Authors: Thomas Doherty
ISBN-13: 9780231110952, ISBN-10: 0231110952
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Date Published: August 1999
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Thomas Doherty is associate professor in the American Studies Department and chair of the Film Studies Program at Brandeis University. He is the author of Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (Columbia, 1993) and Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, and is associate editor of the film journal Cinéaste.
This book explores the four-year interval between 1930 and 1934, a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Doherty chronicles how the freewheeling films of an unrestricted Hollywood inform the culture of America in the 1930s.
In early 1930s America, weighed down by the Depression, a vice-ridden, wise-cracking, anarchic antiauthoritarianism ruled Hollywood. Doherty's exhaustive cultural history of the films produced in the last years before the enactment of the Motion Picture Production Code reveals how the ascendancy of sound and a plummeting economy led to four years of wildly edgy films (1930-1934), radically different from the spic-and-span products of classic Hollywood. Most of the films chronicled here--sporting titles like Eight Girls in a Boat, Call Her Savage and Merrily We Go to Hell--have been both forgotten by film historians and unavailable to generations of late-night TV viewers. Doherty begins with the misery and discontent gripping the U.S. in the 1930s, explaining how these forces shaped a motion picture industry just learning how to use the power of sound. He organizes the later chapters around a colorful, trashy array of genres: anarchic comedies; horror, gangster and vice films; over-the-top newsreels; and expeditionary films set in dangerous territory. Doherty's plot summaries at times grow tiresome, but he rarely fails to enliven them with gossip, quips or anecdotes. Ultimately , he shows how the fun came to a crashing halt when the National Legion of Decency and the Production Code Administration, spearheaded by Joseph Breen, launched a massive and astonishingly successful crusade to clean up "the pest hole that infects the entire country with its obscene and lascivious moving pictures." Given the politics swirling around Hollywood's edgier fare in the wake of the shootings in Littleton, Colo., this lurid and all too short-lived chapter of Hollywood history has never seemed more germane. (Sept.) FYI: A series at New York's Film Forum, The Joy of Pre-Code, running from August 20 to September 14, 1999, will feature more than 40 precode films, including many discussed by Doherty. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Preface | ||
1 | On the Cusp of Classical Hollywood Cinema | 1 |
2 | Breadlines and Box Office Lines: Hollywood in the Nadir of the Great Depression | 21 |
3 | Preachment Yarns: The Politics of Mere Entertainment | 39 |
4 | Dictators and Democrats: The Rage for Order | 69 |
5 | Vice Rewarded: The Wages of Cinematic Sin | 103 |
6 | Criminal Codes: Gangsters Unbound, Felons in Custody | 137 |
7 | Comic Timing: Cracking Wise and Wising Up | 171 |
8 | News on Screen: The Vividness of Mechanical Immortality | 197 |
9 | Remote Kinships: The Geography of the Expeditionary Film | 221 |
10 | Primitive Mating Rituals: The Color Wheel of the Racial Adventure Film | 253 |
11 | Nightmare Pictures: The Quality of Gruesomeness | 295 |
12 | Classical Hollywood Cinema: The World According to Joseph I. Breen | 319 |
App. 1 | The Text of the Production Code | 347 |
App. 2 | Particular Applications of the Code and the Reasons Therefore [Addenda to 1930 Code] | 361 |
App. 3 | Amendments | 365 |
App. 4 | The Critical and Commercial Hits of 1930-1934 | 369 |
Notes | 373 | |
Index | 411 | |
Film Index | 425 |