Forbidden Hollywood-The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934) Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Mark A. Vieira

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  First Edition: April 2019

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959092

  ISBNs: 978-0-7624-6677-1 (hardcover), 978-0-7624-6675-7 (ebook)

  E3-20190305-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE: THE ROARING TWENTIES

  NEW GODS AND NEW RULES

  THE CENSORS

  THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN

  THE COCK-EYED WORLD

  PART TWO: 1930

  THE REAL PRE-CODE FILMS

  THE 1930 PRODUCTION CODE

  THE DIVORCEE

  HOWARD HUGHES AND HELL’S ANGELS

  PART THREE: 1931

  LITTLE CAESAR

  THE PUBLIC ENEMY

  DRACULA

  FRANKENSTEIN

  A FREE SOUL

  POSSESSED

  PART FOUR: 1932

  SCARFACE

  RED-HEADED WOMAN

  THE M-G-M GLOSS

  “THE NEW SHADY DAMES OF THE SCREEN”

  CALL HER SAVAGE

  THE PARAMOUNT GLOW

  ISLAND OF LOST SOULS

  “DECADENT IMAGINATIONS”

  THE SIGN OF THE CROSS

  PART FIVE: 1933

  SHE DONE HIM WRONG

  “SUCH THINGS ARE NOT FOR AMERICA”

  SO THIS IS AFRICA

  THE WARNER BROS. FLASH

  BABY FACE

  THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE

  CONVENTION CITY

  QUEEN CHRISTINA

  PART SIX: 1934

  TARZAN AND HIS MATE

  “PURIFY HOLLYWOOD OR DESTROY HOLLYWOOD!”

  THE PRODUCTION CODE ADMINISTRATION

  FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ENDPAPER PHOTOS

  TO THE MEMORY OF MY PARENTS.

  Myrna Loy personifies forbidden Hollywood in Charles Brabin’s The Mask of Fu Manchu. Photograph by Clarence Sinclair Bull.

  John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore take a break from filming Richard Boleslavsky’s Rasputin and the Empress. Photograph courtesy of Bill Nelson

  INTRODUCTION

  What is pre-Code? Pre-Code is not a film genre like the western or the musical. It is a retrospective discovery, like film noir or screwball comedy. Unlike noir or screwball, though, it lasted only a few years. When Mae West made She Done Him Wrong, she had no idea she was making a pre-Code movie. She thought she was making a movie about her favorite subject, sex. The pre-Code tag came later, when someone realized that these films shared a time, a place, and an attitude. But what does pre-Code mean, really? What was the Code? What was “forbidden”?

  Pre-Code refers to the four-year period before the Production Code was strengthened and enforced. There had been a Code since 1930, but the studios negotiated with it, bypassed it, or just plain ignored it. The movies of this period make viewers exclaim, “I didn’t think they could say that in old movies!” A collection of eye-opening films constitute pre-Code.

  In 1929, the film industry had just made the transition from silent cinema to sound films. Talking pictures brought a new candor, but some people were put off by it. A consortium of clubwomen, churchmen, and politicians assailed the industry, decrying off-color dialogue, stories of seduction, and scantily clad actresses. Local censors could not cut talking pictures yet, because the Vitaphone process used a separate disk, rather than a soundtrack at the edge of the film. With no one to stop them, screenwriters made their dialogue spicier. Complaints increased to the point at which legislators stepped in, and federal censorship looked like a possibility. This would have meant the end of the studio system, so the industry agreed to self-regulation and drafted a list of guidelines. This code would prohibit violence, profanity, and illegal drugs; allusions to “white slavery,” miscegenation, or sexual perversion; nudity, provocative dancing, or lustful kissing; and suggestions of sexual congress, illicit or otherwise.

  In March 1930, representatives of every studio signed the agreement. This “Production Code” should have kept forbidden elements off the screen, but the Great Depression arrived, emptying theaters. To lure patrons back, producers began to violate the agreement. Actresses flaunted their charms and flouted the Code. “Sin and succeed!” wrote Variety when reviewing a film in 1931. “Three cheers for sin!” wrote Liberty magazine when deriding the Code in 1933. By spring 1934, prohibited elements were no longer the issue. The character of the Hollywood film had changed. Films like Search for Beauty and The Scarlet Empress did not merely include suggestive scenes; these films were about sex. Their plots hinged on seduction. They showed naked women and even naked men. Though some of these films were exploitative, many of them were legitimate works of art. Hollywood was offering mature thought to an audience that was ready for it—and supporting it.

  James Gleason, Frederick Sullivan, Bert Roach, and Bradley Page enjoy pre-Code photos in Erle C. Kenton’s Search for Beauty.

  In that same spring, a grassroots movement sprang up in the Midwest. “Purify Hollywood or destroy Hollywood!” was the war cry. “Immoral” movies were the targets. When protests and boycotts caused the box office to drop and bankers to withdraw support, the industry surrendered and let a tough censor named Joseph I. Breen reconstitute the Code. In July of that year, it became the law of the land, and there was a Production Code Administration to enforce it. This time the studios cooperated, allowing Breen to regulate film content. “Pre-Code” films should really be called “pre-Breen.”

  These are the facts of pre-Code Hollywood. The story behind it is monumental, because it deals with a struggle for power. The stakes were high: the billion-dollar market for America’s sixth-largest industry. The market was mostly Protestant. The industry was mostly Jewish-run. Yet a Midwest Catholic minority gained control.

  This is the story of Forbidden Hollywood. The images throughout these pages show why the conflict arose in the first place. Hollywood’s attitude toward sex was counter to Catholic doctrine of the day, which taught that sex was for married people and should not be discussed or shown, least of all in a place as public as a movie theater. Theaters came to be viewed as incipient brothels, corrupting everyone who entered them. Even the posters displayed outside their lobbies were scandalous, tainting the environment. Children were thought to be im
periled. Catholics saw the soul of a nation in danger, and they acted.

  Fredric March and Elissa Landi in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross.

  The “forbidden” aspect of pre-Code is the retroactive treatment accorded films of the early ’30s. Many of them were in circulation when the new Code took effect. The Breen Office yanked these films back to Hollywood and forbade the studios to reissue them. If a film had been a success and merited reissue, Breen removed any element that the Code had just outlawed by having a studio editor cut the offending footage from the master negative. This crude process was applied to films like Animal Crackers, The Public Enemy, and A Farewell to Arms. Films judged too racy, like She Done Him Wrong and Red Dust, were denied reissue seals entirely. They became forbidden.

  From all available evidence, the term “pre-Code” was first applied by a repertory film programmer named Bruce Goldstein in the late 1980s. Since then, there have been festivals, laser discs, videotapes, DVDs, blu-rays, and streaming devoted to the genre. There have been scores of books related to the subject. My 1999 book Sin in Soft Focus was the first to present an accurate, accessible chronology of the pre-Code era, but it is out of print. Information about pre-Code on the internet is often inaccurate. I would like to correct some misconceptions:

  Silent films are not pre-Code films.

  Not every pre-Code film was a low-budget shocker—but made with integrity and artistry. Many pre-Code films had big stars, big directors, and big budgets; these helped them defy the Code.

  The pre-Code censor was the Studio Relations Committee (SRC), part of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (MPPDA)—not the Hays Office, or part of the Motion Picture Producers of America, Inc. (MPPA), which did not exist until the 1960s.

  Joseph Breen was not a lifelong anti-Semite.

  In the twenty-first century, when you can see just about anything you choose to see, you may find it difficult to understand why the images in this book and the scenes described here could have offended anyone, even ninety years ago. Will Hays, the sententious bureaucrat who monitored Hollywood conduct before and during the Code period, was fond of the expression “right-thinking.” When backed against the wall, he said: “We simply must not allow the production of a picture which will offend every right-thinking person who sees it.” Who was this “right-thinking” person? What made thinking right or wrong? Questions like this were swept aside when certain films offended certain people, and those people were not apathetic.

  The American population in 1929 was 122.7 million. Ninety million were moviegoers, but then as now, the tastes of those patrons varied greatly from location to location. Film fans in Manhattan enjoyed sophisticated dramas; fans in upstate New York disliked them. Likewise, homespun stories did well in regional theaters but not in urban picture palaces. It followed that community standards differed greatly from the big cities to the small towns. “Damn” and “hell” were rarely spoken on the screen, of course, but there was even a hubbub over this sentence: “I’m going to have a baby.” Some audiences found it too raw. “There must be a sweeter phrase for motherhood in pictures,” wrote a Colorado exhibitor. “Let’s get above the level of the cow having a calf.” Other audiences found such attitudes risible.

  The challenge for a manufacturer is to create a product that will sell everywhere. What if that product is a fantasy? When the fantasy of one community is the obscenity of another, the filmmaker’s challenge becomes the censor’s problem. This led to a four-year struggle.

  My goal in writing Forbidden Hollywood is to tell the story of the pre-Code era by taking you there. We will eavesdrop on conferences between producers and writers, read nervous telegrams from executives to censors, and listen to conversations between censors and directors, where artistic decisions meant shifts in power—and money—when one-third of a nation was desperate. We will see how these decisions were so artfully wrought as to fool some of the people just long enough to get films into theaters. We will read what theater managers thought of such craftiness. We will read letters from a variety of fans as they, depending on community standards, applauded creativity or condemned crassness.

  We will see why these films brought about the 1934 Production Code:

  The Trial of Mary

  Dugan

  The Cock-Eyed World

  The Divorcee

  Hell’s Angels

  Little Caesar

  The Public Enemy

  Dracula

  Frankenstein

  A Free Soul

  Possessed

  Scarface

  Red-Headed Woman

  Call Her Savage

  Island of Lost Souls

  The Sign of the Cross

  She Done Him Wrong

  So This Is Africa

  Baby Face

  The Story of Temple

  Drake

  Convention City

  Queen Christina

  Tarzan and His Mate

  “Having decided to be thorough, Mae West goes the limit,” wrote Alma Whitaker in the Los Angeles Times. “None of your refined, lean, sinuous sophisticates like Norma Shearer’s Strangers May Kiss or the Garbo-Dietrich line for her. When she is portraying a ‘bad woman,’ she’s sumptuously, voluptuously, riotously bad, and she revels in complete vulgarity.”

  These films can be singled out from hundreds of other “problem films” because they meet these criteria.

  They were adapted from proscribed books or plays.

  They were attacked by the press.

  They were heavily cut by the state or local boards.

  They were banned in states, territories, or entire countries.

  They were condemned by the Catholic press and by the Legion of Decency.

  Reading Forbidden Hollywood, you will learn the truth about these films. You will look at a particular pre-Code title and learn how a scene in it was regarded by a writer, a director, a Code administrator, a critic, an audience—and even a theater manager, who in the small towns, had a personal relationship with his patrons. If those patrons were offended by a film they saw in his theater, they were uncomfortable when they were leaving the theater. They looked down. They looked away. They did not want to confront the manager. But he knew. And even though he had not made the film in question, he felt responsible. He was showing it. Stories like these convey the history of pre-Code Hollywood in a new way. Film history should never be written without a human context.

  Fortunately for us, there is ample documentation of the pre-Code context, even if some of the voices sound odd after nearly a century. Ninety years from now, our reactions to She Done Him Wrong may sound odd, too. This film engendered strong reactions in 1933, and it still does. Forbidden Hollywood will honor those reactions. Whether we find them peculiar or enlightened, we are fortunate to hear them. They give us a broader, deeper, clearer sense of the era than we have had. They help us understand why there was a fight to control the movies, why it ended as it did, and what survived.

  MARK A. VIEIRA

  August 1, 2018

  If one star embodied the giddy abandon of 1920s Hollywood, it was Mae Murray, seen here in Christy Cabanne’s The Masked Bride.

  PART

  THE ROARING TWENTIES

  ONE

  NEW GODS AND NEW RULES

  In 1920, Hollywood was synonymous with the American film industry. It was entertaining forty million Americans a week and achieving mythical status. The country needed myths. It was recovering from World War I and an influenza epidemic. F. Scott Fitzgerald saw “all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” To escape this nihilism, young people sat in darkened auditoriums and watched thirty-foot images solve life’s problems in an hour. This was reassuring. It was also transporting. “You had only to see the faces of people coming out of a theater to know,” wrote the New Republic. “They had been to the altar of all the old gods of human nature.” For many, there were new gods, too—movie stars.

  The stars of 1920 in
cluded William S. Hart, Lillian Gish, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Wallace Reid, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charles Chaplin. Transfigured by luminous photography and animated by an innate charisma, these stars assumed the power of idols. But some idols have feet of clay.

  Beginning in 1920, there was a series of scandals. The first was the poisoning death of Olive Thomas, a star who was married to Jack Pickford, Mary’s brother. The second, in 1921, was the death of a minor actress named Virginia Rappé. Roscoe Arbuckle was tried for manslaughter in her death amid press coverage that hinted at unnatural sex practices. The third scandal, in 1922, was the murder of director William Desmond Taylor. Again, there was speculation about Hollywood’s private life, and two stars were harmed by association: Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter. The fourth scandal was the death of matinee idol Wallace Reid in January 1923. In this case, the cause was known; Reid’s wife, actress Dorothy Davenport, acknowledged his struggle with morphine addiction.

  Newspapers, both dailies and tabloids, seized on these events, sneering that Hollywood was not so much a magical place as a hotbed of vice. Arbuckle, Taylor, and Reid had worked for Famous Players–Lasky, which distributed their films as Paramount Productions, so Paramount was the obvious target. This prosperous combine had been merged only four years earlier, when Adolph Zukor saw how Jesse L. Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Cecil B. DeMille had turned an unpaved suburb called Hollywood into a production hub. “Hollywood had built its big names,” recalled DeMille. “Anything we did was news, and it was titillating news if scandalmongers could hint that there was a fire of corruption consuming Hollywood’s vitals. With the Arbuckle and Taylor affairs as a basis, pulpits thundered a lurid conception of Hollywood as a citadel of sin. The entire industry was tarred with a brush wielded in broad strokes. It was necessary to do something.”