the Pre-Code era. Many newspapers refused to publicize the...
, Hot Saturday
Hot Saturday
Hot Saturday is Cary Grant's first movie as leading man. The movie was directed by William A. Seiter and based on a novel written by Harvey Fergusson...
, Torch Singer
Torch Singer
Torch Singer is a 1933 film made by Paramount Pictures, directed by Alexander Hall and George Somnes, and starring Claudette Colbert, Ricardo Cortez and David Manners and Lyda Roberti.The screenplay was written by Lenore J...
, Murder at the Vanities
Murder at the Vanities
Murder at the Vanities is a musical film based on the 1933 Broadway musical with music by Victor Young, made in the pre-Code era, and released by Paramount Pictures. It was directed by Mitchell Leisen, stars Carl Brisson, Jack Oakie, Kitty Carlisle, Gertrude Michael, Toby Wing, and Jessie Ralph...
, and Search for Beauty
Search for Beauty
Search for Beauty is a 1934 Pre-Code film directed by Erle C. Kenton and starring Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino. They play a pair of champion Olympic swimmers who become the face of a health magazine, which over their objections is turned into a "skin" rag....
, together with a copy of the entire Hays Code.