Pre-Code dreams

A lost film history returns to the Brattle

by Steve Vineberg

The advent of sound in movies in the late '20s was so disruptive that we tend to forget the ways in which the early talkies are linked to the last years of the silents. For all their obvious differences, the movies Hollywood turned out between 1930 -- when the industry had pretty well conquered the technical challenges of the switch-over to sound -- and 1933 extend the frank sexual attitudes we associate with the movies of the mid '20s. They reflect, in other words, the real world beyond the parameters of the screen: men and women look at each other with evident desire, husbands and wives cheat on each other, unmarried couples sometimes live together, and whoring is one way to bring home the bacon.

The bracing reminder of the world we all live in is the major pleasure in what are known as the pre-Code movies from the early '30s, 10 of which, from the Columbia Studios collection, show up this month and next in beautiful new prints at the Brattle. (The first sample of Columbia pre-Code pictures surfaced a decade ago.) The allusion is to the Production Code, popularly named the Hays Code for its supervisor, Will B. Hays. This was a self-censorship program initiated by Hollywood in the '30s -- it went into effect in 1934 -- in response to the protests of church and women's groups to the sex, drug, and murder scandals of the '20s. Hollywood resolved to make itself look clean by banishing immorality from the screens of America -- a rather bizarre project, like Oscar Wilde proving he wasn't a sodomite by writing children's stories instead of Salome. The results hampered creative freedom in American movies for decades. (The Hays Code finally collapsed in 1967, when the movies of a permissive era perforated it in so many places it could no longer stand.) Under the restrictions of the Hays Code, the world of American movies began to bear little resemblance to anything recognizable. There was no sex before or outside of marriage -- at least, not without dire consequences (generally for the woman) -- and, when you consider that married couples slept in twin beds, little plausible sex within it. Bathroom sets were constructed without toilets. Gay relationships simply didn't exist -- that is, unless a clever filmmaker could figure out a way to imply one in ways that Code watchdogs wouldn't pick up on.

A colorful example of the distance between pre-Code and Code-era attitudes can be seen if we compare one of the movies in the Columbia series, the 1932 Virtue (November 16), with one of the racier Warner Brothers features from 1937, Marked Woman. The heroine of Virtue, played by the indispensable Carole Lombard, is a hooker who gets hauled onto a train out of New York by a cop who warns her never to return. She does -- she has nowhere else to go -- but when she hooks up with a wiseacre cabbie ignorant of her past (Pat O'Brien, in the days when he was still a brash, emotionally expressive young actor), she mends her ways. One day a confederate from the old days (Mayo Methot) shows up at the hash joint where Lombard is holding down a respectable job, and when O'Brien swings by to pick her up after work, she's eager to show him off to her friend. "Use your bean!", Methot instructs her. "He might know me. Some of my best friends are cab drivers." (Robert Riskin wrote the dialogue for Virtue, which has a real tang: when Lombard asks Methot whether she's ever been married, Methot answers, "So many times I've got rice marks all over me.") Methot plays a prostitute in Marked Woman, too, along with Bette Davis and a number of other sharp-tongued, been-around-looking actresses, but they're called club hostesses, and all they seem to do is hang around the clip joint run by their unsavory gangster boss, like appealing feminine décor. We spot their profession by the physical attitudes of the actresses; we're not fooled. Yet the script's insistence on euphemism and façade infantilizes the audience.

With her long, horsy, stomped-on face, Mayo Methot -- she was Bogart's wife for most of a decade, until Lauren Bacall came on the scene -- seems unmistakably to belong to the sexier, more straightforward world of the pre-Code films; you can see her in Nightclub Lady (November 30) as well as Virtue. (Bogart himself shows up in Love Affair, which screens December 14, but Hollywood hasn't figured out how to cast him yet. As a young inventor stuck on Dorothy Mackaill -- an actress who shows interior conflict by lifting her pretty chin and staring at an invisible spot a few inches above her eyebrows -- he wears jodhpurs and looks anxious, and every appendage on his face seems glued on.)

One of the pleasures of the series is that it's almost a Who's Who of pre-Code types, most of whom went on making movies after 1934 but usually brought the tone of this gruffer, more graphic time into their performances -- Pat O'Brien, his integrity compromised for good when he started playing lovably pugilistic Irish priests, was the exception. Here are fast-talking Lee Tracy (as a Manhattan politician in Night Mayor, November 30), with his distinctive look of amused irony, and Adolphe Menjou (the star of Nightclub Lady), who's handsome in the elegant, continental style of a practiced roué. Carole Lombard -- feisty in the breezy first half of Virtue, melodramatic but still irresistible in the second -- is one kind of blonde; Jean Harlow, her absurd elocution-class diction warring with her good-time-gal personality, is another. In Three Wise Girls (November 16) Harlow plays a small-town soda jerk who moves to New York to find a more lucrative job and lands one as a model, thanks to a childhood friend (Mae Clarke, a year after Jimmy Cagney planted that grapefruit in her mug in Public Enemy). But she discovers that Clarke is getting a little help from the married man who's been keeping her in a swanky Park Avenue apartment. Harlow keeps her virtue, which makes you wonder about the casting -- she and Clarke should probably have switched roles. But she's still a carnal wonder. Instructing her on how to model a negligee, Clarke tells her not to bother sashaying -- that her hips will take care of themselves. I'll say, brother.

It's certainly the women who make the strongest impression in most of these movies. Marie Prevost plays the third wise girl in this movie, Harlow's roommate. I don't recall seeing her before, but she's a Helen Kane/Lillian Roth type, puffy-cheeked and irreverent, a second-banana flapper. Fay Wray is double-billed on December 7 in Ann Carver's Profession and The Woman I Stole: she's a sexually aware socialite type, dark and compact. In The Woman I Stole (the title is better than the movie), she's the wife of a Sahara oilman (Donald Cook); she's preparing to run off with his mentor (Jack Holt), but the movie's a testosterone adventure tale and she turns out to be an unnecessary appendage. The men reconcile by proving their loyalty to each other, and both of them tell her to go to hell; they end up sailing back to New York together in adjoining cabins, bound for more male escapades. (The homoerotic subtext seems unintended.)

In terms of personalities, the revelation of the series is Nancy Carroll, who stars in Child of Manhattan (November 23) opposite the inexpressive John Boles, who came to movies from operetta (and played his most famous role as Barbara Stanwyck's blueblood husband in Stella Dallas). Carroll, on the other hand, was an invention of the movies, and for a brief period of time she was fantastically popular, but her career was over by 1938 -- nine years after it began -- and no one watches her pictures anymore. God knows she's due for a revival. She has bobbed hair and a kewpie-doll face with almost implausible apple cheeks, and she looks as if she could fit in your pocket. Her eyebrows are pencil-thin, and her enormous, wondering eyes pop out from their frame of mascara. As a taxi dancer who wins the love of a millionaire and almost throws it away because she can't believe she deserves it, Carroll wears a necklace of little silver triangles and a low-cut dress with ruffles that drip off her tiny arms. She looks almost too diminutive to be walking around under her own steam, but she's resilient.

The movie, an adaptation of a Preston Sturges play, is very enjoyable, partly because of the supporting cast -- Buck Jones as Carroll's sweet-natured cowboy suitor, Jessie Rolph as the German-Jewish proprietor of the ballroom where she works, Luis Alberni as a nervous Mexican divorce lawyer -- but mostly because of Carroll herself, who's a charming comedienne and touching in dramatic scenes. Boles takes her for dinner in a private dining room and she looks up at him from the divan, her voice trembling as she asks him whether he's a good guy or a villain. When she gets pregnant, Boles has a moment of shock -- he's been hiding his affair with her because he wanted to keep it out of the papers for his debutante daughter's sake -- but then he snaps to his senses and proposes to her. Her face falls apart as she insists she didn't ask him for any such thing; she can't believe he'd willingly risk his reputation for a dancehall hostess, and she's terrified he'll think she suckered him.

In the Hays Code movies, a woman who sleeps with a man without benefit of preacher is always punished, but in Child of Manhattan Carroll gets the happy ending she's earned. So does Loretta Young in A Man's Castle (December 14). Young plays a homeless, starving young woman who's picked up by Spencer Tracy in a monkey suit. He takes her out for an expensive dinner, then reveals that he's broke too: the tux is just a costume for his part-time job advertising fish (a sign flashes on and off under his boiled shirt). After he embarrasses the restaurant manager into treating them, he takes Young home to his Hooverville on the Hudson, and they become live-in lovers. Young isn't cast right -- it's the kind of proletarian role Sylvia Sidney used to specialize in, and Young always looks as if she grew up with money. But she isn't bad, and Tracy is relaxed and believable.

The movie itself, directed by Frank Borzage in 1933, is a lovely period piece. It's one of a handful of films that responds to the grim realities of the Depression by transforming them into romantic emblems. As in Lewis Milestone's musical Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! (which came out the same year), the hobo life is an expression of freedom rather than the consequence of destitution. Tracy has installed a sliding panel in the ceiling of his shack so he can sleep under the stars; in one scene he looks over at the stove he's bought for Young and then up at the sky, and we see what he feels he'll have to sacrifice if he stays with her. The movie has a very unusual texture -- the result of Borzage's gift for getting poetry out of simple details like the $5-down stove and the stilts Tracy ambles around on when he plays a clown to advertise "Ye Gotham Eatery Eats -- But Eats!" The joint Tracy's unsavory neighbor (Arthur Hohl) sets out to rob is a toy factory: Tracy comes along but you can see he's all wrong for a thief's lifestyle when he becomes preoccupied with a wind-up toy. A Man's Castle, like Child of Manhattan, has been forgotten all these years. In a newly minted print, it comes back to us across the years like a dream of another era.