The children and I watched the original (1931) Frankenstein film last night. While reading the wiki article on film, I noticed it called the film “pre-code.”
I had no idea what “pre-code” meant, so I read the wiki page on it. Wow! :eek: I had no idea such films were made back then.
I now have a desire to watch some of the more “racy” or controversial ones. 
Are there any fans here of pre-code films? If so, what are your favorites?
I don’t know if you are into silent films, but “Broken Blossoms” starring Lillian Gish, is absolutely devestating. She plays a young girl who is beaten often by her father. The film was directed by the great D.W. Griffith. It’s said that Gish asked Griffith why he didn’t use an actual teenager for the (she was in her twenties) and he told her that what he was going to put her through in the filming wasn’t good for a real young girl.
I just watched one of my favorites again last night, ‘Red Dust’ from 1932 with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Set on a rubber plantation in French Indochina, Gable is a hard-working he-man, and Harlow is very clearly a prostitute stranded on his property. Also Mary Astor as a proper married lady who has arrived with her husband, and Gable has an affair with HER. It’s a bit racey when Ms. Harlow takes a bath in a water tank and wears beautiful skimpy chiffon dresses in the hot humid climate. Those were REAL movie stars, a fun, memorable little movie.
Turner Classic Movies occasionally features Pre-Code films–labelled as such. Here are some DVD’s offered at their website. (Which might be available elsewhere at better prices.)
I’ll be investigating FilmStruck, TCM’s streaming service. Yes, I appreciate the arty Criterion Collection. But I’m also interested in Old Hollywood. I’ve enjoyed going cable-free, but do miss TCM.
There’s a great fan Web site at http://pre-code.com – More Pre-Code movies than you (or I) had ever heard of.
I’ve always been partial to Night Nurse – Barbara Stanwyck stands up to child-murdering chauffeur Clark Gable, while she and Joan Blondell show off the best of 1930s-style women’s underclothes.
The Mystery of the Wax Museum was long thought to be a lost film. It was a rare pre-Code color horror film. It starred Lionel Atwill as the Mad Wax Museum Keeper (a role later played by Vincent Price in the remake, the 3D film House of Wax) The film was found in the late 1960s and shown in art houses. It’s an extra on the House of Wax DVD.
Besides being 3D, the film is interesting in having a tough, gutsy female lead. There’s nothing particularly racy about her (besides her cavalier attitude), but after the Code they started reigning in their heroines.
Another example – compare pre-Code sexy Betty Boop to her much more reserved later persona. You caught glimpses of Betty’s body, and she definitely had racy lines in the old days
See #3 in this link:
Barbara Stanwyck again in Baby Face. She gets hired at a company and goes through a series of men, each one more important than last, and therefore on a higher floor in the company skyscraper. That’s right, she literally sleeps her way to the top. The scenes are interspersed with rising shots of the phallic building to underscore the point. Great line: “I’m working so hard I have to go to bed early every night.”
I have to mention that the first five Marx Brothers movies were pre-Code and have a markedly different sensibility than their later movies, although that’s 90% due to their moving from Paramount to MGM.
A couple of things on the “pre-Code era.” First, the Code was already in place. It just wasn’t being strongly enforced. What happened in 1934 is that the Catholic Church intervened. It was being pressured by its parishioners - as heavily political and powerful as the Christian Right is today - to clean up the smut in society. It installed Joseph Breen as Code head and had the Code rewritten to make it stronger. The studios accepted the changes because they almost universally entered formal bankruptcy in the Depression and couldn’t stand a national boycott by millions.
Some people say that the new prohibitions made pictures great because writers had to learn subtlety and innuendo to get across points that were witless and blatant in the past. It’s true that the majority of films remembered today are post-Code. That’s mostly because pre-Code films were suppressed for so long and because they were being made in the first years of sound, the learning period for a new style of filmmaking. The studios would have needed those five years to get great regardless. Who knew what masterpieces were eliminated by self-censorship?
Pre- or post- code, I just can’t get past Boop’s hideously deformed head.
Tarzan and His Mate featured a ton of smoldering living-in-sin sexuality between Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, with O’Sullivan wearing the skimpiest of costumes and the two characters constantly draped over and touching each other. Not only did it feature a nude swim ( with a body double for O’Sullivan to keep up with ex-Olympian Weismuller), but O’Sullivan herself briefly flashed the camera more than once. As a movie it is strictly standard Tarzan fare. But if you’ve ever seen that series of films ( they showed them regularly on Saturday mornings in my youth ), the difference between the kiddie-fare post-Code films and this very adult-oriented one is startling.
Betty Boop “guested” in the first Popeye cartoon. She wore a hula skirt and was clearly topless, although her breasts were hidden under a lei.
My favorite bit of pre-code dialog comes for 42nd Street:
Chorus Boy: Wanna sit on my lap?
Chorus Girl: I ain’t no flagpole sitter.
(Shakespeare used the same joke in Hamlet, BTW).
42nd Street also had the line about Anytime Annie: “She only said ‘no’ once, and that’s when she didn’t hear the question.”
And, of course, Marie Dressler’s classic line (and doubletake) from Dinner at Eight.
Wasn’t Mogambo a remake of this one?
No real ground broken here, but I remember an episode of Jack Benny’s show, where he’d ordered a massage (which was answered by a masseuse played by the memorable, wise-cracking Frank Nelson.)
When Jack stripped down, the masseuse asked him whether he’d ever appeared in Tarzan films.
A delighted Jack answered, “No, why?”
Frank replied, "Oh, right - that was Maureen O’Sullivan"
Umm, it wasn’t in 3D, unless that’s a typo for “color.” This film, BTW, uses a fascinating two-color, pre-Technicolor process.
Another great pre-code film is the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Ivy, the woman Hyde pursues, is a prostitute, and even though they don’t use the word, it’s obvious. There is a weird cropped line where a man said that Hyde is “One of Ivy’s customers,” and the have some background noise come up over the word “customer,” but it’s still pretty obvious what he means.
The film was released in 1931, and remade 10 years later, with Ingrid Bergman in the Ivy role. She’s a Barmaid instead of a prostitute.
The movie Intolerance from 1916 has a long sequence about the fall of Babylon, and had graphic battle scenes with heads being lopped off. I’m not even sure how they did it in 1916. It’s not bloody, but there’s lots of of death, swords penetrating, limbs coming off. If it had lots of spurting blood, it would be like the Normandy invasion in Saving Private Ryan. The an innocent death in it too, which was never avenged, and that was frowned upon under the code, and the actress who portrays it is fantastic.
I’ll second Broken Blossoms. It’s based on a very odd short story that reads like a bad translation of something that was good in the original. Griffith made a lot of changes, but he still had regard for the writer of the original (he owned an autograph of it, which I’ve held in my hands at the library of rare books at my college), which he and Lillian Gish both signed. Gish wasn’t a big woman, but he used camera tricks and other things-- like employing especially tall women to act in scenes with her, and some scenes with forced perspective-- to make her seem really petite. There’s a famous scene in the film called “the closet scene,” which freaked me out the first time I saw it, and apparently made Griffith cry when it was filmed. They used the first take. He’s supposed to have said to Gish “My gawd, you didn’t tell me you were going to do it like that!” It’s not a salacious film, and it’s a little hard to watch, because it’s among other things, anti-child beating propaganda from 1919, a time when most children were beaten, just not within inches of their lives.
Yes, Broken Blossoms, one of my all-time favorites.
And I also recommend Rain, which would have violated the Code in so many respects, to be left with a five-minute short. And a young Joan Crawford, showcasing her spectacular acting.
Two of my pre-code favorites are THE ISLAND OF LOST SOULS and DOCTOR X, both 1932.
The first is an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, about a surgeon who experiments on changing full-grown mammals into human simulations. Banned in England for, like, forever. Also thought to be a “lost film.” Charles Laughton chews the scenery delightfully. The “Panther Woman” provides the forbidden fruit, and Laughton’s obvious sadism at herding the “things” into his surgical “House of Pain” for biological updates is something that wouldn’t have happened after 1934.
LOST SOULS is also the source of “The natives are restless tonight.” And the Recital of the Law by the Beast Men, shouted in response to Laughton’s whip-cracks, is the source of “Are we not MEN???”
Altogether, a great piece of early '30s Weird Cinema. I watch it at least once a year.
DOCTOR X is just…bizarre. Like MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM it was filmed in two-tone Technicolor, and starred Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray. Just watch it. “Artificial…FLESSSHHHHHH…!”
And oh god yes you should watch BROKEN BLOSSOMS. Fell in love with Lillian Gish when I first saw it at age 13.
One of my favorites. The nude swimming scenes were great.
Hypocrites was from 1915 nad had a character, the personification of the virtue Truth, represented as a fully nude (head to toe, all in frame) woman which…
There was talk of not allowing the nudity to be filmed at all but since it’s a “morality play” of sorts (it’s actually quite preachy) it was deemed to have redeeming social value. It also helped that the film was written and directed by a woman.
Merrily We Go To Hell is a fun film from 1932 that features an open marriage. Married woman Sylvia Sidney keeps as her “bit on the side” a young Cary Grant in one of his earliest roles.
I recently read a great biography of Frances Marion and was surprised to see the number of times that she, as a screenwriter, was called into meetings to censor parts of her works during this supposed “Pre-Code” era. Actually, one of the particularly interesting things in reading this biography is seeing how the censorship creeps in over time- unlike the imagined overnight change suggested in most discussions of Pre-Code Hollywood vs. the Hays Code Era. Frances Marion’s career as a screenwriter started in the ‘teens and went into the 40s. Even though Marion is the focus, her biography serves as an excellent look at all aspects of early Hollywood and the emergence of the film industry.
A great line in reference to the Hays Code in the early years, from one of the Marx Brothers’ lesser works, At the Circus (though, credit where it’s due, this film gave us “Lydia the Tatooed Lady”), a woman steals from Groucho and defiantly stuffs it into the cups of her bustier. Groucho muses, “There must be some way of getting that money without getting in trouble with the Hays office.”
There is a 25 minute film named “Mystery of the Leaping Fish” made in 1916 starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr. It’s a broad comedy and he plays a detective named Coke Ennyday. The coke referred to is not a soft drink. A parody of the Sherlock Holmes, Ennyday is continually injecting himself with syringes that are on a bandolier on his chest. His clock doesn’t have numbers, it says EATS, SLEEP, DRINKS, DOPE.
It was an out of style film by Fairbanks and he reportedly hated it.
Please read more carefully. I said that the remake was a 3D film. Which it was.
I’ll agree with you about Reuben Mamoulian’s version of Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde as both a great film and an example of the pre-code looser morals. Many of the shots are set up beautifully – the extended take at the very beginning all done from Jeckyll’s point of view (including a look directly into the mirror), the shot where Hyde descends to rape, disclosing a statue of Cupid and Psyche behind him, the shot at the end where the detective shoots Hydfe, then jumps aside, revealing a skeleton.
The film explored Hyde’s sexual license, something the Stevenson story, for all its virtues, was vague about. Hyde was clearly EVIL, but, aside from killing Sir Danvers Carew in cold blood and running down a child, we didn’t get to see quite why that was.