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Essential Pre-Code

Sin! Booty-shaking! Sexy lingerie! Gambling! Home-wrecking dames! Gents who won’t take no for an answer!

Essential Pre-Code
Photo: Photofest

It’s easy to forget that there was a Production Code in Hollywood as early as 1930, its ideological germination roughly parallel to the all-systems-go industrialization of the American movie itself, beginning at least as far back as the 1910s. The censorship process, at the behest of the Hays Office, formed a perfect bottleneck as all scripts had to pass across a single desk, and its binding power was nothing compared to the draw of lurid content.

Today, the term “pre-Code” suggests sassy, sexy, snappy films where men and women make the most of each other’s loose morals, workplace improprieties were encouraged, and criminal activities were cast in the same “rogue hero” light as those of rugged cowboys or intrepid explorers. Much as we go on about freedom of expression and its symbiotic relationship with obscenity, profanity, nudity, and depicting the seamier side of life, very little of pre-Code’s relative broad-mindedness had a whole hell of a lot to do with individual artistic expression. Dime-novel debauchery was one of the American cinema’s primary selling points, alongside star power, sync sound, and air conditioning. Sin! Booty-shaking! Sexy lingerie! Gambling! Home-wrecking dames! Gents who won’t take no for an answer! These comprised the early talkie’s version of 3D, IMAX, and CGI. And make no mistake, it was business, not personal.

So, too, was the decision to crack down on the same lurid content. When the Catholic Church put its boot down, Hollywood exes were gripped by the fear that America’s largest religious body would renounce the sinful medium altogether. The name of the game was gaining traction with the common man during hard times, and they weren’t the only game in town. Regardless of whether or not they were really able to make good on their threat, it came down to one question: Who had the deepest pockets? The answer: The Catholic moviegoer.

After the blind eye of Will H. Hays and his successors made way for Joseph Breen in 1934, the American movie was bound and gagged by the Vichy government of self-censorship, with Hollywood making itself happily prostrate before the maybe-loaded gun of the church’s wholesale boycott. Subsequent to this, the upholding of traditional (white, heteronormative, capitalist, Christian) values was less a sales feature of the movies than Hollywood’s cross to bear. Consequently, movies began to be distinguished by greater expense, length, and spectacle, as well as color cinematography, the Academy Awards, and the further ascension of movie stars into the realm of myth. When God closes a cash register, he opens a vault.

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Film Forum’s pre-Code series inscribes the 1930-34 period under the ineffectual Hays Office. The program represents a Whitman’s sampler of delectable displays of lust, drunkenness, wanton criminality, marital infidelity, bed-hopping, and more. It’s also worth noting two very pleasurable, and perhaps wholly tangential, consequences of that perfect storm of Hollywood filmmaking. First off, that it seemed that almost no director, not even Mervyn LeRoy, could make a dull film, provided that they—second off—were making those pictures at Warner Bros. Short of director-centric auteurism, there are few more promising leads in the search for exhilarating cinema than to combine the following keywords: “Warner Bros.” and “early 1930s.” Even a bad Vitaphone movie has razzmatazz.

That’s not to say that the formula is foolproof. In movies like Roy Del Ruth’s Beauty and the Boss, the joy of crass behavior is compromised by crass writing; it’s the sort of film that requires a delicate, sophisticated sensibility. Instead, its thinking is dominated by the idea that a man chasing his lover around a fancy boudoir constitutes farce, and that a little thrift-store Diamond/Wilder repartee is enough to class up the joint. Warren William, the industry’s leading suave swine, is always worth seeing, but if you really want to see him in peak form, there are plenty of better films that will let you get your fix.

As it happens, Del Ruth’s track record during this period is otherwise pretty immaculate. Along with Beauty and the Boss, three more Del Ruth/Warren William collaborations appear in the series. Far and away the best of the lot is Employee’s Entrance, the emblem of an archaic subgenre: the department-store melodrama (think Are You Being Served? sewn backward through Peyton Place). Del Ruth, who would also helm the first, and soberest, Maltese Falcon adaptation, was one of the champions of the crisp, pungent rhythm favored at Warner, and Employee’s Entrance breezes through a mountain of amorous skullduggery like a sudden gust through a stack of receipts, and features one of the titanic slaps in all of moviedom.

The Mind Reader is a more down-to-earth tale from the Americana vein that ran between D.W. Griffith and Preston Sturges. William’s another dapper rapscallion, this time out of the wryly affectionate, Damon Runyon catalogue. Del Ruth once again profitably demonstrates his savvy handling of whip-cracking, roughhousing dialogue, and no other director could have kept the picture balanced on the scales as William switches from mid-Atlantic-accented blueblood to Bowery-bred, hard-boiled swindler and back again. It was often merely a question of what angle to shoot him from; the right framing could spell the difference between broad-shouldered Julius Caesar and an oily, three-in-the-morning blackjack loser.

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The Mind Reader’s episodic structure allows the 69-minute, inverse-Capra-esque yarn to feel as if it’s stretching its legs, as even a bumpy train ride takes a moment for a pastoral interlude. William appears in nine of the series’s 50 features, playing a little variation here and there on the same personality; he was the consummate character actor who happened to land one leading part after another. In The Mouthpiece he’s a sensationalist defense attorney, and it’s here that he gets to play all his instruments: crippling remorse, hand-wringing glee, and stoic nobility. He has terrific rapport with Aline MacMahon, who would serve as The Man from Laramie’s big-momma conscience a quarter century later, but here, as William’s secretary/Friday/wet nurse she already has ashen world-wariness smeared under her eyes. In Upperworld and Skyscraper Souls he’s another unscrupulous tycoon; the latter will elicit bitter chuckles from those still reeling from the 2007-to-present financial doldrums, underwriting an outrageous, bare-assed scheme to dupe investors with Mad Men’s embalmed sexual politics.

Mervyn LeRoy’s Two Seconds, one of the best films ever made by a director otherwise considered, for the most part, a second-rate talent, is also one of the angriest films of the era, seemingly projectile-bleeding the acidic fury of the Depression’s back-breaking effect on a working nation. Not to say the film has anything to do with working-class politics in an explicit sense; it’s a tale of an ordinary guy who gets sucker-punched from every conceivable angle and lashes out in the only way he sees as appropriate, its pro forma dramatic framework a mere conduit for pure outrage and hysterical bitterness. Edward G. Robinson’s climactic expression of remorse is not what the Production Code had in mind at all.

The series also features a number of the era’s bona fide classics. A blockbuster among early talkies that has since endured as an icon of movie-ness as well as a treasure trove for cinema studies majors who’ve dissected its inestimable bounty of sexual, racial, and surreal imagery, King Kong is a no-brainer for a group of films that intersects the era’s biggest headliners and its most shuddering, erotic night terrors. The other big ape is Marlene Dietrich in a gorilla suit, serving up “Hot Voodoo,” but when she first appears in Josef von Sternberg’s magnificent Blonde Venus she’s wearing nothing but a lazy, rolling brook, ensuring the smoky chanteuse would also infiltrate our nocturnal landscape as a glistening-skinned naiad.

An auteur whose later career was compromised by “creative differences” that led to his being discharged from such high-profile projects as Laura, Porgy & Bess, and the 1963 version of Cleopatra, Georgian émigré Rouben Mamoulian gave us the primitive talkie that provides the most cogent defense for its own technical virtuosity (Applause), and he has two films in the series. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde netted Fredric March his first of two Best Actor Oscars—arguably the most libidinous, animalistic performance to take that prize. Love Me Tonight’s long-overdue induction into the uppermost firmament of movie musicals has probably been delayed by Mamoulian’s damaged-goods reputation, but few who see it will deny the pure elation of the Rodgers and Hart song score, the romance between Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald’s characters, the peerless supporting cast (Charlie Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, and Myrna Loy), and the legendary “Isn’t It Romantic” sequence.

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Two stories of gentleman thieves stand out. Trouble in Paradise is the most exemplary Ernst Lubitsch, an iconic gathering of his themes, his insuperably urbane charm, his mastery of language, and the frankest awareness of sexuality this side of Eric Rohmer. William Dieterle’s Jewel Robbery may get a little top-heavy with some cumbersome jokes about wacky tobacky, but as long as it focuses on William Powell’s strikingly Feuilladean robber or the proto-Sex in the City rabid gaiety with which Kay Francis and Helen Vinson treat themselves to precious stones and makeovers, it’s 68 minutes of quasi-Lubitschian kicks.

What’s missing from the series? If one begins to answer that question, it might not be possible to stop. Perhaps it’s best simply to say that 50 feature films just barely serve as a cap on the geyser of one of the most fertile creative periods in cinema history, a once-in-the-universe’s-timeline magic hour where the cinema was figuring out 99 ways to put sound against the image, just before the rise of fascism and Catholic decency put the kibosh on practically everything and everyone. When the series concludes with Edgar Selwyn’s Skyscraper Souls and Roy Del Ruth’s Upperworld, you may wander out of the dream looking to re-enter it; luckily, the slate is just the tip of the era’s iceberg. If you like your films mysterious and sexy, there’s Jean Renoir’s unheralded masterpiece La Nuit du Carrefour. If you like your cinema soused, you could scarcely do better than the nearly plotless heaven of William Dieterle’s The Last Flight, where the characters on screen play a drinking game against you.

Even second-tier Alfred Hitchcock like Number 17 enthralls with its impenetrable, oneiric textures, of a sort that could not be recreated during any period before or after. John Ford (Pilgrimage), Ernst Lubitsch (Monte Carlo, Design for Living), Raoul Walsh (The Yellow Ticket), and Josef von Sternberg (Morocco, An American Tragedy, Shanghai Express) enjoyed a victorious transition from silents to talkies. There’s hardly room to get into what Murnau, Vigo, Buñuel, Lang, Ozu, Piexoto, Chaplin, Vertov, Dreyer, and others were up to, lest that conversation also asphyxiate long-overdue reappraisal of Griffith’s unfairly marginalized final films. All of which—the tip of the iceberg, really—argues forcefully for the incomprehensible density of the 1930-’34 period, an interval that seemed to contain the genetic soup of all cinema that would follow, while stubbornly remaining its apotheosis.

“Essential Pre-Code” runs from July 15—August 11.

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Jaime N. Christley

Jaime N. Christley's writing has also appeared in the Village Voice.

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