http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18326-2003May5.html
Can’t wait to see Kitty in a bra made out of marijuana leaves.
Based I’m assuming on the book of the same name by Mickey LaSalle? I picked up the book remaindered a few weeks ago and I’m looking forward to reading it and seeing the documentary.
I’ve been wondering since I saw the commercial, what does “pre-code” mean?
Pre-Code means produced before the Production Code, which spelled out what you could and could not show in films. IIRC, it became known as the Hayes Code because it was enforced by Will Hayes, the once-Postmaster General of the US, and a stick-in-the-mud if ever there was one.
Shanghai Express is a masterpiece, and Baby Face is irresistable. I’ve never seen Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant or Ladies They Talk About w/Barbara Stanwyck, so those are on the top of the list.
Biggest omission: I don’t know if TCM has ever shown Frank Borzage’s **Man’s Castle** (my vote for the greatest Hollywood love story ever), but it certainly would’ve been appropriate for a pre-Code series.
Thanks! Is there a good place to go to read up on what the Production Code did not allow? I’d never heard of it before-- I just assumed that what movies portrayed was more or less dictated by prevailing social mores, not actual rules. Interesting stuff.
[rul=“http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html”]Here you go, Beadalin.
I’m sure you can do a search and come up with a listing of prohibited depictions. From memory, they included:
- Drugs
- Sex
- Crime without consequences (you could show the gangsters shooting at the cops, as long as the cops won or the gangster somehow got what was coming to them).
- Religion in a bad light
- Segregation
I’m sure there are others (and even the ones I’ve mentioned had gray areas), but you get the idea.
Here you go, Beadalin.
That’s the movie that sprang to mind when I saw the thread title.
I’ve heard all the arguments that the code “forced moviemakers to be more creative,” or led to the Hollywood Dream Machine of the 1930’s, etc., but still this was all at the cost of portraying real people’s lives. With very few exceptions, I don’t think American movies have recovered from the direction that the Hayes Code set them on.
(and no, this soapbox I’m harranging from atop of was not made by child labor)
I think you mean miscegenation (Part II, paragraph 6 of the Hays Code of 1930).
Yes, that’s what I meant. For some reason I was thinking of “integration” as being prohibited, which leads, in a roundabout way to miscegnation (really, really integrated). I noticed the goof right after I posted.
I think I have already seen all the films they’ll be showing, but I will watch the special tonight. Wonder why they are having Jane Fonda, of all people, narrate it? Bizarre choice, to say the least.
Tidbit: though it is called the Hays Code, after Will Hays (who instituted it in the early 1920s), it was actually Joseph Breen who clamped it down in mid-1934. He was a horror—Hays actually loved Hollywood and the movies and was a delight to deal with, but Breen was a meglomaniac who hated sex, gays, Jews, you name it. Movies were a lot less fun after early 1934.
I figure it’s because of Jane Fonda’s breakthrough feminism in Tall Story. 
The only thing good about the Hays Code is that writers developed the screwball comedy as a result of it. [For others than Eve whom I’m sure already understands this thoroughly.] True screwball comedies have as a central plot device some impediment between the leading man and leading lady that requires that they can’t get together. More than that. They will likely profess to hate one another. They will take out their sexual frustration in odd and forceful agression against one another. There is wonderful innuendo and sexual tension running as an undercurrent throughout. The final clinch is a relief and a triumph of true love and sexual attraction.
But the Hays Code destroyed many careers (Mae West’s probably first and foremost) and set back realism in movies for two decades until post-war noir began to chip away at it.
I haven’t seen all the movies, and I already have my VCR set up to start taping tonight.
For those of you setting your VCRs, you must catch Downstairs (1932) at 5:00 a.m. Probably John Gilbert’s best talkie–and it has a brief cameo, at the very end, of the recently deceased Karen Morley. It’s a dark comedy about a roue who sleeps and lies his way to the top of the servant world.
The saddest and most depressing film about child abuse was Broken Blossoms, with Lillian Gish, directed by D. W. Griffith. It was a silent film. Gish portrayed a 12-yr old, and when she says she told Griffith that since she actually was 24 she was too old(they taped her chest down and put long curls on her) he is said to have replied that what he was going to put her through, although fictional, was too intense for a real child. EVeryone DIES in this movie, the kid by beating, her father killed in a fight with her benefactor, and the benefactor then suicides. The scene where her father is breaking down the door of the closet where she is hiding from him had me in tears. I hadn’t realized how powerful a silent could be until this film.
. . . Well, the special was pretty good—even Little Miss Picky here has no real complaints (though it might have been better had they interviewed me!). Some good clips, and I was glad to see Joan Blondell and Ruth Chatterton given so much screentime.
But, again, Jane Fonda?!
Why not Jane Fonda? Is she not a complicated woman?
For those (like me) who missed this last night, it will be re-broadcast May 20 at 9:30 PM EDT and May 21 at midnight EDT.
I thought from the article linked above, that they were showing a lot more of the pre-code movies. I watched most of The Divorcee, but the others were just too late for me. I found the little biography special fascinating, and while I don’t normally like b&w movies, I thought the one I did watch very good. I can see how you love them so much Eve. I was just startled at how…modern(?) the portrayal of women was in these movies. Anyway, I looked at the guide for the next few days, and didn’t see any of the pre-code movies playing, so I’ll hope to catch it again later in the month. I’m hoping someone will either re-bumb this, or make another reminder thread.
Tuesday the 13th:
8:00 PM Torch Singer (1933) Claudette Colbert and the great Lyda Roberti. Soap, but good soap.
9:30 PM Baby Face (1933) Barbara Stanwyck in the pre-Codiest of the pre-Coders.
11:00 PM Female (1933) If you’ve never seen Ruth Chatterton, grab this.
12:15 AM Queen Christina (1933) Garbo & Gilbert. Long and uneven, but some great moments.
Tuesday the 20th:
10:30 PM Shanghai Express (1932) Marlene as “the notowious white wose of the Owient.”
1:00 AM Red Dust (1932) Gable and Harlow, and very sexy indeed.
2:30 AM Gold Diggers Of 1933 (1933) Argueably the best of the Busby Berkeley musicals.
4:15 AM The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) Chevalier, Colbert, Hopkins and “Jazz Up Your Lingerie.”
Tuesday the 27th:
8:00 PM Morocco (1930) Marlene’s US debut, with a red-hot Gary Cooper.
11:30 PM She Done Him Wrong (1933) Mae West and Cary Grant—how can you lose?