Profiles

What is Pre-Code Film

Pre-Code

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pre-Code films were created before the Motion Picture Production Code or Hays Code took effect on 1 July 1934 in the United States of America. Although an existing code of conduct for the film industry came into being in 1930, many ignored it and it was not enforced very enthusiastically.

The original code was written by a Jesuit priest, Father Daniel A. Lord and officially adopted in 1930. The code was effectively ignored because many found such censorship prudish, due to the liberal social attitudes of the 1920s and early 1930s. This was a period in which the Victorian era was looked upon as being naïve and backward and was constantly ridiculed as such.

Films in the late 1920s and early 30s reflected the liberal attitudes of the day and could include sexual innuendos, references to homosexuality, miscegenation, illegal drug use, infidelity, abortion, and profane language (such as the word “damn”) as well as women in their undergarments. Such behavior was common in the liberal climate of cities at that time, although it often shocked audiences in rural areas.

Popular character roles include tough-talking, assertive women, gangsters, and prostitutes.

Of particular note were both the references to sexual promiscuity, drug use, bloody gangster life, and morally ambiguous endings, which drew the ire from various religious groups – some Protestant, but overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

In particular, Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, apostolic delegate to the Catholic Church in the U.S. called upon American Catholics to unite against the surging immorality of the cinema. As a result, many religious groups created their own leagues, such as the Catholic Legion of Decency (eventually renamed to the “National Legion of Decency“) in 1933, premised around controlling and enforcing decency standards in theatres, and boycotting movies which they deemed offensive. Conservative Protestants tended to support much of the crackdown on “immorality”, particularly in the South, which had its own form of censorship. By 1939 “Even black bellboys were routinely cut out of films shown in the South; from the evidence of Hollywood pictures of the 1930s, one might not suspect that black people existed in America”.^[1] Anything relating to the state of race relations in the South or miscegenation could never be exhibited below the Mason-Dixon line.

By 1934, theatre revenues were slumping (likely, in part, due to the Depression) and those in the film industry were unhappy with the prospect of losing even more of their audience, particularly in heavily Catholic cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, etc).

Thus, the pre-Code era effectively came to a close with the establishment of a special bureau (eventually christened The Breen Office, after Joseph Ignatius Breen, a former public relations executive), whose purpose was to review scripts and finished prints in order to ensure that they adhered to the new Code.

This effectively spelled the end of the pre-Code era, and shaped the trends in American film-making during the ensuing years. Enforcement of the code popularized several new trends, such as plots about headstrong, able, employed women (like Jean Arthur).

Why Fight it? I’m no Dorothy Davenport.

Dorothy Davenport, let’s chat about Dot for a moment shall we? (AKA Mrs. Wallace Reid) She was a movie producer/writer and director. She had an extremely interesting and prolific film career.

One of her films was Road to Ruin, which I have got to get my hands on.

So what has once powerful, forgotten female director, a film about the dangers of sex, drugs and abortions and today’s news have to do with each other?

Well, this Times Article. Titled-”Women in Hollywood 2009-At the Box Office but Not Directing. Ok, by now you may have figured out that I am a director and not a man. I found this article insanely depressing.

Not to mention it made little of the fact that women were once quite powerful forces in the silent film era and pre-code era.

The article was so depressing…you know what,

F-it. I’m officially now a male director. I am done. The odds are so stacked against me, I mean I could be a role model, inspiration and all that nonsense but in the mean time some jerk off twit guy is making money that I should be making. I’m done being a sucker. That’s it!

I’m a guy. As I guy, I think it’s cool that Tiger banged so many chicks and doesn’t give a rats ass about his family. Hell, I’m a &^%$ Italian Guy Director.

I wanna get paid to be a douche bag. I want to inspire women to do sexy things on poles and compete for my attention. Because, if you are a woman, that is all you want right? My attention?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UROPOl9pBo&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Also as a guy, I now don’t care if you think what I write is smart or honest or relevant to your life. I want to make movies about over sentimentalized family situations, women who are shrews or sluts and make every actress over 30 play a MILF. Because that is the range of my personal, immature guy experience and that is how my audience sees the world.

What have I been thinking!!! Being a guy director is going to be SO much easier! Because women suck and men are funny. Bitches!

The Big O and why you should thank Hedy Lamarr for your wireless connection

Happy Monday! Here’s a little something to pick you up or at least to transport you. This little clip just took me somewhere else. I just found it beautiful. The crane shot at the end..(I mean that had to be a crane) made you feel like you were a fly’s soul escaping. Very hypnotic.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuInfQHb564&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

And here’s a little Hedy Kiesler (Lamarr) nudity for the evening.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlGxHUY3jHE&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
I can’t quite find the orgasm scene. When I dig it up I will definitely post it. This was done before she had fled her husband Friedrich Mandl, an arms manufacturer who was conspiring with the Nazi’s. (This is wacky, because he was apparently half Jewish). She changed her name to Lamarr later.

So get this. This is the coolest thing I have ever heard about a Hollywood actress. So turns out Hedy Lamar, the woman who was famous for the first depiction of a female orgasm on film. (Which again, when I find I promise I will post) was also a co-inventor of a device that we base our current secure military transmissions on.

Or something like that (It is called Spread Spectrum Technology). Basically, we could not have had wireless technology without her. Cool, huh?

The Hitler Channel, Casablanca and Conrad Veidt

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. God, I’m full. So I got to spend the holiday with my parents and my husband. Was fun. At my parents’ house it is a ritual to watch some old movies. Lots of them. My husband is not so tolerant of our addiction so we broke it up with a little Hitler..uh, I mean The History Channel. They had a great series on WWII in HD my Dad recorded. Lots of really interesting footage in color taken by the military and by people in the military. I’m not a huge fan of this kind of stuff but it was very good. Very moving and candid. Ugh…Obama is about to speak about the troop deployment. It’s so terrible what these families have to go thru. Thoughts are with you.

On a lighter note, Casablanca was on (we won’t talk about the exchange between my husband and I when he turned off the TV right before Humphrey Bogart says to Claude Rains “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”).

Fritz Mannheimer

Here’s a great bit of dialogue that is a bit timely..

Woman: What makes saloonkeepers so snobbish?
Banker: Perhaps if you told him I ran the second largest banking house in Amsterdam.
Carl: Second largest? That wouldn’t impress Rick. The leading banker in Amsterdam is now the pastry chef in our kitchen.
Banker: We have something to look forward to.

Ok that was fun. So now for Conrad Veidt. My mom was reeling over my find Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others 1919). She was an admirer of Veidt, but now she was fascinated, she saw a whole new level to his performances and how versitile he was. He wasn’t just that tough guy who played evil Nazi’s anymore.

“Did you know he gave his paychecks to the war effort?”, my Dad said. “He hated Nazi’s so much he donated all of his earnings he made from his films to the war effort to fight the Nazi’s.”

I have no idea if this is true but it made sense. I mean they destroyed at least one great film of his that I am aware of. According to Wikipedia he was strongly opposed to the Nazi’s and fled Germany after he married a Jewish woman. I liked him enough when I saw him in the film Anders al die Andern, now I just think he’s seriously cool.

Amazing that he ended up being famous for playing Maj. Strasser the big bad Nazi in Casablanca.

Why else is Conrad Veidt a bad ass? He was the model for the Batman character The Joker!

Take a look at The Man Who Laughs.

What is also interesting about him is how he flourished on the bookends of the Pre-Code era films. He made many films before 1929 and then again in 1938-his death in 1943. During the Pre-Code film era he had Nazi problems. So he is the inverse Pre-Code star.

Marie Dressler and Oprah Winfrey

So Oprah is going to stop doing the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Ok, it’s not like I sit around the house and watch Oprah every afternoon, and I have to admit I’ve become a bit snotty about her. But that is just because I’ve gotten older and snottier not because I don’t like Oprah and not because I didn’t watch her announcement and cry. I did. Oprah is a strange social compass for me. If Oprah talks about it, it’s fun, enlightening, slightly indulgent, sympathetic, but most of all very very ….normal. Where am I going to turn to in this current media environment to find a rational meeting place. Ellen? Meh. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ellen, but Oprah…

I grew up in the Chicago area. Let me be more accurate. The Chicago broadcasting area. I grew up in Wisconsin. But Oprah, I remember watching her on a show called AM Chicago. I’d watch her when I came home from school. She started conversations about stuff we weren’t supposed to talk about, started dialogues about hatchets that were far from buried and struggled along the way with all of us.

Who will be our cheerleader? Who will stare us in the face and say, “You can do it!”?

Well, while we are trying to figure that out, here’s a bit of comfort. Before Oprah, there was Marie Dressler. You could go to the movies and see someone who was you. Or who you wanted your mother to be. Who bonded with the audiences in such a deep way.

Here’s a excerpt from the blog ” The Well Rounded Mama-Size-Acceptance Warrior, Birth Activist, and One Fierce Mama.”

“She was the top draw at the box office for most of the early 1930s, and the highest-paid star in Hollywood for several years. She was so famous and so popular that she was the cover of Time Magazine in its August 7, 1933 issue.

She was nominated as Best Actress for two years, and won it in 1931, despite being an older woman (in her 60s) in Hollywood, which, as today, worshipped mostly the young and beautiful.

Oh yes, and she was a woman of size.”

I think Oprah would like Marie and Marie would like Oprah. So for those of you out there who need a little guidance and a positive female role model or hell, just a great role model, take a night off, watch a little Oprah and then take a look at “Min and Bill”.

I’m sure Oprah would approve. I guess what I’m saying is, there is no replacement for Oprah, or Marie for that matter. But every once in a while someone comes along that can bring us together and has a unifying entertainment value that transcends religion, race, gender, age and makes us cry whether we want to or not.

So go ahead and be sad. I know I am. But just know, someone will understand us again. I hope.

Britney Murphy, another lost girl.

Jean Harlow

Britney Murphy

There is currently much speculation about Britney’s death. When Harlow died, there was much speculation that she was murdered. Harlow was very sick for a long time and simply died too young from a Kidney disease she suffered from. Britney is no Harlow, but had a vulnerability and everyday rawness that was similar to Harlow. She had an over sentivity with an awkward social over compensation that had a Harlowesque quality.

I think this may be why I enjoyed her so much in 8 mile . She was a great match for Eminem. Her performance in was exactly crazy enough to have you believe that she could dominate Mr. Mathers.

Sad.