Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood.

by Mark A. Vieira. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 1999. 240 pp., illus. Hardcover: S39.95.

Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934

by Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 400 p., illus. Hardcover: $49.95 and Paperback: $19.50.

Although American film historians, social scientists, and other media scholars have long been concerned with movie censorship, and particularly with the Hollywood Production Code, the subject area has enjoyed a remarkable surge of late, becoming something of a subfield unto itself over the past decade or so. This explosive growth was spurred on the one hand by a related surge in 'industry studies' and the increasing availability of corporate records, studio archives, and the like, and on the other hand by what might be called a 'cultural approach' to media policy and regulation. Thus the raft of books that have both revitalized and revamped our understanding of film censorship--most notably Lea Jacobs's The Wages of Sin, Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons's The Dame in the Kimono, Gregory D. Black's Hollywood Censored, and Frank Walsh's Sin and Censorship, all of which were published in the 1990s.

Now come two new studies by Mark A. Vieira and Thomas Doherty to further complicate matters and to further parse the censorship subfield. Their focus is "pre-Code" Hollywood, that curious, exhilarating period between Hollywood's adoption of the Production Code in March 1930 and the installation in July 1934 of the Production Code Administration (PCA) to actually enforce the Code. Despite their similarities in terms of subject matter, Vieira's Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood and Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 are very different books, not only in format and market strategy, but on far deeper levels as well. Whatever their differences, though, both are thoughtful and well-executed books, which add considerably to our understanding of censorship in American film and also of a singular period in Hollywood's history.

The pre-Code era actually began in late 1929 with the drafting of the Code by two Catholics: Martin Quigley, the publisher of Exhibitor's Herald (later Motion Picture Herald), an important film industry trade paper, and a Jesuit priest, Daniel Lord, who edited an influential youth magazine. The Code was drafted at the behest of Hollywood's powerful trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), mainly in response to the mounting outrage of various social and religious groups, particularly the Catholic Church, over what was deemed the increasingly depraved content of films since the recent introduction of sound. Hollywood in 1929 was in the throes of a 'talkie boom' that had attendance soaring and a tidal wave of talent sweeping in from New York. "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots," the writer Herman Mankiewicz had famously wired his friend Ben Hecht, one of countless East Coast novelists, journalists, and playwrights drawn to Holly wood in the late 1920s. There was an influx of directors and actors from the New York stage as well, who likewise were drawn by the talkie revolution (and the millions), and also by the prospect of a more 'mature' movie industry. And in the early years of sound, the Hollywood studios did indeed push the envelope not only in terms of dialog but story and theme as well.

That impulse scarcely diminished after the publication of the Code, however, which proved to be little more than a Hollywood public relations stunt. A far more significant development at just that moment was the stock market crash and ensuing Depression, which induced the studios to turn out even more sensational (if not salacious) films in an effort to stem the rapidly declining attendance, which, of course, dramatically increased the hue and cry by the watchdogs of virtue and culture. And so it was that the defining events of the early 1930s--the introduction of sound, the unprecedented influx of talent, and the sudden reversal of economic fortunes--generated a run of truly innovative and offbeat films. From Warner Bros.' gangster cycle and Universal's horror films to the risque humor of Paramount's Mae West and ubiquitous 'fallen woman' melodramas, Hollywood demonstrated time and again that it was willing to fade the heat from the public and the MPPDA alike in order to exploit the potential of sound and t o bolster attendance.

Vieira and Doherty both regard the films of this period as being utterly distinctive, although the two have very different views of the prevailing conditions as well as the films themselves. For Doherty, the Code itself was a key factor. In his view, filmmakers acted in brazen defiance of the Code (and the forces behind it), reveling in the freedom "to venture farther out on the frontiers of free expression than would he permitted after the Code." Behaving as if they knew the ax eventually would fall, top talent made the most of the opportunity: "For four years, the Code commandments were violated with impunity and inventiveness in a series of wildly eccentric films. More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, they look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe."

And the results, for Doherty, are not altogether impressive. "The inconvenient truth," he writes in his closing chapter, "is that Hollywood's output on the other side of the Code reveals no ready correlation between freedom of expression and aesthetic worth." Following the lead of other recent censorship scholars, Doherty finds precisely the opposite to be the case; he posits that Hollywood's response to Code enforcement under the PCA was a deciding factor in its classical style and its so-called Golden Age. The consummate irony of classical Hollywood, asserts Doherty, is that "the most vivid and compelling motion pictures--glorious as art, momentous as texts--were created under the most severe and narrow-minded censorship ever inflicted upon American cinema."

Whereas Doherty views the pre-Code era as one of outrageous license but limited achievement, Mark Vieira sees it as one in which filmmakers were learning to operate under considerable pressures--albeit far less pressure than in the later PCA years--and also as one that produced its fair share of classics. He provides an inventory in his closing chapter of several dozen films from the early 1930s that later were cut by the PCA on the occasion of their reissue, and his outrage is most acute with truly memorable films like Dracula, Frankenstein, Blonde Venus, Shanghai Express, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Love Me Tonight, 42nd Street, Scarface, She Done Him Wrong, and King Kong. While Doherty singles out King Kong as the only pre-Code film "that lives universally in the American imagination," Vieira's inventory suggests otherwise. And I tend to concur that a good many images from pre-Code Hollywood are now stored in our collective cultural memory, from Lugosi's vampire and Cagney's gangster to the indelibl e lunacy of Mae West and Groucho Marx.

These enduring images are among the literally hundreds that appear in Vieira's Sin in Soft Focus, which appears at first glance to be just another lavish 'coffee-table book' about the movies. But as Ronald Haver proved some two decades ago with his oversized masterwork, David O. Selznick's Hollywood, we shouldn't judge film books by their format. Vieira's study is not quite up to Haver's standards, perhaps, but it sheds valuable light on the workings and the films of pre-Code Hollywood. Vieira is a professional photographer with a solid working knowledge of the history and esthetics of motion picture cinematography, which adds an important dimension to the book. And he has done some serious digging into archives and trade papers of the time to trace several concurrent industry trends: the relatively aggressive on-screen treatment of such subjects as adultery and prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, and all manner of violence and mayhem; the ongoing efforts of the MPPDA (mainly via its Studio Relations Commi ttee) to encourage filmmakers to abide by the Code; and the studios' elaborate rationalizations for blatantly ignoring-- if not openly defying--the Code.

Not surprisingly, most of the 275 film stills that adorn Sin in Soft Focus illustrate Code infringement, and most of the images are simply stunning--not only for their risque value but also as manifold evidence of the sheer photographic artistry of even the most routine A-class pictures of that era. Some of Vieira's best writing and keenest insights, in fact, come in the photo captions rather than in the text itself, which is rather narrow in focus and tends toward relentless chronicle. The book chapters trace the pre-Code era from year to year, emphasizing the films (and stars and genres) that most directly and overtly challenged the Code. If Hollywood's censorable inclinations somehow turned up in, say, cartoons or short subjects, Vieira is either unaware or simply not interested.

Not so Thomas Doherty, whose Pre-Code Hollywood is as free-wheeling as the films he assays. As in Teenagers and Teenpics, his superb study of 1950s exploitation cinema, Doherty both contextualizes his subject and demonstrates the full range of its implications and its importance. After situating pre-Code Hollywood in terms of the social, economic, and political climate, Doherty traces the licentious filmmaking impulse not only in the more obvious instances but also in newsreels, documentaries, and even the kind of exploitation (a.k.a. "stag") films that weren't even on the MPPDA radar. The result is a rich and evocative sense of the period, which emerges in Doherty's study as eccentric and utterly unique in the annals of Hollywood.

This is not to dismiss Vieira's book or diminish its value. The carefully selected images (and captions) alone are enough to carry the project, and in fact Sin in Soft Focus provides an ideal complement to Doherty's rather sparsely illustrated Pre-Code Hollywood. Taken together, these two books convincingly portray the pre-Code era as a time apart, an odd interval between the heyday of silent film in the late 1920s and Hollywood's Golden Age a decade later. While the Code (or the threat of Code enforcement) was simply one of the factors that set this era apart, these books present a very strong argument that "pre-Code Hollywood" may indeed be the most appropriate designation for the period.

Thomas Schatz is author of numerous books, including The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era.