The Code and its Perfect Specimens
There’s TWO pre-code sets out for spring: Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 3 and this week comes the Pre-Code Hollywood set from Universal. None of the films quite measure up to the[…]
Category: Pre-Code
Dizzy from the Altitude, Happy to Plummet: Pre-Code Cinema and the Post-Code-Shock Syndrome
“The air is saturated with their feelings for each other as they listen to ‘the distant music of the falls,’ the same falls, of course, that will threaten to kill her.”
Sinners’ Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code
“Code? What Code?”
Ten Cents a Dance!
TCM had another one of their Stanywck days today, and tivo nabbed me TEN CENTS A DANCE (1931). Stanwyck is on a great slow burn here, starting out as a[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code
Miriam Hopkins & the Pre-Code Menage-a-trois
Imagine Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston deciding to live together and share Brad Pitt! How hot would that be? But no, now we live in a much more (as in[…]
Comedy · DVD & Blu-ray · Pre-Code
Dinner Is Served: The Return of MGM’s Witty ’30s Romp
Cukor’s all-star gala remains a tasty dish
Comedy · LGBT & Queer · Pre-Code
Wheeler and Woolsey Queered
The downright peculiar pleasures of pre-Code Wheeler and Woolsey
The Bowery: Raoul Walsh’s Gangs of New York
They spit! They swear! They smoke in bed! Back in 1933, The Bowery scored a big hit, introducing Darryl Zanuck’s new independent venture called Twentieth Century Pictures, yet this nostalgic[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Horror · Pre-Code · Reviews
Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932): Production Notes and Analysis
The normals are the real freaks in this still gut-wrenching horror classic Production Notes In mid-1931, MGM production head Irving Thalberg summoned scenarist Willis Goldbeck to tell him the time[…]
Music & Musicals · Pre-Code · Reviews
Pre-Code Follies: Murder at the Vanities
This 1934 musical mystery has girls, grins, guns, and Duke Ellington, too “Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.” That was the legend above the entrance[…]
Music & Musicals · Pre-Code · Reviews
What Kind of a Cowboy Are You? Eddie Cantor Goes West in Whoopee
“All Singing! All Dancing! All Color! All Racist!” Whoopee is a find, a treasure, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Most of all it is a chunk of Flo[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Producers & Studios · Reviews
Public Enemy: Warner Bros. in the Pre-Code Era
Nobody “did” the Depression, or sexual excess, or populist uprisings, better than the Brothers Warner. Conventional wisdom says that before the taboo-busting ’60s, all deviance in American filmmaking was suppressed.[…]
Fuck Housework! The Bad Girls of M-G-M, 1932
Harlow, Bankhead, yes, even patrician Norma Shearer “strayed” before the Hays Code ended their fun. Feminist film historians usually focus on Warners and RKO as the prime exponents of the “bad girl” genre[…]
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