Back to the Dirty '30s

By RICHARD CORLISS

America is rocked by social violence, and some people think Hollywood is to blame. They point to the sex and smutty talk, drug use and gun love onscreen. The moguls hide behind a rickety rating system that stokes more fury than it slakes. Church groups attack it as a sham; critics on the left complain that it eviscerates mature films. "The censors have spent all their time protecting children against adult movies," says The Nation. "They might better protect adults against childish movies."

As it is in the late 1990s, so it was in the early 1930s. The same clamor, with different causes and results. Back then, the social eruptions came not from random acts of carnage but from an economic collapse that whacked the country. The films of the early '30s are full of clues to America's mood in the first long ache of the Great Depression: frantic, feisty, obsessed with getting a job, a buck and ahead by any means necessary. Today's typical film is a fairy tale; the '30s pictures played like tabloid journalism--the March of Crime. Gangsters, gold diggers, ruthless businessmen, wage slaves and the not-working class all jumped out of the headlines and onto the screen.

To rein in the wild horses of this art-industry, Hollywood in 1930 charged Will Hays, a former Postmaster General, with establishing and enforcing standards for screen stories and behavior. At times the regulators used diplomacy: one official, objecting to gruesome screams in Murders in the Rue Morgue, suggested "reducing the constant loud shrieking to lower moans and an occasional modified shriek." At other times they took the stern approach, telling Howard Hughes he was forbidden to make the gangster film Scarface. The producer's response, in a memo to director Howard Hawks: "Screw the Hays Office. Start the picture and make it as realistic, as exciting, as grisly as possible." Within four years the Hays system was kaput, and a new, tough Production Code was installed. Overnight, Hollywood movies went from jazzy to genteel.

Now the "pre-Code" era of 1930-34 is getting its due in two excellent books and a film retrospective. Mark A. Vierra's Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood (Abrams; 240 pages; $39.95) mixes gorgeous photos with tart memos and anecdotes from the period. Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 (Columbia University Press; 430 pages; $19.50) cogently examines the pictures and their political impact. Those in New York City can see the fabulous evidence firsthand. Film Forum, the town's invaluable rep house, is mounting a series of 44 key films, unspooling through Sept. 14.

By 1930, movies had learned to talk and, with the help of Broadway-bred writers, did so in a sassy vernacular that singed sensitive ears. And the films were acted with a feral intelligence. James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck were street-level stars with insolent accents and attitudes. "There we were, like an uncensored movie," says Harlow of one tryst in Red-Headed Woman (she fornicates her way up the social ladder, gets found out and lands in Paris with a new sugar daddy and a stud chauffeur). These guys and dolls could dish it out and just as surely take it. Even glamour types felt the sting of the Depression. In Blonde Venus, Marlene Dietrich sells her virtue for the price of a meal for herself and her child: 85[cents].

For desperate times, desperate titles. Heroes for Sale, in which Richard Barthelmess endures war injuries, morphine addiction and betrayal by every military, judicial and corporate authority, was joined on marquees by Beauty for Sale, Girls for Sale, Scandal for Sale. The films painted, in brisk, garish strokes, America's can-do optimism twisted into gotta-have greed. "What could I do?" asks Stanwyck about an office liaison in Baby Face. "He's my boss, and I had to earn my living." She's bad, but the Depression made her do it.

Maybe the Depression made Hollywood do it. Most of the studios were losing money by 1932 (RKO declared bankruptcy), and racy films brought in the money. But they also fanned the ire of state and local censorship boards. In 1934 the new Production Code had teeth, and under Joseph I. Breen, a former newspaperman, it bit hard. Dialogue was denatured from snappy to sappy; gowns hid what they once revealed; evil lost a lot of its seductive plausibility. And as studios sought to rerelease their pre-Code films, Breen insisted that cuts be made in the master negative, thus censoring some movies forever. Yet when he retired in 1954, Hollywood gave him an Oscar for Life Achievement. The plaque read: "To our industry's benevolent conscience."

The industry today has no conscience. Nor does the current cinema possess half the wit, elan and social acuity of Hollywood in the dirty '30s. Those films were more than the sum of their smirks. They were expressions of an industry scrambling for survival, like their amoral heroes for sale, and doing it in a style--raffish, dynamic, truly adult--that we've hardly seen since.