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Pre-Code Hollywood
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thanks for posting this information Elaine - i've been reading Pictures at a Revolution which talks a bit about the code under the influence of Breen. in particular, about the struggle to make Bonnie and Cylde.
Elaine,Thanks for the synopsis. I've been interested in pre-code movies since I heard about them, but haven't gotten around to them yet. Your thumbnail sysnopsis is further piquing my interest.
Jim
Rob wrote: "I was pretty shocked to see actual nudity in The Man Who Laughs, which is a silent film from the late 20's. I've heard good things about Waterloo Bridge and Red-Headed Woman, which both have theme..."One expects nudity and overt sex, but those aren't the things that stand out in the ones I've seen so far. It's the fact that women are deep characters with sexual desires like men's and that they aren't happy or fulfilled by their traditional roles. Of course, sins going unpunished are unfortunately perhaps the norm in real life, so why not in the movies. No Country for Old Men is an extreme recent example, but that is post-post Breen.
i really liked baby face. there are two versions...one that ends catastrophically for stanwyck and one that is hopeful. in the different versions there is a speech that is given where an older mentor figure tells her about nietsche and free will and that a woman should know that her sexuality is powerful and she can control men with it. in the sanitized version, he tells her she has to change her ways and live right. in short, one version offers her spiritual salvation, the other ends in a way where you can smell the fires of hell in the final frames (yawn). it's probably not hard to guess my preferred print.
Phillip wrote: "i really liked baby face. there are two versions...one that ends catastrophically for stanwyck and one that is hopeful. in the different versions there is a speech that is given where an older ment..."Both versions are on my dvd. I viewed the Nietsche advice one which was the original. The second version was for post 1934 rereleases. I thought the first one was good, despite the predicable and repetitive plot line (why not just use montage to show the successive affairs on her way to the top?)precisely because it told the truth: her only way out was to use her sexuality. She learned that at her father's knee and the "professor" just legitimized it for her. (No, I am not a hardened Nietsche believer, but in this instance, Nietsche was correct.)
i have a thing for stanwyck, and i found the film kind of shocking in it's frankness...there was in fact a montage...where the camera scans upward from floor to floor illustrating her climb to the top.
O, come on Phillip. That was repeated twice and I counted it as a pan, not a montage. A montage gives several separate scenes. It wasn't as well made as Three on a Match or many other movies of the time or even earlier, but I, too, was surprised to see a man move his hand up her thigh to.... and then a cut. Have you seen the Busby Berkley Golddiggers series or his wonderful musical number Lullaby of Broadway for more such frank sexuality and the theme of a woman's using her sexuality to gain material wealth? It's easy to condemn such attitudes, but for women trapped in poverty with no real "honest" way out, the circumstances were quite different.
ok, it wasn't a montage. i just thought i'd mention that the filmmaker told the audience through visual means (not voice over narrative or dialogue) that she was rising to the top. people who want to get ahead use whatever skills they have at their disposal. it's not like men wouldn't sleep their way to the top if things were reversed.
Pre-Code movies are those made before Breen, a nut case, actually, but a devout Catholic one, took over the job of censoring movies in 1934. There was a board before, but it didn't use its teeth. Breen did and American movies suffered from it for 50 years afterwards. In some ways, they've never recovered.
People assume that Pre-Code movies had a lot of wisecracking about sex and overt sex scenes. They had some of the former and surprisingly little of the latter, although one knows that people are having sex. What the Pre-Code movies did was to show that the double standard was wrong, that if a man could philander, if a man could have sex without strings, so could women. Women weren't the property of their husbands. If their husbands bored them or cheated on them, women had the right to get out of the marriage. In 1929-1934, that was dangerous stuff. It still is, though, isn't it?
After reading Mick LaSalle's book on pre-Code women (See my book review), I bought 4 collections of movies made before Mr. Breen could say "no!" So far, I've watched two. One, Baby Face shows Barbara Stanwyck doing just what men want women to do: have sex. Only, she is a desperately poor girl with ambition, so she uses her sexuality to "sleep her way to the top," as they say. However, the movie makes it clear that that is the only avenue a poor girl with no hope of education can take. Moreover, her upbringing was devastating, making her think that was the only avenue. However, she turns out to be more than that. Actually, this wasn't a very good movie. The story was linear with no subplots to enliven it. After about 15 minutes, you could predict what was coming next. However, the clothing she wears is gorgeous, which women like.
The next one I saw Three On a Match is a much better film. In this one, the woman who goes wrong has everything, but she is bored. Marriage and a baby are not enough. Now this sentiment wouldn't be voiced again in America until Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique. This film shows that there are virtually no options for the wealthy or even middle-class married woman. She can not pursue a career. She can't even take a job. Only poor women can do that.(Side note: my mother had to work as a saleswoman, but other women she met shunned her once they learned she "went out to work.") Of course a woman then couldn't go get a degree or become a serious artist or anything that would detract from her duties to her husband. So An Dvorak does what she can do. She throws over her marriage, leaves her husband, and tries to stay stoned. Any more will be plotspoiling. This movie is well told and well acted. What makes it revolutionary is that it questions a woman's role in a way that it hadn't been questioned in the movies before. (Virginia Woolf had questioned it in A Room of Her Own before she committed suicide. I have 16 more of these to go. I'll alert you all to any I think are good or revealing.