Pre-Code Hollywood

Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930â "1934
Erscheinungsjahr 1999
ISBN: 978-0-231-11095-2
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 400 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 594 g

Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe.

In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled.

No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression. and afterward.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Doherty, Thomas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. On the Cusp of Classical Hollywood CinemaPatrolling the DiegesisPre-Code Contexts2. Breadlines and Box Office Lines: Hollywood in the Nadir of the Great DepressionThe Lost MillionsA Synchronized Industry"Mike Fright"3. Preachment Yarns: The Politics of Mere EntertainmentTelegraphing IdeologyClass DistinctionsProfessional Malfeasance4. Dictators and Democrats: The Rage for OrderHankering for Supermen"The Barrymore of the Capital": The Newsreel Presidency of Franklin Delano RooseveltA New Deal in the Last ReelThe Mad Dog of Europe5. Vice Rewarded: The Wages of Cinematic SinPackaging ViceModels of ImmoralityFigurative LiteralnessQueer Flashes"Women Love Dirt"Working Girls6. Criminal Codes: Gangsters Unbound, Felons in CustodyRushing Toward Death: The Gangster FilmMen Behind Bars: The Prison Film7. Comic Timing: Cracking Wise and Wising UpCommentators on the ActionStory, Screenplay, and All Dialogue by Mae WestNewspaper PatterThe Blue Eagle and Duck Soup (1933)8. News on Screen: The Vividness of Mechanical ImmortalityLibrary StockThe Newsreel EthosCovering Up the Great Depression9. Remote Kinships: The Geography of the Expeditionary FilmPoints on the CompassFaking It: Phoney Expeditions and Real DeathsThe Dark Continent10. Primitive Mating Rituals: The Color Wheel of the Racial Adventure Film"He's White": Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) and Tarzan and His Mate (1934)Red Skin, Red Lips: Massacre (1934)East Mates West"The Ethiopian Trade"Nerve and Brains: Paul Robeson and The Emperor Jones (1933)Beauty and the Beast: King Kong (1933)11. Nightmare Pictures: The Quality of GruesomenessRugged Individualism: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and Their ProgenyThe Lower Orders Rise Up: Island of Lost Souls (1933) and Freaks (1932)12. Classical Hollywood Cinema: The World According to Joseph I. Breen"The Storm of '34"Hollywood Under the CodePost-Code Hollywood Cinema

Über Autor(innen)

Thomas Doherty is associate professor in the American Studies Department and chair of the Film Studies Program at Brandeis University. He is the author of Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (Columbia, 1993) and Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, and is associate editor of the film journal Cinéaste.