Customer Reviews

Why Be Good? Sexuality and Censorship in Early Cinema

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The one thing that drags this documentary down is the use of a modern actress/dancer in really fake looking flapper dresses and wigs during the opening and closing credits. (Seriously, her outfits look as if they had been purchased at a discount Halloween shop) You also see her, at times, throughout the film. It kinda takes away from the beautiful archival clips.
Otherwise this is a well done documentary about women in Hollywood, the Hays Code, and morality in film.

This film is incredibly thorough! The documentary takes the viewer through the naughty years of pre-censorship Hollywood. There are countless rare film clips and even more rare photos, of Mae West, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Jean Harlow and many more that we all love, including Valentino and Dietrich. There are interview clips that are priceless! It would take an extraordinary amount of money and time to ever gather all of these wonfderful clips on our own (and near impossible to get hold of the rare vintage photos shown onscreen) and so this DVD is highly recommended.

Just great. Not as shocking as I thought it would be, but then this is 2009 and one sees more shocking scenes on TV and the street that are more shocking. I do, however, think this DVD should be in your DVD Collection and I am pleased that I own a copy.

I was hoping this video had a look at how sexuality in early cinema led to the adoption of the Production Code and how those changes affected movies. It's interesting but not nearly as good as the TCM doc "Complicated Women," which isn't available on DVD. So given my expectations, I'd say this falls short of the mark.