Intro: Pre-Code Cinema

We’re excited to share a new entry in our “intro” series of short audio segments discussing artists and historical moments that helped shape our culture. For this episode, Head of Film/Video Dave Filipi offers a primer on the pre-code era, a time in early Hollywood when rules around sex, violence, and other controversial elements on screen were made to be broken. 

This intro is prompted by the film series The Sound of Screaming, which offers three double features of genuinely creepy early horror films including genre classics such as Freaks and the original Dracula. It runs October 9th through the 31st.

The transcript below includes hyperlinks to find more info on some of the films and terminology Dave discusses.

Transcript

Melissa Starker: This is Wexcast, from the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. We’re excited to share a new entry in our “intro” series of short audio segments discussing artists and historical moments that helped shape our cultural history. For this episode, head of film/video Dave Filipi offers a primer on the pre-code era, a time in early Hollywood when rules around sex, violence, and other controversial elements on screen were made to be broken. This intro is prompted by the film series The Sound of Screaming, which offers three double features of genuinely creepy early horror films including genre classics such as Freaks and the original Dracula. It runs October 9th through the 31st. Let’s listen.

Dave Filipi: Hi, I'm Dave Filipi. I'm the head of the Film and Video Department at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and we're going to talk about pre-code films. When people talk about the pre-code era, the time period that they're usually talking about is roughly the beginning of the sound era, maybe even as late as 1929 through 1934. It's a period before what was known as the Production Code began to be enforced by the Hays Office.

And during this time, before 1934, and with the addition of sound as one of the elements that went into those available to filmmakers, it was this really fun and interesting period of films across genres, horror films, gangster films, musicals, where filmmakers had more freedom to explore different social issues, maybe employ risqué language or sexual innuendo, just deal with things in a way that once the code started to be enforced in 1934, were no longer possible.

Almost as long as the movies have been in existence, people were concerned about the content in movies, how it would impact kids, or how it might inspire bad behavior or loose morals or whatever. So, the specter of censorship has always kind of hung over the movies almost from day one.

Sensing this, at a certain point in the 1920s, the studio heads got together and thought, If we don't do something to show people that we are committed to cleaning up the movies a little bit, we might face government's censorship, and then we would have no control over it.

And so they worked with Will Hays, who was a former postmaster general of the United States, and worked with him to come up with a code guiding what could be depicted in movies, what sentiments, just what things could be expressed in movies, what could be depicted and so on.

And even though that code was in place in 1930, it really wasn't enforced until 1934. And so it was almost like a joke at the beginning of the 1930s because it wasn't enforced. And I think filmmakers took delight even in doing things that they know they probably weren't supposed to do.

But like I said, in 1934, there was a list of, you can't show these types of things in film, you can't have these types of situations. If someone commits a crime or a murder, they need to be punished in the end. You can't show prostitution, you can't show homosexuality or talk about homosexuality, just on and on and on. There's this list of things that were no longer to be depicted in movies.

When sound was introduced, it of course introduced another tool in the filmmaking toolbox. And so just using horror, for example, since we're doing this series of pre-code horror films this month, all of a sudden—of course there were silent horror movies before and people really were not that upset about them—but with the coming of sound, all of a sudden you had this atmospheric music. All of a sudden, you had sound effects, especially these people screaming. And it just really amped up the impact that these horror films, that these scary situations had on audiences.

And that's true across other genres too. For instance, in a gangster film, all of a sudden you have the sound of gunshots and machine guns and things like that. Dialogue is available to a person. So instead of intertitles up on the screen that would hint at little bits of dialogue, now you had actual dialogue. And so the screenwriters could make sexual jokes, either really blatant ones, or again, like double entendre or innuendos about certain situations. So, that's why it coincided with sound, because sound just added this really interesting extra layer to filmmaking that hadn't been there previously.

I think freedom maybe is not the right word to use to describe the pre-code era. People were aware of the boundaries of public taste. There were all kinds of local censorship boards and religious groups that objected to this film and that film. Different parts of the country reacted to films differently. There might be one film that played just fine in New York City, but if it played in Fargo, North Dakota, who knows? Or Columbus, Ohio.

And so it's not like that filmmakers and studios had kind of free rein to do whatever they wanted, but there certainly was not a list of things that they couldn't do. And so we look back on that time period when I think filmmakers were having fun with it; they knew that there was something down that they really weren't supposed to be doing, but nobody was really stopping it yet. And then again, it did kind of come to an end in 1934.

The horror genre during the pre-code era is really interesting, because of course, there have always been horror films. There were horror films in the teens and the '20s, and after the code was enforced and up to the present day, but some of the films that were made during what we call the pre-code era are so bizarre and weird, and deal with such creatively just bizarre situations, that again, you have to kind of go back and just think that the filmmakers were intentionally having fun pushing the boundaries of what they could get away with.

Like, you have cannibalism suggested in Dr. X, and you have these beast creatures, beast men in The Island of Lost Souls, the Dr. Moreau character wanting to find a human to mate with the she-beast, if you want to call it that. So just like these bizarre situations, and then maybe not the most well-known, but the most indicative pre-code horror film would probably be Freaks, a film that troubled people greatly. It was cut almost immediately when it first came out and edited down. And it's really, on one hand, visually horrifying and has all of these really troubling situations in it.

At the same time, and Tod Browning was kind of known for this, it was this real intentional depiction of the humanity of these people, that in the movies and whatnot, they're sideshow attractions. They're not viewed as human beings and people, and Browning really goes to great effort to bring that out in the film. So, it's just such a really interesting period. And I think, again, yeah, the horror genre really captures what filmmakers were able to do during the pre-code era, and some of the things they were emphasizing during the pre-code era, kind of going out their way to dance along the boundaries of acceptable taste, in some instances.

The two films that I'm most interested to see how they play, personally: The Island of Lost Souls I just think is such a wonderfully creepy, weird movie. I can't remember the last time I saw it on the big screen, so I'm really looking forward to seeing that and seeing it with an audience. I'd say the other film, or maybe double feature that I'm looking forward to, is the last night in the series with Freaks and Dracula.

I know when I was in college, Freaks was a film that you really could only read about. It was a notorious film. It was mentioned in all kinds of film books. There was an author named Danny Peary who did a series of books called Cult Movies, and those were just like Bibles to us. And so we could read about films like Peeping Tom or Freaks, but there was no way to see them. And I know that Freaks has quite a reputation, so I'm interested. I'm sure there's many, many college students and many folks on campus who have heard about the film, have read about the film, but maybe they haven't had a chance to see it, or certainly haven't had a chance to see it on the big screen.

And then Dracula, of course, Bela Lugosi's Dracula is the archetypal vampire. I think it'll just be interesting to see if students or our audience in general haven't seen the film, what they make of it, the pacing of it, the way Browning really creates this atmosphere in Dracula's castle. Yeah, I'm just really interested to see how that plays with a big audience. It's been a while since we've shown it.

Tod Browning was associated with horror films, films that kind of depicted the bizarre side of life. He made Freaks, he made The Unholy Three, The Unknown, films that again depicted sort of this underbelly, obviously Dracula. But he died at a young age, and so his career didn't last terribly long.

As opposed to someone like Michael Curtiz, who had a very long career in Hollywood. It did start roughly around the pre-code era in the late 1920s. He made a number of really interesting pre-code films, but he would go on to make some of the most beloved classics in Hollywood history. He made Casablanca, which is kind of arguably maybe the best-known American film, films like The Adventures of Robin Hood, and so on. So he had a very long career in that respect.

Personally, I like older horror films more than contemporary horror films. Of course, there are great examples of recent horror films, but I think a lot of horror makers today rely too much on shock and shock cuts, screeches and things like that where there's not always a lot of suspense. And I think some of my favorite horror films, Rosemary's Baby or The Night of The Living Dead or Psycho, suspense is such a big part of it in creating an atmosphere. Creating a mood is what I like about horror the most.

And so I think one thing that's nice or fun about some of these really early horror films, that audiences can go in and they're still going to probably be creeped out, but it's done in a way that I guess I appreciate more, again, than really graphic violence and extreme violence. And I know, of course, lots of people love that stuff. I'm not one of them. So, maybe It'll be like, "These films are almost 100 years old now, and look how weird they are, look how creepy they are." They're still able to deliver in that respect. And maybe that will be a nice surprise for some people who have never seen films like this before.

Another thing that's going to be cool about the series, three of the films that we're showing during the series are on 35 millimeter. In fact, Dr. X, that's the only way that you can show it theatrically. There is no DCP for Dr. X. So, I think people that appreciate the chance to see films in the original film format, and just the way the quality and texture of the image looks different on film, I think they'll appreciate that.

And also, just a little bit of history. In the second double feature, the films that we're showing—The Mystery of the Wax Museum and Dr. X—those were the last two films made in Hollywood in the earlier two-strip Technicolor process before the three-strip technicolor process that we're all more familiar with from The Wizard of Oz, Singin' in the Rain, films like that, before that took over. So it'll be interesting for people to see a color process that they're probably not familiar with.

Melissa Starker: That was Wex head of film/video Dave Filipi with an introduction to the pre-code era of Hollywood history. For details on the October film series The Sound of Screaming and all things Wex, go to wexarts.org. For the Wexner Center for the Arts, I’m Melissa Starker. Thanks for listening.