Get Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in PDF

By Thomas Doherty

ISBN-10: 0231110952

ISBN-13: 9780231110952

Pre-Code Hollywood explores the interesting interval in American movie historical past from 1930 to 1934 while the commandments of the creation Code management have been violated with impunity in a chain of wildly unconventional motion pictures -a time whilst censorship used to be lax and Hollywood made the main of it. notwithstanding extra unbridled, salacious, subversive, and simply simple extraordinary than what got here afterwards, the flicks of the interval do certainly have the glance of Hollywood cinema -but the ethical terrain is so off-kilter that they appear imported from a parallel universe.
In a feeling, Doherty avers, the flicks of pre-Code Hollywood are from one other universe. They lay naked what Hollywood lower than the construction Code tried to hide up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by way of the legislation of God or guy, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic traces crossed and racial obstacles overlooked, financial injustice uncovered and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and advantage unrewarded -in sum, pretty well the uncooked stuff of yank tradition, unvarnished and unveiled.
No different e-book has but sought to interpret the movies and film-related meanings of the pre-Code period -what outlined the interval, why it ended, and what its courting was once to the rustic as an entire in the course of the darkest years of the nice melancholy . . . and later on.

Show description

Read Online or Download Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema; 1930-1934 PDF

Best reference books

Football For Dummies (UK Edition) - download pdf or read online

Even if you must galvanize pals and co-workers with new-found soccer knowledge, brush up on information you're uncertain approximately (the offside rule, someone? ) or enhance your functional talents, this is often the publication for you! overlaying all of the fundamentals of the sport, ideas and strategies, in addition to giving an in-depth background of the game and the way it has advanced to the current day, this imperative advisor gets you up to the mark at the most well liked online game on this planet very quickly.

Download e-book for iPad: How to Read Historical Mathematics by Benjamin Wardhaugh

Writings through early mathematicians function language and notations which are relatively various from what we are acquainted with this present day. Sourcebooks at the heritage of arithmetic offer a few counsel, yet what has been missing is a consultant adapted to the desires of readers imminent those writings for the 1st time.

Additional info for Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema; 1930-1934

Example text

Sometimes the moneymen made matters worse by intruding into production meetings and bungling about sound stages. ” Taking note of “the tightening of loose spots and the elimination of waste in the most rigorous manner,” Paramount founder and president Jesse L. ” At the exhibition end of the business, theater owners slashed prices, fired ushers, eliminated stage shows, and scrambled to attract the “lost millions” with raffles and giveaways. Purchase a movie ticket and win a chance at grocery baskets, hams, china, Japanese tea sets, crockery, waffle irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, home furnishings, cash, automobiles, trips to Yellowstone and Hollywood, and in one case (soothing the Depression-racked BREADLINES AND BOX OFFICE LINES / 31 mind and body at one session) free psychoanalysis and ice cream served up in the lobby.

Although virtu- BREADLINES AND BOX OFFICE LINES / 37 ally all the big radio stars of the s ventured into the movies, few radioborn personalities achieved first-rank success as motion picture performers. Often even the most high-priced radio talent was relegated to short features, supporting-player status, or single numbers in cavalcade productions. In the pre-Code era, the Marx Brothers, Al Jolson, Lawrence Tibbet, and Eddie Cantor were considered the only radio “headliners whose screen efforts enjoyed any appreciable success,” and all but Tibbet had already achieved fame in vaudeville.

For four short years, though, pre-Code Hollywood entertained, even embraced, visions of immorality and insurrection. With the stock market crash of October , , the knockout bell for a flattened decade tolled the cold-water awakening for the next round. In print and on screen, popular renderings soon cast the passage as a kind of temporal morality play wherein the frenetic excesses of the Jazz Age lead inevitably into the long penance of the Great Depression. After a wild night spent burning the candle at both ends, gyrating to the Charleston, and sloshing around in bathtub gin, the dull pain of the next ten years is the deserved hangover, just punishment for straying so far from the traditional American virtues of temperance, hard work, and deferred gratification.

Download PDF sample

Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema; 1930-1934 by Thomas Doherty


by Michael
4.2

Rated 4.87 of 5 – based on 30 votes