American film history has benefitted over the past two decades from a new generation of film historians who have pieced together, through a remarkable array of individual efforts, the story of cinema in the 20th century. Many of these books vary in quality, with some embodying more of a knowledge of criticism and film theory than others and with some concentrating more on readings of films than on lists and summaries. It’s difficult to do both intensive textual analysis and historical story-telling. And it’s difficult to keep critical categories of analysis in mind when covering several years’ worth of films and events. Thomas Doherty’s Pre-Code Hollywood is more of an historical account than a piece of theoretical analysis, and Doherty does a fine job of filling in the empty spaces in the long story of 20th century cinema.
The era from 1930 to 1934 Is so important and so worthy of a book in its own right because during this short time period, Hollywood became more adventurous than it had been before (or would be again until the 1960s). Doherty begins by pointing out the connections between the onset of the Depression and the appearance of films dealing with crime, sex, and public immorality that helped lure audiences back into the theaters. While the motivation for the films may have been commercial, they as a group constitute one of the most interesting and important explosions of cinematic creativity in the history of American film. It was a cynical and disappointed era, and that spirit is reflected in the images of faulty families, wayward wives, morally dubious public officials, sexually aggressive young women, and corrupt businessmen. Figures of public authority who had been beyond reproach in cinematic culture were now figures of scorn and derision. Americans who had put their hopes into screen images now placed all their hopelessness into the stories of despair, loss, and failure to be found in many films.
Hollywood didn’t go too far, however, and films that might have had radical social and political implications were prevented from realizing them. For every bleak I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, there was a Gold Diggers of 1933, which turned failure into hope. And the ones with the most radical potential, Heroes For Sale comes to mind, were careful to include communist, socialist, or radical characters as figures of mockery and to conlude on a note that suggested that America was all right after all. Still, something of the danger of the era is rightly suggested by Doherty, who points out that it was essentially closed down by censorship and by the imposition of the Production Code, which had not been much enforced before 1934.
One of the problems with film history is that it can tend toward plot summary, and there is a little too much of that in this book. Too, there are so many films in any one era that a historian cannot be expected to have seen them all. Still, the absence from the book of some of the more salacious and interesting sex films (available in the two-volume laserdisc collection, Forbidden Hollywood) is puzzling in a book that otherwise does an excellent job of covering all the bases (and even some unexpected ones such as the documentary adventure films which are wittily and brilliantly linked to the monster films of the era).
Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immoralit
American film history has benefitted over the past two decades from a new generation of film historians who have pieced together, through a remarkable array of individual efforts, the story of cinema in the 20th century. Many of these books vary in quality, with some embodying more of a knowledge of criticism and film theory than others and with some concentrating more on readings of films than on lists and summaries. It’s difficult to do both intensive textual analysis and historical story-telling. And it’s difficult to keep critical categories of analysis in mind when covering several years’ worth of films and events. Thomas Doherty’s Pre-Code Hollywood is more of an historical account than a piece of theoretical analysis, and Doherty does a fine job of filling in the empty spaces in the long story of 20th century cinema.
The era from 1930 to 1934 Is so important and so worthy of a book in its own right because during this short time period, Hollywood became more adventurous than it had been before (or would be again until the 1960s). Doherty begins by pointing out the connections between the onset of the Depression and the appearance of films dealing with crime, sex, and public immorality that helped lure audiences back into the theaters. While the motivation for the films may have been commercial, they as a group constitute one of the most interesting and important explosions of cinematic creativity in the history of American film. It was a cynical and disappointed era, and that spirit is reflected in the images of faulty families, wayward wives, morally dubious public officials, sexually aggressive young women, and corrupt businessmen. Figures of public authority who had been beyond reproach in cinematic culture were now figures of scorn and derision. Americans who had put their hopes into screen images now placed all their hopelessness into the stories of despair, loss, and failure to be found in many films.
Hollywood didn’t go too far, however, and films that might have had radical social and political implications were prevented from realizing them. For every bleak I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, there was a Gold Diggers of 1933, which turned failure into hope. And the ones with the most radical potential, Heroes For Sale comes to mind, were careful to include communist, socialist, or radical characters as figures of mockery and to conlude on a note that suggested that America was all right after all. Still, something of the danger of the era is rightly suggested by Doherty, who points out that it was essentially closed down by censorship and by the imposition of the Production Code, which had not been much enforced before 1934.
One of the problems with film history is that it can tend toward plot summary, and there is a little too much of that in this book. Too, there are so many films in any one era that a historian cannot be expected to have seen them all. Still, the absence from the book of some of the more salacious and interesting sex films (available in the two-volume laserdisc collection, Forbidden Hollywood) is puzzling in a book that otherwise does an excellent job of covering all the bases (and even some unexpected ones such as the documentary adventure films which are wittily and brilliantly linked to the monster films of the era).
Michael Ryan