SIN! SEX! SHOCK! SCANDAL! Welcome to the sordid cinema of Pre-Code Hollywood! Classic film scholar Michael van den Bos is your tour guide on a 5-part trek through the seamier, steamier and sinister side of Hollywood movies from the early 1930s.
This Film Studies series delves into the outrageous and salacious movies created by Hollywood in a time known as the Pre-Code era. These films were produced from 1930 – 1934, a period when studios pushed the boundaries of indecent and intense adult themes deemed objectionable and offensive by American morality organizations before Hollywood’s Production Code Office strictly enforced its previously ignored censorship rules. Get ready for deliriously debauched delights on a Babylonian scale!
Our Pre-Code tour begins with a notorious film that helped trigger the end of this wildly wicked era… Baby Face (1933). Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, a damaged young woman who regains control of her life by taking sexual advantage of the executives working in an international bank, sleeping her way up the corporate ladder, leaving behind a trail of broken men (including a very young John Wayne).
In his pre-screening talk, Michael touches on the sexually-charged nature of the story, the film’s streamlined and propulsive filmmaking and discusses the remarkable performance by Barbara Stanwyck, one of Pre-code Hollywood’s most daring actresses.
If you want to turn someone onto pre-censorship movies at their most fun, sleazy and outrageous, just take them to Baby Face and from there they’ll be inspired to explore the whole era.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Inarguably one of the greatest screen actresses of the century, Stanwyck gives one of her strongest performances here, all fire and hunger and pain.
Jeffery Anderson, Combustile Celluloid
Still breathlessly subversive today.
Sheila O’Malley
2:00 pm
2:30 pm
Michael van den Bos
Alfred E Green
Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Henry Kolker, John Wayne
USA
1933
English
Book Tickets
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Credits
Screenwriter
Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola
Cinematography
James Van Trees
Editor
Howard Bretherton
Art Director
Anton Grot
Also in This Series
Move through the changing fashions and styles in screen acting in the wake of World War II.
Notorious
In the first of our new Film Studies series, Ingrid Bergman is pimped out by US agent Cary Grant to Nazi-sympathizer Claude Rains (ironically the most likeable character in the film). Hitchcock's thriller is a prime example of classic Hollywood star power.
A Streetcar Named Desire
"I don't want realism. I want magic!" declares Blanche du Bois, the tragic heroine who meets her nemesis in her sister's husband, Stanley Kowalski, in Tennessee Williams' great play. Brando's performance as Stanley is a turning point in American acting.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A young couple accept an invitation for a nightcap with history professor George (Richard Burton) and his wife Martha (Elizabeth Taylor). At first it's fun and games. But what passes for caustic wit soon degenerates into vicious mind games.
Nashville
With 26 actors getting more-or-less equal screen time and half of them singing their own tunes, Robert Altman's state-of-the-nation satire on bicentennial USA is a movie that repays multiple views.
Raging Bull
In the throes of a near-fatal drug problem Martin Scorsese made what he believed could be his last movie. Its subject: the Bronx Bull, Jake La Motta, a graceless but indomitable boxer who never quits beating himself up. De Niro has never dug deeper.