Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings
 Tax the Rich

Movie Monday - Did it all go wrong in the 1930s?

I'm going to be referring to the Hollywood morals code, commonly known as the Hays Code, which came to full bloom in the early 1930s in Hollywood. If you are unfamiliar with it, just click on any of these sites for information:

http://www.callmefatty.com/id8.html   

 (Good Frank Rich column included.)

http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs/ProductionCode.htm

(Just the facts.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

(Lists the "Shall Nots.)

 

I know we are celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday today even though he was born on January 16 and Googles  home page is mum on this (no MLK icon). Funny, I'm not thinking about MLK but about J. Edgar Hoover today. That truly great American (snark intended) who made King's, and so many more Americans', life miserable. 

Weird, you must be thinking, today is Movie Monday and how is Hoover connected with Hollywood? Well, he is, especially in his maniacal push to remove all vestiges of communism from this "great country" and that definitely included any "left leaning" Hollywood types. Google the Hollywood Ten for more on this.

However, Hoover comes to mind more in the aggregate, as a symbol of the never ending stream of "shall nots" coming from US moral standard bearers which often include powerful government figures and unfortunately become banners for our treatment of the rest of the world.

Last night, I watched the final chapter in Oliver Stone's The Untold History of the United States. I have the book and now I want to fill in the spaces by reading it. Stone thinks there were times in recent (75+ years) US history when we could have moved away from the rabid communist witch hunt which fueled our thoughts and our economy (the growth of the military-industrial complex) for so, so many decades.

I don't know if I agree with him that things may have been different if Henry Wallace had been FDR's VP and he, not Truman, become president in 1945 or that things may have been different with Vietnam if JFK had not been assassinated. But just watching his series made me take out my copy of Howard Zinn's opus and, this time, really read it and also to buy Lies My Teacher Told Me (love it), the Caro books on LBJ and the above-mentioned Stone book. Stone got me researching historically again and that is always good.

But keeping with Stone's theme that things might have been different, might have been better for this country, the should-of, could-of type of thinking, I decided to apply these thoughts to two old-time movies I watched on TCM this week.

The first is Fast and Furious, 1939, a horrid who-done-it with Ann Southern and Franchot Tone playing a husband and wife amateur sleuth team. It is very worthy (or unworthy) of a plethora of horribly-acted, unhumorous, married amateur sleuth B movies (not included are the first few Thin Man movies) from this period, which is just after the Code kicked in around 1933.

By the time of F & F in 1939, Tone and Southern have the obligatory twin beds, no hanky-panky, and a plot with a perchant for domestic violence or intended domestic violence, which I guess if it wasn't sexual violence was then, as now, OK with the censors.

This movie was directed by Busby Berkeley who was reduced to directing non-musical dross by 1939 since the interest in that genre had declined. (Truth note: I hate almost every musical ever made except Cabaret, Les Miserables, and Moulin Rouge- all of rather recent vintage. But the first heyday of the musical was mid-1930s (followed again in the 1950s as a reaction to the advent of TV) and I believe this was a direct result of the Code; musicals were safe and almost Hayes Office proof.)

Fast and Furious was also another example of the movie studios' unbelievable ability to crank out films constantly. For while the best hits from this time period are still touted, F & F type movies were needed in droves back then because if you went to the movies in those days, you got two movies, a cartoon, a short, dish prizes, etc., etc. - or so I've been told.

Which brings me back to those moral standard bearers I mentioned earlier, back to the time they were just gaining power in the early 1930s, and to the second movie I saw last week: The Phantom of Crestwood (1932.)

It's a typical old house, stormy night, murder mystery with Ricardo Cortez as a gangster who is forced to be a good guy detective here (and it is implied that he is able to walk away at the end) and Karen Morley as a high-class hooker. There is no sugar-coating of her profession since this movie got in just under the wire with the Code. In Phantom, Morley's character, Jenny Wren, would probably have gone on to a happy, monied retirement if she wasn't needed as the murder victim. That is, once the Code really kicked in, Morley would be punished because she was a bad woman, not because her death was needed as a plot point.

Some features that make this movie so much more memorable than F & F: Cortez realistically uses his wits to solve the crime, the people assembled in the old house are not one-dimensional evil, the 1929 stock market crash is alluded to and Jenny Wren is not a typical cold-hearted bitch; in fact, she has sympathy for the Johns she is blackmailing. Even today, 80 years later, there is a freshness to Phantom; it's stuck in its genre but not its time period.

However, in just a year, all this would change and except for classic works where "bad" women, Anna Karenina, Camille, etc., would be presented sympathetically since they will "kick the bucket" in the end, typical Hollywood movies caved to the Hayes Code because as Frank Rich stated in his column re: Hollywood and the Code: It panicked.

So returning to Stone's contention that attitudes may have been different in this country if certain events had occurred, if certain other men had been our leaders, my jury is still out on this POV. 

However, I do think there is stronger proof that the Hays Code had a long term ill effect on American memes/attitudes. Today, in the independent internet age, it may be difficult to understand that there was a time before the internet and television. While information also came the press and the radio during this time,  for almost 50 years, millions and millions of Americans went to the movies weekly, perhaps daily. They sat there and watched how the world "lived." It was from what they saw and heard in those darkened theaters that they received their code of values to live by. Unfortunately, starting in the early 1930s, the strongly religious-backed Production Code set up this values and all the memes which followed from them.

I'm stopping here because I don't want this to become a polemic but I'd like to revisit this theme in some other blog. Like Stone, I'm fascinated as to how and why things happen and how things might have been different. Of course, I would also love it if my movie package could get some better movies so I could return to just plain reviewing. Unfortunately, if they keep offering turkeys like Hysteria (no it's not horror; well, I guess it really is a horror!), that ain't gonna happen.

See you next week.