Pre-Code Hollywood

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.

Author Biography

Thomas Doherty is associate professor in the American Studies Department and chair of the Film Studies Program at Brandeis University. He is the author of Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (Columbia, 1993) and Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, and is associate editor of the film journal Cineaste.