This text explores the four-year interval between 1930 and 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. More unbridled, salacious, and just plain bizarre than what came afterward, the films produced between 1930 and 1934 look like classical Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from another universe. The book lays bare what Hollywood under the Production Code did its best to cover up and push off the screen: 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, the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled. Thomas Doherty chronicles how the freewheeling films of an unrestricted Hollywood inform the culture of America in the 1930s. Sandwiched between the subtleties of silent film and the moral sweetness of Shirley Temple, pre-Code Hollywood movies extolled the vibrant and the audacious.
The traumas of the Great Depression, an increasing public taste for the sensational, the fascination with gangsters and felons, the sexual permissiveness left from the Roaring Twenties, a growing skepticism of capitalism, and the birth of a long-lived affection for such horror movie staples as Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and King Kong - all are revealed in this analysis of an anomalous period in Hollywood history.
Industry Reviews
Scholarly but at ease with a Hollywood aside or period slang... Providing a nearly complete chronicle and casting unifying light on an unexplored era in film. Kirkus Reviews Pre-Code Hollywood is a delight-a text as witty and lively as the dialogue to be found in most of the pre-Code films under discussion. Filmfax Doherty keenly grasps the paradox at the heart of Hollywood censorship in the studio era.. -- Clayton Koppes American Historical Review A pleasure to read. Where film criticism often seems doomed to crush the power and the immediacy of the moving image under the weight of theoretical abstraction and protracted analysis, Doherty's prose is swift, vivid and energetic, much like the films that he addresses here. -- Jeffrey Geiger American Studies Pre-Code Hollywood is not only fun to read, it's instructive-a valuable, organized dip into a narrow slice of Hollywood history. -- Robert Gottlieb The New York Times Book Review Pre-Code Hollywood is not just a valuable exercise in film scholarship but also a fascinating cultural history of America in crisis. Doherty's discussion of Roosevelt's notorious manipulation of the mass media is itself worth the price of the book. -- Peter Kurth Salon.com Looks to become the standard work on this decidedly nonstandard age. -- Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times Excellent... Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood cogently examines the [Pre-Code] pictures and their political impact. -- Richard Corliss Time A detailed and fascinating study. -- J. Hoberman The New York TImes This is a fascinating, in-depth look at an overlooked Hollywood era. Doherty re-creates the horse-trading over censorship and the social tensions and casual racism of a young industry... Highly recommended. Library Journal
