Review by C.J. Bunce
This week Turner Classic Movies/TCM takes a new look back at the ahead-of-their-time movies of the early 1930s. In its latest addition to the TCM Film Library, Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era 1930-1934 (now available for pre-order here at Amazon), authors Kim Luperi and Danny Reid document a world eerily similar to today, with inane government and private interests trying to tell others what they can and cannot view. But Hollywood auteurs delivered their visions anyway–for a time. Studios, directors, and producers put together some of the most cutting edge, ground-breaking movies, classic films, even if after they left the studio they might be chopped up and ravaged by local theater owners and government censors before they made it to your neighborhood. Some complete works have been re-edited in their entirety for the first time only in recent years. Others are still missing pieces.
The authors dug into the history of these films, pulling together notes, correspondence, and decisions that took a toll on these films, creating a history of 50 films that reflect the censorship and chaos. The result is a fascinating chronology of four years of film that unveils auteurs putting on the big screen genres, tropes, relationships, and conflicts that might not have been addressed as openly since. Mob movies, sex and violence, race, horror, comedy, taboos, and more–Pre-Code Essentials is TCM’s most insightful look at cinema yet.
For anyone who might not instantly reach for a book about Pre-Code movies, consider this: The list includes King Kong, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. Plus epic dramas like All Quiet on the Western Front and Grand Hotel, and the gangster movies that launched the genre: The Public Enemy and Scarface. But you probably already know about those. You also probably have some favorite movies starring Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy (that’s her on the book cover), William Powell, Joan Blondell, Clark Cable, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, Robert Montgomery, Fredric March, Ann Dvorak, Kay Francis, Maurice Chevalier, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, and Paul Muni, filmed by noted directors Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hawks, Victor Fleming, Frank Capra, William A. Wellman, Mervyn LeRoy, Walter Huston, or Ernst Lubitsch. If you love movies they’re known for, might you also like some of their earlier work?
During the Golden Age of Hollywood theaters struggled from the weight of the Great Depression. To get audiences into theaters between 1930 and 1934, studios gambled on more provocative subjects, including powerful women and sexual freedom, outlaws as good guys, protagonists who weren’t only white, disenfranchised communities that included and went beyond LGBTQ characters, and other era taboos, including exploring violence to levels never before depicted in theaters around the country for communities big and small.
Why “Pre-Code”? The Code is the Hays Code of 1930, and the “Pre-” is the window before the Code was rigorously enforced. Luckily for more open-minded moviegoers, it took a few years. In that window studios used many means and methods to get scenes past the censors. This book is filled with images of letters where the men with the power to censor dictated, rationalized, and pounded their fists over edgy movies and moviemakers. More than 200 illustrations include gorgeous film marketing, stills, and photographs of actors and actresses rarely seen before.
Nearly every movie is an illustration of the fragility of a society with a Big Brother governing what you can and cannot view. What is most astonishing is how the dangers faced by Americans then are still not addressed and eliminated a hundred years later. Every film and battle with censors is a clarion call to action of the dangers of allowing censorship in any form.
You may be surprised to see all the uncompromising movies that starred Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, Barbara Stanwyck, and Myrna Loy (you may know about the frequent pairings of Loy and William Powell, but how about the seven movies that featured Powell with Kay Francis?). The movies may or may not have been intended to shock the 1930s audience, but many of the descriptions of the 50 movies will likely surprise if not shock you. Nudity, characters of the same sex kissing, the first sounds of the horrors of war, drowning a kid in a lake, women fighting, men assaulting women, dead bodies, someone getting skinned (yikes!), interracial relationships–nothing most adults would bat an eye at today, but this was nearly a century ago.
Sometimes the surprise is in the titles themselves, like Madam Satan, Safe in Hell, Freaks, Love Me Tonight, and Call Her Savage. But the unassuming Downstairs is about a man “making moves” on women in a residence both upstairs and downstairs. An appendix includes a brief guide on the availability of the selected films today and a copy of the 1930 Hays Code. Each movie includes a sidebar focusing on a relevant creator or issue, with nuggets of interesting trivia.
You’ll learn a lot about dozens of movies you’ve probably never heard of starring some of Hollywood’s leading actors and actresses. For cinema aficionados, every fan of entertainment, history buffs, and anyone who wants to make sure the kind of censorship that followed this period never happens again, Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era 1930-1934 is available for pre-order here at Amazon.
Don’t miss the other volumes from TCM’s film library reviewed here at borg, covering a wide range of topics across film history and genres: 52 Must-See Movies That Matter, 52 More Must-See Movies That Matter, Must-See Sci-Fi, Dynamic Dames, Forbidden Hollywood, Viva Hollywood, Fright Favorites, Summer Movies: 30 Sun-Drenched Classics, TCM’s Hollywood Victory, TCM’s Danger on the Silver Screen, TCM’s Rock on Film, TCM’s Essential Directors, TCM’s Christmas at the Movies, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, TCM’s 50 Oscar Nights, But Have You Read the Book?, Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar, Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed, Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir, Forbidden Cocktails, Hollywood Pride, Falling in Love at the Movies, Dark City Dames, TCM Imports, TCM Rewinding the ’80s, TCM Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era 1930-1934, and TCM’s 20th Century Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio.
