PRE-CODE ESSENTIALS

The story of Hollywood cinema before censors cleaned up its act.

Even before 1934, when Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan ripped the gown off Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane and tossed her, fully naked, into the lagoon in Tarzan and His Mate, many observers were saying that “Hollywood has gone off the rails.” This was the pre-Code era, when nudity, Greta Garbo kissing a woman on the mouth in Queen Christina (1933), and other supposed affronts to decency led to demands for censorship from the federal government. In response, Hollywood adopted the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 but didn’t enforce it until 1934, when it hired Joseph Breen to head the Production Code Administration. For this immensely entertaining book, Luperi and Reid have gathered 50 films from 1930 to 1934, “strikingly brazen, authentic stories of sexuality, female agency, class, politics, and beyond”—all elements that censors wanted to suppress. Many of the films are famous, among them the original Frankenstein (1931), which censors cited for its “implicit discussion of God and violating the sanctities of life,” and Red Dust (1932), featuring “a love triangle between a married woman, a prostitute, and a conniving, sweaty plantation owner in 1930s French Indochina.” Others are more obscure, such as I Am Suzanne! (1933), “an oddball musical/body horror film,” and Murder at the Vanities (1934), featuring a song called “Sweet Marijuana.” As the authors write, “Really, you can’t get much more pre-Code than an entire song devoted to drugs.” One great entry after another are examples of unchanging mores. In a classic example of ’twas-ever-thus, censors had less of a problem with the violence in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) than with the nonsexual nudity, with boards condemning not the carnage but soldiers “swimming in the raw for ‘unduly exposing themselves.’”

An excellent cinema book on the permissive early days of sound.