If "deviance" seems too strong a word to apply to Hollywood commercial films of the 1930s, consider: In Baby Face (1932), a very young Barbara Stanwyck screws her way through an entire bank, from a fat clerk to a doddering CEO. In Kongo (1932), a father has his daughter raised in a convent, then turned into a hooker and a drug addict. In Freaks (1932), director Tod Browning thrust a cast of actual pinheads, Siamese twins, and basket cases at queasy audiences. In The Secret Six (1931), the road to success is paved with gin runs, speak-easies, fast women, and bullet-riddled bodies. In Black Moon (1934), a wealthy matron tries to kill her child to further the political aspirations of a group of oppressed islanders. In Faithless (1932), a sympathetic landlady quietly reminds a starving tenant to put on makeup before her first foray into prostitution. Needless to say, capitalist homilies like "the work ethic" and "the joys of motherhood" find little sympathy in this crowd of gangsters, molls, pimps, and monsters.
Pre-code films are in some ways the ideal film product, offering Depression-era viewers brief (typically 65- to 80-minute running times), incisive parables of class warfare, and sex roles stretched till they snap. Titles like The Beast of the City (1932) and Skyscraper Souls (1932) let poverty-rattled audiences indulge their hatred of the plutocrats; and titles like Dangerous Female (1931), Possessed (1931), and Faithless (1932) suggested women might find a way out by "stepping out."
No genre was untouched by the pre-code craze for boundary-busting. The title number of 42nd Street (1933) shows a sailor knifing a whore, a far cry from the sunny images in musicals that preceded it. Even a natural environment like the jungle in Tarzan and His Mate (1934) resonates with a kind of quasi-bestiality, as civilized Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan), standing in for the audience, willingly succumbs to the brutish charms of her nearly naked "ape man." If most of these films ended by asserting the superiority of Joe Average over jungle lord, mother over moll, and good guy over gangster, audiences weren't fooled. The tacked-on endings were soon forgotten in favor of the outlaw thrills that occupied most of the films' running time.
-- Gary Morris
"Hollywood Before the Code" runs from Friday, May 23, to Sunday, June 1, at the Roxie, 16th St. & Valencia. Tickets are $6. Call 863-1087. For a complete list of movies and times, see Reps Etc., Page 78.
