Customer Reviews

Pre-Code Hollywood

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a good book, but it doesn't capture the excitement of its subject matter. All kinds of wild & crazy things were happening in pre-code (1930-1934) Hollywood movies (extramarital affairs, prostitution, robbery, violence, etc.), & they happened for the most part without moral judgment on the parts of the movie makers. But this book presents this exciting period in a rather dry, humorless way. It contains lots of useful information about the era & its surrounding politics, but also leaves out a lot of things that should be mentioned. On the plus side, it contains a complete version of the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (which is referred to in so many books, but hard to find a copy of). The photos are great, but small in size & printed on the same porous paper used for the text (which results in less sharpness than if printed on glossy paper). The biggest negative, in my opinion, is that a number of important pre-code movies are not even mentioned in this book (for example, Norma Shearer's "The Divorcee"). And why the author spends 4+ pages analyzing "Congorilla" (a 1932 African documentary that was made during the pre-code era but has little to do with Production Code censorship) is beyond me; it's a good analysis but perhaps belongs in a different book!

I love this era, and I love reading about this era, but even so, I gave up reading this book about halfway through. There are better books about pre-Code, at least two or three. Geoffrey Blake has a great book about how the Code came to be, and Mick LaSalle and Mark Vierra also have excellent books about the artistry and the gossip and the history. This one is OK, but I'd recommend it only to people like me who just can't get enough. And even then, I found out, I can.

Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood (Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930 - 1934) is a wonderful study of Hollywood and the movies it produced before the Production Code gained its censorious teeth and bloodied them on celluloid. The most significant and interesting aspects of the book were the politics involved, both in the production of the movies and the movies themselves. Movies looked at vice, poverty, and politics, for example, with eyes wide open and this frightened many people in power who led a successful campaign against the industry. This book tells that tale very effectively. It is a joy to read.

This is a very respectable but uninspired treatment of the pre-Code era. Its virtues come mainly in the beginning, with an interesting introduction. Its weakness stems from the fact that the author seems more fascinated by the politics of the era than with the movies -- and that he fails to connect the politics with the movies in a way that ultimately illuminates THE FILMS, on an artistic level. I don't think he has a feel for the ART of the era at all, and as a result the best chapters are about Franklin Roosevelt and the newsreels of the day. A decent treatment, but better books are out there.

Most film afficionados know about the milestone films that lead the Hays Office to establish a type of censorship code of ethics for the major film studios. This well researched book goes beyond the Mae West and gangster films, and offers a penetrating look at many forgotten films that were aimed at an adult audience in the time period between the advent of sound in the late 1920's and 1934, when the Hollywood Production Code was written and adhered to. Before Hollywood went "Hollywood" to present a fairy tale portrayal of 1930's depression America, a surprisingly high number of films addressing realistic social issues and sexual mores were written, filmed, and released to a wide audience. It would be almost thirty years before Hollywood would return to, and go beyond, its pre-code roots.

Doherty includes discussions of many well-known films in his narrative, but also does justice to long-forgotten films rarely seen since their original release. Although films stars such as Barbara Stanwyck and James Cagney established their screen presence and characters in the pre-code films, we usually remember them for their later work, with a few rare exceptions like Cagney's Public Enemy. Doherty recalls the early films of stars like these, and also remembers actors and actresses unknown to the current generation of filmgoers.

Many of the films covered in this book were ventures with low or moderate budget ventures, but they had a strong impact on audiences. Comparing a pre-code Warners musical like 42 Street to one of its post-code counterparts, like Golddiggers of 1935 illustrates the major change in tone and attitude films acquired as a result of the code. Pre-code language was stronger, more skin was shown, and plots were not sugar-coated with mandatory happy endings. Doherty paints a strong picture of a movie era too often glossed over in most film histories.

While there may be no more fascinating subject in film history, this book just does not capture its magic. Most of the book consists of plot summaries, and the social analysis contains a lot of specious correlations between film content and the transition between the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. The author doesn't really seem to like pre-Code films all that much--rather he seems to find them sociologically interesting. This is hardly a bad book. A lot of research clearly went into it. But this is not the book to make non-aficionados interested -- or lovers of pre-Code enlightened.

With the proliferation of 24-hour "Classic movie" channels, television viewers are finally treated to an almost forgotten world: Uncut Hollywood movies made during the height of the Depression and under much less censorship than would apply from 1934 onward. With insight and humor, Thomas Doherty describes why the years 1930-1934 were so different from what had come before (the ephemeral silent era) and, especially, what came after July 1, 1934 when the Catholic Joseph I. Breen took his seat as the head of the Production Code Administration and made movies predictable. From Mae West to Paul Robeson, PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD, as Mr. Doherty so ably demonstrates, offers so much more than primitive sound recording and future movie legends in their embryonic, all-but-forgotten years.

As far as scholarly texts go, I found these essays very entertaining, due to the lively-by-definition subject matter and the engaged perspective of Mr. Doherty.

Sections of the text focus on different genres of the period, touching on areas of Pre-Code history with an equal hand. In doing so, the author gives as much attention to the expected loose women and unpunished criminals as he does to the nature of newsreel reporting, expeditionary films, or the depiction of race. Some readers may be looking for only the most sensational aspects of the period, but Doherty gives a more complete picture, including ample historical context (outlining the politics behind the creation and eventual enforcement of the code).

No prior knowledge of the subject is required, but a certain patience is recommended if the subject is new to you - the movies of the pre-code era were an entirely different animal than those released now, and many look hopelessly dated even to viewers accustomed to films of the classic era of Hollywood.

I thought this book was a complete waste of time. Didn't like the writing, incompetent research, etc. Even the cover is lousy!
It is nothing more than a re-hash of what has been written before, by much better, competent, well-researched and informative authors.
Readers: Mark Vieira's "Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood" is excellent. And Mitch LaSalle's "Complicated Women" and "Dangerous Men" are also excellent for history before that rotten "code" came into being. Like silent film history and biographies of celebrities, there are perhaps two excellent ones and all others trash.
I'm still astonished a company would even publish this.