Well you can watch the pre-Hays Code version of The Maltese Falcon. I don’t see a significant difference and they actually screwed up the ending too, in relation to the original story, but in a different way. On the plus side it has Bebe Daniels as Miss Wonderly. For some reason the videotape I have is called Dangerous Female and I can’t check and see what the credit title calls it because people are watching football here. But it’s TMF all right. (Despite the ending.)
HNS aka some damned doper
Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Jean Arthur, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck all reached their peaks in spirited, independent women roles under the Production Code. In my opinion, women had considerably better roles in 1940 than, say, 1930. Likewise, as was said above, the 1941 Maltese Falcon, while being a great movie on its own, is also much better acted and directed than the 1931 version.
There’s any number of old movies I love, and many that I don’t. As great as I think Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are, Some Like It Hot doesn’t really do it for me either. It’s an OK movie, and I’ll watch it, but it’s not the sort of movie I’ll drop everything to watch.
On the other hand, I think It Happened One Night and most of the other famous “screwball” comedies of the era were great films. (Actually, wrt IHON it amazed me to learn that there actually are words and verses to the “Flying Trapeze” song).
And these are just examples. I could trot out a dozen more pairs of “I like this, but I don’t like that”, from all eras. It doesn’t matter a whole lot to me when a movie was made.
Yeah, well, if you’re the type of person who judges the quality of a movie by how many tits you see onscreen or how many women are shown bound and gagged, I guess the Code can be seen as a bad thing. The rest of us have different standards. Maybe it’s time you taught that pony of yours another trick, huh?
Last Saturday, Mom was watching some movie about a real murder case… something-or-other Von Bulow… anyway, the movie itself was relatively recent, but some of the things on it were very much intended to time-stamp it. “be nice to the jew, dear” (back-translating from Spanish, so may not be the original quotation) would be one; the jew in question, who’s Von Bulow’s lawyer, looks pretty stumped. This tells you “we’re in a time and place where most people wouldn’t dare say something like that, but at the same time where someone can say it and get away with it”.
A movie set in, say, Rome, where everybody is perfectly politically correct (they plan to murder each other but in a fashion that nobody except the corpse may find insulting) may be pwetty, but it’s not realistic at all, whatever the critics say.
I don’t have a problem with people saying they don’t like This or That movie; heck, Gone With The Wind gives me hyperglucemia; but I do have a problem with people who completely refuse to watch a movie because they know it’s over one year old - or to read a book because “it’s the wrong gender”. Specially given how gender labels change between countries. My basic point of view is, give it a try and if you don’t like it let me know, I’ll be happy to learn what you liked and hated so I can make better recommendations next time.
However, IMO, women in those roles couldn’t get away with as much as they could have in 1932 or '33 – running companies, being prison wardens and single mothers, ie: very often competing one-on-one with men. That, surely, could not stand for long.
It’s hard to use that as a marker considering that Theatres up to and including the 1950s also showed news, shorts, cartoons and in some cases a second feature so they natuarlly made shorter films to be part of a larger bill.
The average length of a film in the 1930s and 40s was approximately 60 to 80 minutes (With exceptions like GONE WITH THE WIND) During the late 1940s, the average length of a film increased and by the 1950s, the average length increased to 90–100 minutes per film, with many over 120 minutes. The 1950s also saw the rise of ‘epic’ films which often exceeded 150 minutes in length.
(http://afi.chadwyck.com/info/editorial.htm)
Todays films on average are about 90 minutes so I’d have to say the length hasn’t altered unless you include the Epics (Lord of the Rings for example) which run from 120 to 160 minutes. But Epics are the exceptions.
Thanks for posting what I was thinking, Uvula.
good topic-I just caught “THE THIRD MAN” last night on TCM. I think its still a very watchable movie-and the B&W filmimg adds to the sense of evil/mystery about harry Lime. Why does a basically goodhearted person (Holly) go off to mysterious Vienna, at the invitation of a man he hasn’t seen in years? Vienna looks like its falling apart-and its filled with creepy people-the only child you see is the creepy kid who accuses Holly of murder.
I can’t imagine a film like this being made today-it has its place in history. god forbid we ever stop watching old movies!
I agree with your point, at least so far as you rebut Evil Captor, but the Code really did have a bad effect to some extent. Stories had to have good morals - the bad guy always had to get it in the end, etc. I doubt Lauren Bacall would have been running around with no top on, Code or not.
Definitely, inarguably.
Walloon, for a real eye-opener, read Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. Then (or first), watch Ann Vickers, 1933, in which Irene Dunne plays a prison warden who *chooses *to be a single mother. If this movie had been made after the Code came into play–which, first off, it wouldn’t have been–the censor would have required her to die at the end. Literally. Or Female, also 1933, in which Ruth Chatterton plays the head of an automobile manufacturer, complete with a boytoy secretary.
These movies, and others–Ruth Chatterton made a lot of independent-woman pictures, as did Kay Francis, Norma Shearer, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, and Loretta Young–give you a clue as to the real agenda behind the Catholic Church’s insistance that the Code be strictly enforced.
Later stars like Davis and Stanwyck and Hepburn portrayed strong female characters, but they were always in movies that provided, at best, mixed messages on the subject. In the best of those movies, the images that stayed with you are the images of the strong character, and the censor-imposed retributive ending rings so false that you kind of dismiss it from your overall impression of the movie.
That’s not at all the only thing that was censored by the Code. What was allowed under the code is a quicker write than what wasn’t. As was already stated, all films had to align absolutely to a particular moral code, even forbidding, for example, criticism of religion or depiction of unpunished infidelity.
I’m a lover of old movies, and I too, for the most part, skip anything made in Hollywood between 1934 and 196-something ('68, I guess, now). It’s not a hard rule, thankfully, or else I would have missed out on a few favorites like My Man Godfrey, Good News (1947), and Rebel Without a Cause, but in general, those nuetured films of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” are a pain to sit through.
As Much as I think Evil Captor isn’t totally correct in his assertion He’s not totally wrong either. There is no need to jump on him for this as he does have a point. The clamping down on sexual themes and onscreen violence did have an effect.
If you look at how much European Cinema had diverged from American you can see the restrictions had a very large impact and in some ways stunted some of the more mature themes from developing.
Now, let’s not kid ourselves it is not like the pre hayes films were all fithy, sexy, foul mouthed violent films. They all are still pretty tame by today’s standards. I mean sure the Giant monkey peeled a few layers off of Faye Ray but she still got to keep her slip.
That being said…Hayes films can not and should not all be dismissed as inferior because they were made under the code. There was a more creative effort by the good directors to bend the rules as far as they could go and remain under the code (If you really wanted to tittilate and get away with it Just do a good old fashioned Bible Epic a la Cecil B De Mille).
There are so many great films from that period that do not come across as neutered. For example Sunset Boulevard required no sexy scenes or excessive violence and remained completely within the Code. You don’t see shooter and victim in the same shot, The “bad guy” pays. It is one of my favorites! What about White Heat?
Pretend you are a Lucas type and you can change the film to what was supposed to be inteneded and remove the Hayes restrictions What do you change really? I mean Cagney getting away in the end actually lessens that film’s climax.
What about (yep I’ll bring it up again)** Lawrence of Arabia**? Would it have been a better scene to actually show Lawrence being raped rather than the shot of the Turkish Bey watching the beating from the door coughing into his hanky. There was a moment where a director excelled at showing something absolutely Unhayes in a memorable way that actually added to teh film rather than lessened it.
The coy ways at hinting at action can also become the most effective ways to portray an event on film rather than a full on realistic shot.
So I’ll say yes the Hayes codes severly restricted the films under it to teh point where they didnot get to develop the way other countries films did… but did not necessarily ruin every film that it touched and in some ways made them better despite itself.
You’re saying there was some Production Code section that prohibited women from being portrayed running companies or being prison wardens? No? Then what are you saying?
I’m saying that the chief censor, Joseph Breen, was a militant Catholic who collaborated closely with an activist Bishop; it’s generally accepted that the. His enforcement of the code was dictated by his belief that a woman’s place was in the home; that a woman who aspired to anything other than motherly wifeliness was a “loose woman.” In any Code-era film I can think of, a female character who was the head of a company, or independent–read: without a man–either “changes her ways” and gets a man by films end, or ends tragically. I cannot think of a single Code-era film that celebrated–or even accepted as normal–strong, independent womanhood. I’m sure there must have been some, but none come to mind at the moment. In any case, they were certainly scarce, due to the Hays Office’s hostility to such a message.
Don’t take my word for it, Walloon. Read that book. It’s an entertaining read, and will give you quite a laundry list of great movies to watch.
I absolutely agree with this. I annoy my friends frequently with my theory that the Code is partly to blame for Bush’s America.
I mean, think about it: the Movies are America’s Medium. They’re the way we’ve told the story of ourselves, as a people, as a society, for most of the last century. They’re the way we’ve exported ourselves and our culture to the world, they’re a big part of how we learn, ourselves, about the culture we live in. And for the peak years of the movie industry–a time when more people went to the movies than any peak year since–Breen was twisting this massive cultural force into his narrow, puritanical worldview.
I think a lot of the puritanism in modern American culture–the “culture war” bullshit promulgated by the right wing–is due to the cultural impact of the Hays Code.
But then I spend a lot of time under my desk playing with my lips.
I don’t know, personal favorites I guess. Movies that you’d recommend to a fellow doper who found the article intriguing.
So this whole Hayes (Hays? Make up your minds!) Code thing kind of puts to rest that white supremacist claim that “The Jews” run Hollywood, doesn’t it?
Or is that a matter of “The Jews” supposedly being responsible for getting rid of the Code, and running Hollywood since 1968?
Moderator interjects: Way back up there in Post #83, **Uvula Donor **, I remind you that personal insults are not permitted in this forum. You are out of line.
If you have a complaint about another post/poster, report it to a Moderator. You do this by clicking on the ! in the little triangle in the upper right corner of the page.
And for the record: your accusation of “one-trick pony” is not only insulting, but dead wrong.
No problem with the latter part. I’ve seen literally thousands of movies.