Just saw John Gilbert’s terrific Downstairs (1932), a male version of Baby Face and Red-Headed Woman, wherein he screws, steals and blackmails his way to the top.
I love pre-Code talkies, ca. 1929 till mid-1934, when the Hays Office clamped down. I have always thought 1932 beat 1939 all hollow as Hollywood’s Golden Year: you’ve got Mae West in her film debut in Night After Night, and RKO’s bizarre Thirteen Women, great gangster films (Scarface, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Three on a Match, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing), horror and suspense (Freaks, The Mummy, Island of Lost Souls, The Mask of Fu Manchu, The Old Dark House, Murders in the Rue Morgue), delirious screwball comedies (Horse Feathers, Million Dollar Legs, Red-Headed Woman, If I Had a Million, The Greeks Had a Word for Them, Blessed Event, The Half-Naked Truth), musicals (Maurice Chevalier in Love Me Tonight and One Hour With You; The Big Broadcast).
Plus other treats: Marlene Dietrich’s ultra-glam Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus; Clara Bow’s wonderfully insane Call Her Savage; the A Star is Born precursor What Price Hollywood?; the tear-jerker One Way Passage—what are some of your favorite pre-Code moments?
You pretty much covered most of them. Just watched *Island of Lost Souls *last night on TCM. Also recommend *The Black Cat *with Legosi and Karlof and All Quiet on the Western Front.
If you want to go back a little further, Birth of a Nation. The battle scenes are very realistic for the era and many of the scenes, including the rape are quite intense.
A question about the Hays Code in general: did any producers (independent or studio) refuse to follow it? Since it wasn’t government imposed, what would have happened if they had refused?
All the major studios–and most of the minors–buckled under and signed on, to prevent government-imposed censorship. They fought like wildcats against some proposed cuts, and more often than one would think got away with it, too. It was a dance.
If a studio *did *release without the Code’s stamp of approval, the studio would be under the magnifying glass for the next year or so–not worth it.
There are scenes in silent films that would not have made it during the Code.
I remember some scenes in “Ben-Hur”. During the sequence with the galley slaves one guy is chained against the wall, face in. He’s not referred to but one assumes he’s being punished. He’s also stark naked. Full backal nudity I guess you could call it. I didn’t see that again until the late 60’s or early 70’s. Then there’s a victory parade in Rome, with girls throwing flower petals. They wear long skirts, long hair, and nothing else. Everytime they throw a handful of petals their breasts flash out.
Another silent film with a mature subject was “Broken Blossoms” starring Lillian Gish, and directed by D.W. Griffith. Gish plays a young girl in London whose father beats her. After a particularly bad beating she collapses in the doorway of a local shopkeeper, who happens to be Chinese. He takes her in, treats her wounds, and nurses her back to health. The guy is attracted to her but doesn’t do anything. Her father finds her, takes her away and beats he so badly she dies. The pacifistic shopkeeper goes bonkers, fights the father and kills him, then goes home and commits suicide. The epilogue asks people to consider that although they may not hit their kids, “do you hurt them with unkind words?”
A very grim tale. Gish is said to have asked Griffith why he didn’t use a younger girl for the part and he is supposed to have replied that what he was going to put her through in the filming would be too tough for a real kid.
If you can, watch The Mystery of the Wax Museum, the (technicolor!) original that was remade as the 1950s 3D pic House of Wax. Lionel Atwill has the Vincent Price role. The big difference between nthe two is that the pre-code original has a tough-as-nails female reporter in place of the 1950s fainting flowers. (The film is available on some of the House of Wax DVDs – the 1950s one, that is, not the ridiculous Paris Hilton “remake”)
Any documentary on the history of film will have lots of info on the Hays code and as Eve mentioned, plenty of books too.
So called educational films used to get around the Hays code. In the 60s and early 70s they were called “white coaters” due to the white coat of the alleged doctor narrating the film. These were mostly European erotica/porn films that were “legitimized” by inserting a doctor giving a sex education lecture.
If you’ve seen Taxi Driver, you’ve seen an example of a white coater when Bickle takes his date to a movie.
During the 30s-50s, it wasn’t as cheeky as the Euro porn of the 60s/70s, but adults used to line up around the block to watch films of women giving birth for the full frontal nudity!
As for the silent era, yes, there was lots of nudity and violence compared to the Hays period. Much of it in the mostly lost Vampire or Vamp movies, meaning what we now call a femme fatale, not the blood suckers. Although the women who played vamps were kind of portrayed as blood suckers with images of men morphing into a pile of bones.
I saw one full frontal nudity silent film involving an outdoor glory hole. On a dirt road there was a wall separating the men from the women. The man thought he was having sex with a woman, but when the camera switched to the other side, he was actually nailing a goat. The three naked ladies giggle at their practical joke.
Implicit unmarried sex between Jane and Tarzan, Maureen O’Sullivan in revealing costumes, explicit nude swimming scene. As if real people would ever do such things.
“Roman Scandals of 1933” which was a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court kind of spoof had a lot of near-nudity and under-the-radar kink (including Lucille Ball as one of a group of VERY long haired slave girls chained naked to a giant cake thing) and there’s all kinds of kink in 1933’s “Sign of the Cross.”
The last time I watched Goldiggers of 1933, Mr. brown actually perked up and took an interest when he saw Joan Blondell at her boudoir table dressed in next to nothing. He sat down to watch for awhile but lost interest when no more of Joan (in a manner of speaking) was forthcoming in the movie.
Everybody gets the Hays Code wrong these days. The Wikipedia page gets the timing correct, but doesn’t really explain the sequence well unless you already know it.
The Hays Code went into effect in 1927. That’s right, during the silent days. And the studios did ignore it, mostly.
That infuriated the Catholic Church. Today the Church seems relatively liberal, especially compared to the Christian Right, but up through the 1960s the Church, through American bishops, was a powerful conservative moralistic force. And enforcer. It could enforce because the centers of population were in the heavily Catholic large northeastern cities. When the Church condemned a movie, the faithful could not go see it. That was equivalent to box office failure.
The famous Code was quite literally written by the Church, using “lay Catholic Martin Quigley, who was editor of the Motion Picture Herald, a prominent trade paper, and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord.” This was adopted in 1930.
Hays was not an enforcer, even though he heartily approved of the Code and badgered studios about it constantly. They were too involved in the changeover to sound and battling the Depression to worry about a third source of agita so screenwriters got away with it for a few years.
The Hays Code should be called the Breen Code, because in 1934 the Church forced the appointment of Joseph Breen, as evil a moralizing nutcase as Anthony Comstock, as head of the Production Code. To be somewhat fair, the Church was ready to destroy the movie business by then and government intervention was a real possibility. It worked, and people have argued since that the cleverness needed to avoid the letter of the Code worked to give movies its Golden Era. That’s highly debatable, and movies probably seemed better because everybody finally learned to cope with sound, but it’s hard to argue with box office. The end of Prohibition and the gangster era undoubtedly also caused a big swing in the kind of movies that were popular; the Roosevelt era was more moralistic than the Hoover era, odd as that may seem today, and the sex-and-violence laden films of the “pre-Code” era probably would have faded anyway. But Breen is too juicy a villain to ever excuse.
The depiction of independent women was probably the biggest impetus for the Catholic Church to get behind the Code. They weren’t nearly so interested in gambling-and-girlie-show type raciness. Their parishioners had been indulging in that since who laid the rails.
But showing ballsy broads as respectable was something new. And, as is often the case, the main issue couldn’t be addressed head on. For the Church to speak out plainly against modern women, not just loose women, would have drawn entirely too much attention to the issue.
