Pre-Code Hollywood

Product Description

Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 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 & Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled salacious subversive & just plain bizarre than what came afterwards the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema -- but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe. In a sense Doherty avers the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up & push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man marriage ridiculed & redefined ethnic lines crossed & racial barriers ignored economic injustice exposed & political corruption assumed vice unpunished & virtue unrewarded -- in sum pretty much the raw stuff of American culture unvarnished & unveiled. No other book has yet sought to interpret the films & film-related meanings of the pre-Code era -- what defined the period why it ended & what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression...and afterward.