Volume 56, Number 11 · July 2, 2009
When Hollywood Dared
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Pre-Code Hollywood Collection: The Cheat/Merrily We Go to Hell/Hot Saturday/Torch Singer/Murder at the Vanities/Search for Beauty
Universal Studios, 3 DVDs, $49.98
Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume Three: Other Men's Women/The Purchase Price/Frisco Jenny/Midnight Mary/Heroes for Sale/Wild Boys of the Road
Warner Home Video, 4 DVDs, $49.98
The term 'pre-Code'—denoting the Hollywood films of the early talkie era, before full enforcement of the Production Code was imposed in 1934—has been enjoying the kind of currency previously attained by 'film noir,' and for similar reasons: it's at once a promise of buried pleasures and shorthand for an aesthetic aura that is complex enough to encompass both campy artifice and rough-edged immediacy. It isn't of course news that to the early 1930s we owe the most enduring mythic figures of talking pictures: the gangsters incarnated by Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, the chorines of Busby Berkeley's epic musical numbers, the iconic fright masks of Frankenstein and Dracula and The Mummy, and—before their comedy was normalized and bowdlerized—the Marx Brothers and Mae West. But these represent only the glittering surface of a legacy with many hidden layers. After 1934 many pre-Code movies were either put on the shelf or reissued in censored form; most weren't shown on television; and for a long time they were frustratingly hard to find on video.
Review, 3934 words
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