I’ve perused some collections of the old Little Orphan Annie (http://www.toonopedia.com/annie.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Orphan_Annie) strips from the 1920s-40s. And it occurs to me that no newspaper would run them today. Not because of Harold Gray’s right-wing, proto-Objectivist politics – that could probably find an outlet. But they’re so violent! People get killed! Sometimes in labor riots, sometimes in ordinary crime, sometimes by Nazi spies. Annie’s life is repeatedly put in danger. I can’t remember the last time I saw anything like that in the funnies, except for Prince Valiant. With all the violence we so readily accept in other media, why have we gotten so squeamish about the comic pages?
You think Little Orophan Annie is bad? Trty reading some of the old Dick Tracy strips – people get beaten up and bloodied. The villains often died in picturesque and interesting ways – impaled on a steeple, frozen to death (various times), electrocuted, gassed, falling from great heights.
Once I saw a Tarzan episode from the funny papers and it concerned young Tarzan and his courtship of a young female ape.He considered himself a hairless ape,but the implications were mindboggling
The religious right didn’t really latch on to the idea that they should have control over what everyone read, viewed and listened to until the 30’s. I am told, though I’ve never investigated the truth of it, that many movies of the 20’s and early 30’s got away both with scenes that were extremely bloody and violent even by today’s standards, and with very close to nude scenes, if not nude scenes proper.
Not for long. There were nude scenes in the silent days, but they were condemned early on. By 1930, the production code prevented any nudity, and the examples that can be found in silent film, the nudity was generally “artistic” and no sexual intercourse was shown.
And violence was nothing compared to films today.
Well, except for the technicolor blood, I’m not sure I’d agree with that. Ever seen the original Scarface? It’s no Audition, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was “nothing to compare.”
In any case, the Production Code didn’t start to have an effect unti 1934, to split hairs. Before that, there was some “tasteful” nudity, the most famous probably being Tarzan and His Mate and Ben Hur. More importanly, IMHO, the Code was a backlash against the strong-willed, indepdent women that had become the most popular characters in movies, and ushered in an era of institutionalized misogyny that American cinemas has yet to fully recover from.
Sheesh. Must perview.
I never heard that before. Could you tell us more?
I’ve heard something about this independent women thing before. Conmpare the 1933 “Mystery of the Wax Museum” with the 1954 “House of Wax” (They’re on the same DVD now, so it’s easy). The former has a strong female reporter that the later film lacks. Supposedly, after the Hays Code, a lot of strong female characters disappeared from the movies.
An excellent book which makes the point lissener is making is Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood.
And I see from my link that the same author has written the same book over again, but with men. I’ll have to check that out.
Not to mention Tommy-gunned into swiss cheese.
Have you seen Pibgorn?
Compare it to the more recent film by that name. Which was more violent? The Pacino one, by far. Admittedly, it helped the the older films were in B&W, but, at the same time, they never showed anyone’s blood and guts being spattered.
Then compare it to something like Saw II or House of 1000 Corpses
1931, to really split hairs. And there was a code before that.
Not really. The nude scenes were removed from Tarzan almost immediately, and Jane is not really shown nude – she’s in the water. That was allowed – you could imply a woman swimming nude as long as you didn’t actuall show anything. For instance, in Road to Zanzibar Dorothy Lamour was swimming with all her clothes left by the water. (They did show shots of her head.)
As a footnote, and as a sign of cultural values, Zulu had a scene with dozens of topless native women, and it was hardly noted, since that sort of “anthropoligical” nudity was accepted.
I’m not familiar with the Ben Hur, but there doesn’t seem to be a version in the time frame allowed.
Not so. There were strong willed, independent women in movies like His Girl Friday, Footlight Parade, Golddiggers of 1933, and others. Mae West was hurt by the code, but generally, writers and directors got around things by implying and suggesting instead of showing.
Mickey Mouse’s suicide attempts likely wouldn’t fly today either
http://www.barnaclepress.com/comics/archives/comedy/mickey_mouse/index.html
I keep thinking about the eyes. I can’t imagine an editor letting a strip in where the artist didn’t draw in pupils. Creep-city.
Note that comic strips and movies are distributed quite differently.
You get a paper, and there’s the strips. Anyone can buy a paper. It sits around the house for a day.
With a movie, you need to make an effort to go see it and plunk down some real money. Nowadays, they even tell you if it’s suitable for children (supposedly).
Most people therefore expect a certain level of prudishness in papers.
(In short, I have no idea why “Scarface” got dragged into this thread.)
Hell, I remember worse. Littleface Finney was pissed off that one of his henchmen wore a monogrammed vest-pocket to a heist, so he had another thug hold the guys arms while he set fire to the hankie…and let it burn away most of the guy’s suitcoat, shirt, and chest.
The Brow hooked one Summer Sister up to a timer-linked electrical Iron Maiden. The other twin had to carry out some nefarious errand and be back in time for him to turn off the machine before the spikes gouged into her sister’s leg.
And how about Mrs. Pruneface’s Deathtrap? She shackled Tracy to the floor, set up a board with a railway spike across two large blocks of ice, and weighted it down with a refrigerator. Turned the heat way up and left. Dick got to watch the ice melt and the spike descend into his chest. I forget how he got out of that one.
Nudity in public was surprisingly prevalent until World War II.
The various Broadway revues - the Follies, the Scandals, etc - all used literally nude showgirls as backdrops to the fabulous sets.
The 1939 New York World’s Fair had a number of nude shows, all for adults, but also an “educational” outdoor nude exhibit.
The nudist movement was extremely popular worldwide and book proclaiming the healthfulness of sun and nudity gained acceptance.
The biggest turn toward prudishness came not because of religious objections but byecause of World War II itself. Two reasons, one minor and one major. The minor one is that frivolity of all sorts was dampened by the war effort. The major one is that the repositioning of women into war work made objectifying them appear unpatriotic, while the number of men in uniform glorified their sacrifice. Wholesomeness and good ol’ fashioned American virtues became paramount.
That’s not to say that religious groups, especially the Catholics, didn’t have a disproportional say on public morals. But all of lissener’s claims are wrong.
The nude scene in Tarzan and His Mate was never mass exhibited (it may not have even made the preview showing); the protest was over the scantiness of Jane’s costumes. The one true nude scene was Hedy Lamarr in Extase and that was suppressed almost everywhere.
Pre-code movies did have some nudity: there’s been several Café Society threads about this. But almost always these were anonymous chorus girls or extras. Mainstream nudity of stars in Hollywood films was all but non-existent until really the 1970s.
Strong women flourished after the Code throughout the 1930s. Just look at all the screwball comedies, almost every one of which has a strong female lead. But they were also mostly comic females. Serious movies had female leads but most strong leads went to men, no different than in later decades.
The dropoff in female leads comes especially comes when Hollywood stops making screwball comedies during the war years. Although a few were made immediately after, their era was over and the era of domestic females lasted for more than a decade. Again, this was not because of religious group pressure. All of American mainstream society agreed to this diminution of their roles.
Violence too was portrayed drastically differently. Without color, films could not properly show gouts of spurting red blood. And there is no question that they would not be allowed to do so, before or after the code. After the Code, of course, death was mostly shown offscreen. Even war movies were so sanitized by modern standards that the true effects of war was never shown.
Violence in comic strips and comic books went mostly unnoticed until the 1950s. We forget today how violent and gruesome fairy tales and children’s stories were until the Victorians deliberately sanitized them. Sex was always an issue for children - i.e. it was totally unmentioned - but violence wasn’t considered a menace until about the time of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which, along with the Congressional hearings, killed the comics industry in the mid-1950s.
To this day Americans care way more about sex and nudity than they do violence. We’re just even more hypocritical about what we publicly approve of then we used to be, and that’s saying quite a bit.
You know, they’re still printing Little Orphan Annie daily strips. And they are unbelievably fucked up Eric Burns tells us more!
(For those disinclined to click the links, I got one thing to say for you: Iguana Queen from Mars.)
(I’m not a regular reader, so I can’t tell you how many gunbattles and/or Nazis it has on a regular basis.)
Aw, hell…Miller beat me to the punch. Curse you, Red Baron!
When I was a Bircher in the early 1980s, AMERICAN OPINION journal noted the the present LOA writer had Daddy W & her fighting the Tri-Continental Coalition, or something like that (being the Trilateral Commission).