Pre-code Hollywood

Pre-code Hollywood

Film Art

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Pre-code Hollywood

 

“Pre-Code Hollywood” encompasses films produced between 1929 and 1934, from the consolidation of sound films until the Hays Code was put into effect.

The Hays Code is the film industry’s self-censorship (which lasted until 1967) that prevented showing or praising anything that was against high morals.

In other words, pre-code Hollywood is the cinema of uncensored sound films.

Pre-code films are the films that have everything that films from 1934 onwards could not have. But it should be clarified that they do not have the creativity and the deployment of resources that directors would have to use to imply, insinuate, or suggest what they wanted to say or show when it was not possible to be explicit.

As we explained in the article on the code (see link at the end of the article), directors would forcibly become infinitely creative and would end up enriching the cinematographic language wonderfully.

In the pre-code era, most films were about issues that at the time were a source of scandal: the unscrupulous mobster who seems more a hero than a villain, the femme fatale (a sensual and dangerous woman who uses sex as a weapon), the woman with a licentious lifestyle (of little morality by the standards of the time), corruption and violence without punishment, infidelity, vulgar language, promiscuity, drugs, homosexuality, interracial relationships, and lack of respect for the religious institution and the family institution.

Let us keep in mind that the human being in general is attracted to what is forbidden, to what goes beyond the limits of “what is right.” The reality of each human being, their “normality,” is usually overwhelming, and then everything that transgresses it is attractive and liberating. Let’s imagine that in a society living the monumental crisis of the Great Depression, a society that in the early thirties saw its American dream crushed: violence, indecency, chaos, and immorality sold a lot of tickets.

So the self-censorship arrived with the argument of concern for the deterioration of morals and law-breaking. And when this pre-code stage, full of daring and liberties, ended, everything that the code took off the screen, the directors had to put in the imagination of the spectator.

 

Image: James Cagney and Jean Harlow in The Public Enemy (W.A. Wellman, 1931)

 

Representative films:

Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)

The Public Enemy (W.A. Wellman, 1931)

Safe in Hell (W.A. Wellman, 1931)

Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932)

Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)

What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor, 1932)

Female (Michael Curtiz, 1933)

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

Bed of Roses (Gregory La Cava, 1933)

 

Recommended links:

The Hays Code.

The Golden Age of Hollywood (Classic Hollywood Cinema).

The Best American Movies in History according to the American Film Institute.

The Actors Studio.

Film d’auteur (Auteur cinema).

New Hollywood.

You can also find more material using the search engine.

 

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