Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

ISBN 0 231 11094 4

430 pp.

A$37.95

Uploaded 1 March 2000

In the early 1990s Turner Entertainment began releasing a series of Hollywood films produced during the “Pre-Code” (1930-1934) period under their “Forbidden Hollywood” banner. The term “Pre-Code”, however, was not strictly accurate as any film labelled such should really be pre-1930, the year in which the Production Code was officially adopted. The year 1934 takes on special significance, however, as there were extensive revisions to the administration of the Code in July and it is this period, from 1930 to 1934, that is usually referred to as the “Pre-Code” period, a usage that Doherty retains in his book. Anyway, some of “Pre-Code” films released by Turner were introduced by Leonard Maltin who stressed the differences between the pre 1934 Hollywood films from the post 1934 films in terms of their sexual content, colourful language and relatively direct political material.

This perception of “two Hollywoods” in the 1930s was promoted by Robert Sklar in the mid 1970s who argued that Hollywood movie-makers during the 1930 -1934 period “perpetrated one of the most remarkable challenges to traditional values in the history of mass commercial entertainment. The movies called into question sexual propriety, social decorum and the institutions of law and order”(175).

This view was challenged by Richard Maltby in his 1986 article contextualising the 1933 Warner Brothers film Baby Face, where he pointed out that the textual evidence for the “subversive Hollywood” thesis is often based on a small sample of approximately 20 films, or 1% of Hollywood’s output during the 1930-1934 period, usually comprising “three gangster films, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Mae West” and the Marx Brothers (25). Maltby, in his chapter on “The Production Code and the Hays Office” for the History of the American Cinema series, challenged other aspects relating to the “two Hollywoods” thesis. Maltby claimed, for example, that it was an oversimplification to argue that producers “blithely ignored” the tenets of the Production Code prior to 1934 just because the MPPDA did not have any punitive powers (43). Also, that the genesis of the 1930 Production Code should not be perceived solely as a Catholic reaction to the “immorality” of Hollywood’s output in the late 1920s as considerable pressure was exerted on the Hays Office by an “increasingly insecure Protestant provincial middle class” who sought to defend their “cultural hegemony from the incursions of a modernist, metropolitan culture”. (45) Similarly, Maltby maintained, the changes to the administration of the Production Code in 1934 were “determined more by economic matters than matters of film content” and that:

the events of July 1934 are best seen not as the industry’s reaction to a more or less spontaneous outburst of moral protest backed by economic sanction, but as the culmination of a lengthy process of negotiation within the industry and between its representatives and those speaking with the voices of cultural authority. (40)

Maltby also argued that although there was a “growing chorus of voices” that:
denounced the moral evils of the movies, it would be wrong to conclude that movies became more salacious or vicious between 1930 and 1934. With occasional exceptions, the reverse is the case, as both Joy and the state censors applied increasingly strict standards. (49)

In the context of Maltby’s “revisionist” views, Thomas Doherty’s book, without specifically addressing Maltby’s arguments, essentially represents a return to the orthodoxy of the “two Hollywoods” in the 1930s – a “subversive”, anarchic 1930 to 1934 period followed by the “true” classical Hollywood period from 1934 to 1960. Whilst this is implicit in the book’s sub-title (Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934), Doherty outlines his central thesis thus:

The four-year interval marks a fascinating and anomalous passage in American motion picture history: the so-called pre-Code era, when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Unlike all studio system feature films released after July 1934, pre-Code Hollywood did not adhere to the strict regulations on matters of sex, vice, violence, and moral meaning forced upon the balance of Hollywood cinema. In language and image, implicit meanings and explicit depictions, elliptical allusions and unmistakable references, pre-Code Hollywood points to a road not taken. For four years, the Code commandments were violated with impunity and inventiveness in a series of wildly eccentric films. More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, they look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe. (2)

Doherty documents his “parallel universe” case through an extensive coverage of specific genres (the so-called “preachment yarns”, the “sex” film, gangster, prison, comedy, horror and “nightmare” films) and dominant, albeit short-lived, themes such as the “Hankering for Superman” and a “New deal in the last reel”. Doherty’s methodology is simple, despite his allusions to visions of American poet Hart Crane. Doherty provides an extensive system of plot synopses combined with regular references to the motion picture trade press (especially Variety, Motion Picture Herald, The Film Daily and the Hollywood Reporter), selected newspapers, and well known media commentators of the period . Secondary sources play little or no part and although Doherty describes his approach as “cultural-historical”, he seems to take some pride in the fact that the book’s “critical methodology” is not by influenced by the work of French structuralists or British semioticians.

Some of the material covered by Doherty has been expertly studied elsewhere, particularly the “sex” film which was the focus of The Wages of Sin, Lea Jacobs’ 1991 study of censorship and the Fallen Woman film (1928-1942). Doherty supplements Jacobs’ study with useful notes on Clara Bow’s “comeback” film for Fox, Call her Savage (1932), together with two 1932 films, Love is a Racket and Unashamed. These latter films are particularly noteworthy as murder is presented in each film as the most effective method of removing an unworthy suitor. Also, in both films the crime goes unpunished, a resolution that would not be permitted after July 1934.

In this chapter Doherty also points to the relatively specific references to homosexuals during this period which was a violation of the Production Code under its prohibition of positive representations of “impure love, the love which society has always regarded as wrong and which has been banned by divine law”. Yet, Doherty argues:

the homosexual appears with greater frequency and readier acceptance in pre-Code Hollywood cinema … [where] he, and she, was played queer. No sophistication was needed to read the same-sex orientations as gender disorientations.

The screen homosexual, Doherty continues, “was called the nance, the poof, the fairy, or the queer.” (121)

Doherty’s chapter on “Criminal Codes” focuses on the gangster film and the prison film. The latter is further differentiated according to setting – films set in a “big house” compared with films dealing with the chain gang. The two faces of the gangster imagery during this period, Doherty argues, were typified by the surly criminality of Al Capone compared with the “mythically resonant American outlaw”, John Dillinger. This chapter also includes a bizarre photo of Dillinger’s body in the Chicago morgue on 22 July 1934, surrounded by drunken revellers who had been allowed into the building.

The demise of the gangster film, Doherty argues, was due not only to the intensity of the public protests but also to fact that the cycle had run its commercial course. These factors, combined with the realisation that overseas markets were not receptive to the genre, meant that by the middle of 1932 the “gangster film became more trouble than it was worth.”(156) However, Doherty’s speculation in this regard ignores the fact that the Association of Motion Picture Producers directly intervened six months earlier, in September 1931, by passing a resolution prohibiting the further production of gangster films. It is highly unlikely at this time, September 1931, that producers would have considered the gangster film a financial liability following strong audience support for films such as Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, Smart Money, and City Streets in a period of depressed box office receipts. Rather than public indifference to the genre, it was the intensity of interest groups, combined with institutional opposition (from state censor boards), which resulted in an industry prohibition, and hence the rapid decline in production.

Other chapters in Doherty’s book open up less familiar areas, such as the newsreel and the expeditionary film, but the most significant section focuses on the “preachment yarns” and those films that were motivated by a “hankering for supermen”. It is not just the films, however, but the fact that they were, in some ways, relatively unusual and that they proliferated only for a brief period – from 1931 to early 1933. These chapters provide the strongest validation for Doherty’s claim that “pre-Code Hollywood entertained, even embraced, visions of immorality and insurrection”(20).

Doherty provides selective social and political details of the early 1930s focusing on the fear of mob rule in the 12 months prior to the election of Franklin Roosevelt – a fear exacerbated by the Bonus Army encampment near the White house, which began in May 1932 and ended when the Army attacked the veterans with tanks and tear gas on July 28, 1932. At the time General MacArthur remarked that he smelled “incipient revolution in the air”. At this point Doherty attempts a direct correlation between the social/political climate and the “dominant” Hollywood themes. Whilst this is normally a difficult, if not futile, exercise, Doherty does cite a number of Hollywood films riddled with ideological confusions and narrative contradictions, a trend noted by the trade press at the time which discerned a “dictator craze”, a “series of films with strong tyrannical personalities who whatever their flaws as human beings and citizens, at least knew how to take strong action” (70).This “craze” included films such as The Power and the Glory (1933), Employees Entrance (1933) and the bizarre Gabriel over the White House (1933), a film with uncredited contributions from media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

Similar confusions marked the “preachment yarns”, or what Warner Brothers labelled “Americanism stories”, such as Cabin in the Cotton (1932) together with those “workplace melodramas”, such as The Match King (1932), Skyscraper Souls (1932), States Attorney (1932), The Mouthpiece (1932) and Lawyer Man (1932), which lashed out at the professional classes, particularly businessmen and lawyers. Perhaps the most excessive reaction in Hollywood came from a man who would later epitomise the extreme right wing during the communist “witch hunt” of the late 1940s, Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille’s production of This Day and Age (1933) came at a time when he was looking sympathetically at the Soviet Union compared with the United States whilst voicing his opinion that capitalism was doomed. DeMille’s pessimism and lack of faith in democratic institutions is reflected in the film’s strong support for vigilante action – one scene even depicts a group of young boys lowering a gangster into a pit full of rats, an action subsequently endorsed by the police in the film. Reporting the reaction of a preview audience, the Hollywood Reporter noted that the cheers and long burst of applause at the end of the screening was tempered by a touch of mob hysteria. (67)

The last months of Herbert Hoover’s presidency produced more examples of “politically befuddled” and aesthetically off-balanced films:

Caught at the crossroads between 1932 and 1933, between Hoover’s raw deal and FDR’s New Deal, Hollywood cinema underwent a jarring sensibility transplant, sometimes within the very same film – an abrupt turnabout from despair to hope, contempt to respect, wisecracking cynicism to wide-eyed belief. (85)

Two William Wellman films made for Warner Brothers during this period – Heroes for Sale (1933) and Wild Boys of the Road (1933) – are examined by Doherty as examples of this brief trend. Both of these films looked back on the 1920s from the trauma of the 1930s, a recurring feature of the issue-oriented or “preachment yarns” which elevated specific political concerns to a level higher than was the norm in post-Code Hollywood. This, Doherty maintains, was due to the “absence of systematic censorship and the presence of political upheaval”(49). Relevant issue-oriented films included American Madness (1932), I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and The Wet Parade (1932), MGM’s adaptation of the Upton Sinclair novel against Prohibition.

These “preachment yarns”, or issue oriented films, are different, Doherty argues, from the “social problem films” that appeared after World War 11 by their lack of remedies. The post-world War 11 films “seek to do more than dramatize a crisis; they want to cure it and they know what medication to prescribe”. The early 1930s films, on the other hand:

express the anguish of the dispossessed and fearful, but they have no idea how to alleviate the symptoms of what seems like a terminal case. Like their protagonists, men on the verge of a crack-up, at the end of their rope, the films have a fevered, pursued, despairing quality. After 1933, the magic bullet of the New Deal would provide a panacea for narrative closure, its slogans spoken like incantations before the end credits rolled. (53)

Doherty’s final chapter, “Classical Hollywood cinema: the world according to Joseph I. Breen”, provides another version of the events leading up to the July 1934 changes to the administration of the Code. The changes implemented in July consolidated not only Breen’s authority but provided a more effective mechanisms to enforce the amalgam of “Irish-Catholic Victorianism” that permeated the terms of the 1930 document. With the elimination of the Producers Appeal Board and the formation of the Production Code authority, as a replacement for the Studio Relations Committee, Breen was able to confront the studio moguls on the same plane of authority as now his authority flowed from the same men the studio heads also served – the MPPDA board back in New York.

The July 1934 changes to the Code, Doherty concludes, meant that “the landscape of American cinema underwent a tectonic shift. In a matter of months, the genres, tones, and textures of pre-Code Hollywood were erased from the screen” (331). To demonstrate this he compares two films from each period, Gabriel over the White House and Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Doherty’s final chapter returns to the arguments introduced in Chapter 1 where he modifies the definition, and starting point, for the Bordwell, Staiger, Thompson version of Hollywood classicism, which they place as approximately 1917. Doherty, on the other hand, favours the publication of the Production Code in 1930, and its consolidation in 1934, as representing the “logical birth date” of the classical Hollywood cinema with the Code, as enforced by Breen, providing a “moral universe with known visual and ethical outlines”:

[The] Code gave Hollywood the framework to thrive economically and ripen artistically and that Hollywood in turn gave the Code provenance over a cultural commodity of great price – the visible images and manifest values of American motion pictures. What makes Hollywood’s classic age “classical” is not just film style or the studio system but the moral stakes. (5)

It took an Englishman, “nurtured in the bosom” of Hollywood to kill off the Code – the film was Psycho (1960) and the man was Alfred Hitchcock and, Doherty argues, after Psycho “the Code was walking dead” (334) with the release of films such as Lolita (1962), Kiss Me, Stupid, (1964), Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), The Pawnbroker (1965), and Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). In 1968 the Motion Picture Association of America adopted a new strategy – not a system of self-censorship but a system of ratings – which, Doherty argues, effectively resulted in Hollywood changing its moral stance from “Viewer be assured” to “Viewer beware” (345).

Thomas Doherty’s study of pre-Code Hollywood and America during the early 1930s is challenging, wide ranging, provocative, sometimes glib and simplistic. However, as more films from this period re-emerge, the stronger the claim for a “parallel universe” in the 1930s becomes. Recently re-released films such as Employees Entrance and Ladies they Talk About (1933) validate Doherty’s claim that in pre-Code Hollywood films “the fissures crack open with rougher edges and sharper points. What is concealed, subterranean, and repressed in Hollywood under the Code leaps out exposed, on the surface, unbound in Hollywood before the Code” (3). If you don’t believe me, and Doherty, watch as many Barbara Stanwyck and Warren William films made for Warner Brothers and Columbia in those crucial years from 1931 to 1934 as you can find.

Geoff Mayer

References:
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger & Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production. London: Routledge, 1988.
Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Richard Maltby, “‘Baby Face’ or how Joe Breen made Barbara Stanwyck atone for causing the Wall Street crash’, Screen 27, no. 2 (March-April 1986).
Richard Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office”. In Tino Balio, ed. History of the American Cinema 5. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1939. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993.
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America. New York: Random House, 1975.