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Sinner’s Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code

Once upon a time, Hollywood movies showed us Spencer Tracy skinny-dipping with Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck ducking into the ladies’ room with her boss in exchange for a promotion, and chorus girls warbling hosannas to marijuana.1 This, of course, was pre-Code: shorthand for the era of Hollywood movie-making between the advent of sound in 1929 and the ascendance of Hays Office censorship in 1934. The term is in fact a misnomer. The Production Code was written and officially adopted in 1930, but for the next four years, like Prohibition, it was flouted with near impunity. A look at a representative film of the time provides ample evidence of the Code’s impotence. Take Night Nurse (Wellman, 1931), starring Barbara Stanwyck: a fast, tough, sleazy and thoroughly enjoyable tale of a nurse who uncovers a plot to murder the children in her care for their trust funds.

The Code proclaimed that Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot. Stanwyck and her roommate, played by Joan Blondell, often speak their lines while casually changing their clothes in front of the camera. An intern who walks in on Stanwyck in her scanties assures her, “You can’t show me a thing. I just came from the delivery room.” The Code said, The use of liquor in American life…shall not be shown. The mother of Stanwyck’s charges, who is never seen in any other state than blotto, boasts, “I’m a dipshomaniac—and I like it!” Stanwyck befriends an amiable bootlegger when she treats his bullet-wound and agrees not to report it, contrary to law. In gratitude, he sends her a bottle of rye. “But you’re not allowed to drink,” a square nurse objects. “No,” Blondell cracks, “But it’s swell for cleaning teeth.” Adultery and profanity are both proscribed by the Code. The dipsomaniac is plainly carrying on a tawdry affair with her chauffeur, Nick (Clark Gable), and at one point Stanwyck, disgusted to find her passed out while her children are on the brink of death, rebukes her with, “You mother.” The Code said, Methods of crimes should not be explicitly presented. When sent out to get milk for the sick children, the amiable bootlegger breaks into a grocery store. As for Revenge in modern times shall not be shown, the movie ends with the bootlegger arranging for Nick to be “taken for a ride.” Did I forget to mention that Apparent cruelty to children or animals, the central trope of the plot, is also forbidden by the Code? Or that Gable socks Stanwyck on the jaw, or that Stanwyck gets her job by flashing her ankles at a doctor?

Code? What Code?

The appeal of pre-Code movies lies not in sex, violence or vulgarity (there’s more than enough of those in the infinitely more explicit cinema of the last forty years) but in their attitude, which conveyed the pessimism and irreverence of their time. Radical cultural changes in the wake of World War I, the farce of Prohibition, the 1929 stock-market crash and the Great Depression combined to create a pervasive disillusionment and loss of respect for authority and traditional values. With rapid changes in fashion and technology, violent upheavals in economic and political conditions, society was wide open, hectically elated in the twenties, confused and frightened in the thirties. For a few years the lack of rigorous censorship allowed movies to channel the mood of the country and to capture society warts and all. They depicted adultery, divorce, rape, prostitution and homosexuality; bluntly portrayed alcoholism and drug addiction, glorified gangsters, con artists and fallen women. With a distinctive blend of cynicism and exuberance, they offered escapist entertainment but also bitter and sometimes radical visions of a society on the verge of breakdown. Oscar Levant famously quipped that he he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin; Hollywood too was grown up before it was innocent.

The Con Man as Comic Hero: Blonde Crazy

During the silent era, censorship of films was piecemeal. Not only states but individual towns had boards of censors who screened movies and ordered cuts of shots or scenes they considered too racy. Projectionists simply snipped out the offending material, a practice that accounts in part for the incompleteness many surviving films from the twenties.2 In the early twenties, Hollywood was hit with a string of off-screen scandals, culminating in the trial of comedian Roscoe Arbuckle on charges of rape and manslaughter. The movie moguls, terrified that bad press would scare away audiences, invited Will Hays to become the guardian and public face of Hollywood’s morals. Hays, a Presbyterian elder and former postmaster general, became director of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. He was an ideal choice to project a more wholesome image of Hollywood, but as a censor he proved ineffectual, and movies continued to be attacked for their evil influence on the country’s moral fiber.

Silent movies contained many elements that would not be seen during the Code era, including nudity, drug use and comic vulgarity. But the absence of sound gave film a degree of unreality that lent itself to fantasies like Valentino as an Arab sheik and Douglas Fairbanks riding a flying carpet, as well as to timeless moral fables like Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans, whose characters are called simply The Man and His Wife. From Mary Pickford as a spunky urchin to Harold Lloyd as a college freshman, actors frequently played much younger and more naive than they were in real life. Even the flapper films of Clara Bow and Joan Crawford, which purported to expose the shocking mores of modern youth, presented their heroines as pure though misunderstood. With the change to talkies, the silent era’s swashbuckling heroes, Great Lovers, ringleted sweethearts and carefree flappers suddenly seemed antiquated. Sound punctured fantasy and brought movies down to earth and up to date: never again would they soar to the heights of romance they had reached in silence.

The coming of sound involved a complete reinvention of movies, amounting to the development of a new medium. The fluid spectacles of the silent screen gave way to small-scale films confined by the technical limitations of early sound recording technology to interiors and studio sets. The bulk of films from 1929 and ’30 are clunky and static, with stilted dialogue and acting. When talkies hit their stride in the early thirties it was with urban settings that could be recreated on studio backlots and zingy vernacular dialogue delivered at machine-gun pace by Brooklyn-bred voices. As the old screen gods faded, snappy young urbanites like James Cagney and Joan Blondell entranced audiences with their unaffected style and wised-up attitude.3 This new earthiness brought the censorship issue to a crisis; everyone agreed that movies were going “from bad to voice.” In 1930, still hoping to render external censorship unnecessary through self-regulation, the studio moguls officially adopted the Production Code, written largely by a Jesuit priest named Daniel Lord (hence it should, aptly, be known as the Lord’s Code rather than the Hays Code.) But this effort coincided with the onset of the Depression, when the movie studios were struggling like other businesses. Desperate to lure audiences back to theaters they defied the Code to create daringly risqué entertainment, treating the list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” as a list of “Do’s.”

The kick in pre-Code movies comes from the awareness shared by the actors and filmmakers that they are pushing the limits, getting away with something. Since today’s films must work so hard to raise an eyebrow, they can never recapture the harmless fizz of Maurice Chevalier taking Jeannette MacDonald’s measurements in Love Me Tonight, or Jean Harlow slipping a portrait of her boss into her garter in Red-Headed Woman, or Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise picking each other’s pockets over the course of a romantic meal. (“I trust I may keep your garter?”)

There was a Code, after all, and movies were never completely uncensored. Because they couldn’t get away with explicitness or profanity, pre-Code movies specialized in innuendo. A line that would register with sophisticated adults but fly over the heads of children or more naïve viewers was considered ideal; it would protect the innocent while enticing the experienced. In The Half-naked Truth, a scheming promoter played by Lee Tracy checks into a fancy hotel with a Mexican carnival dancer he is passing off as a Turkish princess. Also with them is rotund Eugene Pallette, wearing a turban. The hotel clerk looks at the register Tracy has filled out and does a double take at Pallette. “Oh, they have them in all Turkish harems,” Tracy says, adding confidentially, “He’s very sensitive about it.” The joke is carried through the movie without a word being spoken that could bring a blush to the most prudish cheek. Pre-Code wasn’t always this artful—there’s nothing subtle about Dick Powell singing “I’m Young and Healthy” in a tunnel of chorus girls’ legs, or Tarzan and Jane romping around the jungle in loin cloths—but in general the naughtiness was low-key, not flaunted but there to be discovered by the alert viewer.

Movies offered vacations from reality in sleek art deco style: gleaming penthouses with twinkling views of Manhattan, shimmering bias-cut evening gowns and shiny top hats, buoyant jazz scores and intoxicated gaiety. Beyond mere escapism, there’s a loopy, zany, surreal streak in pre-Code that flourishes in the early Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields films, in Busby Berkeley musicals with their kaleidoscopes of semi-nude chorines and in the cartoons of the Fleischer Brothers, where Cab Calloway lends his voice to a ghostly dancing walrus singing “The St. James Infirmary Blues.” There’s a dizzy feeling, as if the whole of society, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot, had an empty stomach and it went to their heads.

Maybe it was the effect of hearing so often that prosperity was just around the corner while the country sank deeper and deeper into despair. Demented optimism was parodied—or endorsed; it’s hard to tell—in a bizarre cartoon short from Columbia Studios called Prosperity Blues. A world of wretched, baggy-eyed, trembling sufferers, of cobweb-infested banks and pitiful apple-peddlers, is transformed into a fascistic spectacle of crazed cheerfulness as the hero, to the tune of “Happy Days Are Here Again” slaps disembodied grins on people’s faces with the command “Smile, darn ya, smile!”

“The age of chivalry is over,” James Cagney declares in Blonde Crazy (Del Ruth, 1931). “This, honey, is the age of chiselry.” Tough yet ebullient, Cagney personifies the essential pre-Code flavor of hard-boiled high spirits, sarcastically knowing and gleefully amoral, but not sour or misanthropic. Like nightclub owner Texas Guinan who greeted her customers with a hearty, “Hello, suckers!” the con artist hero of Blonde Crazy seems high on his own cynicism. Or maybe punch-drunk: you need a score card to keep track of how many times Joan Blondell slaps him, and he keeps coming back for more.

The films of Hollywood’s classical period are tight, smooth, polished. The scripts, dialogue, acting, lighting and art direction all gleam with controlled craftsmanship. Blonde Crazy, by contrast, skates on the verge of chaos: the actors seem to be winging it, cutting loose, seeing how far they can go. Cagney revels in this freedom, indulging in outrageous vocal mannerisms, flaunting his virtuosic control of his body as he darts and weaves through the role like a boxer in the ring, going from crafty schemer to world-class chump, wise-cracking operator to heart-broken lover. The anarchic, free-wheeling atmosphere of pre-Code, mined with slapstick and doubles entendres, often leaves modern audiences incredulous. Did I really hear that? Did they really mean...?

Like Night Nurse, Blonde Crazy methodically defies the Code. Undressing scenes? Cagney walks in on Blondell in the tub and appreciatively examines her underwear, doing a little shimmy with her panties, playfully holding her bra over his eyes like a pair of goggles. Liquor in American life? In an early scene Cagney, a bell-hop in an anything-goes hotel, peddles bootleg booze to a traveling salesman (Guy Kibbee). Adultery? Cagney and Blondell’s first con involves setting up the same salesman: caught “parking” with Blondell and a bottle of hooch, he offers a hefty bribe to the “cop” who’s actually their accomplice. Methods of crimes? The depiction of the movie’s confidence tricks, including a daringly simple ploy by which Cagney lifts a diamond bracelet from a jewelry store, is so detailed the viewer could easily copy them. Revenge in modern times? The movie lovingly details the means by which Blondell succeeds in fleecing a fellow con man who previously fleeced Cagney.

One scene is set in an elegant hotel lobby where men discuss the races while women share their plans to blackmail men with love letters. Every single person here is on the make. “Everyone has larceny in his heart,” Bert (Cagney) explains to Ann (Blondell) when he asks her to join him in the rackets. She’s reluctant, but only because she’s afraid of getting caught and sent to jail. Still, as the movie’s only hint of a conscience, she objects to out-and-out thievery and feistily protects her virtue. Bert keeps making passes at her and she keeps slapping his face, without harming their affectionate partnership. But the pair’s toughness keeps them from admitting the depths of their feelings. “I’ve wanted you ever since I saw you,” he tells her earnestly, then shrugs dismissively, “But if I can’t have you I’ll have someone else.” Still, by the time Ann tells him she’s marrying another man, your heart bleeds for Bert, the chiseler with the wandering eye. The other man is Joe Reynolds (Ray Milland) who chivalrously takes a cinder out of her eye and sends her a book of Browning (the poet, not the automatic, as Philip Marlowe would say.) She tells Bert that she’s going to marry Reynolds because he and his family know “a better way to live.” They care for “music and art and that kind of thing.” Of course he turns out to be the biggest louse of all, stealing from his firm and exploiting Bert’s devotion to Ann to make him the patsy. Bert winds up in jail and shot full of holes, but at least Ann finally admits her love and promises to wait for him.

Joan Blondell was the best love interest Cagney ever had. More than able to stand up to him, she brings out an unexpectedly tender and sexy side of his cocky, wound-up persona. With her wide-eyed, appetizing looks, Blondell has a warm, open front but an inner reserve and caution. Like her fellow Brooklynite Barbara Stanwyck, she was born wised-up. Cagney too, for all his extroverted energy, has a core that is aloof, introverted, nervously intense. It is touching to see these two wary, skeptical souls embrace each other so openly. They have good reason to be wary; only suckers trust anyone in the world of Blonde Crazy. Con artists con fellow con artists, and “respectable” citizens lack basic decency. Near the end of the movie, another con man tries to interest Bert in a ploy that involves tricking the relatives of the recently deceased into paying for good luck charms that the dead supposedly ordered just before “kicking off.” Anyone stupid or trusting enough to be conned deserves to lose his money. Life is a continuous game of one-upmanship, a contest to see who can laugh last.

In Guys and Dolls, Sky Masterson explains that among his people, “to be marked as a chump is like losing your citizenship.” During the early thirties, audiences who felt like victims of an economic swindle reveled in the exploits of sharpies, shysters, smart guys who know all the angles and who outwit hypocritical representatives of wealth, authority, respectability. Cagney played more con men than gangsters: in Jimmy the Gent, as “the greatest chiseler since Michelangelo,” he asserts, “There’s only two kinds of guys in business, the ones that get caught and the ones that don’t get caught.” But for all his street smarts, Cagney has moments of child-like naivité. “The consummate urban provincial,” as Andrew Sarris called him, Cagney is irrepressible rather than unflappable. His driving energy, self-mocking humor, hot temper and sentimental streak expressed the pre-Code mood—fast-paced, excitable, hustling for a buck—as Bogart’s world-weary postwar cool expressed the mood of noir.

Later in the thirties, Frank Capra would glorify his own version of the sucker: in his films Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart embody the soul of America as innocent, optimistic, easily fooled. Smart cookies like Stanwyck and Jean Arthur would crumble in the face of such purity, renouncing their hardened attitude and determination to get ahead by any means necessary. Even pre-Code movies often bow, sometimes wistfully and sometimes perfunctorily, towards the old-fashioned virtues. Chivalry makes a come-back in the final scene of Blonde Crazy, one of the few genuinely romantic moments in Cagney’s career as he gazes up at Blondell with shining, worshipful eyes. Bert has demonstrated that love can turn a crooked guy into a knight in shining armor. But he’s got a prison stretch ahead of him, and then—what? Will he go straight, get a job? It’s hard to feel any great confidence in his future, since the lasting impression left by the film is that the cornerstone of American society is the confidence trick.

“The End of America”: Heroes for Sale

The pre-Code years corresponded to the nadir of the Great Depression, when disgust with Herbert Hoover’s government deepened the country’s black mood, when the homeless called their shanty-towns “Hoovervilles” and the newspapers they wrapped themselves in “Hoover blankets.” Law-abiding citizens made folk heroes out of bank robbers like Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, while hoboes sang of a utopia where “all the cops have wooden legs” and “the railroad bulls are blind.” The “bulls” were notorious for beating the hoboes they caught, shooting at them or forcing them to jump from speeding trains; even young teenagers weren’t spared. Being broke, jobless and homeless was treated not as a misfortune but as a crime. In the South, many towns used transients as slave labor: arrested on freight trains or in rail yards, they were put to work on chain gangs, and when their sentences were up, put back on the trains they’d been arrested for riding and told to get out of town. Communities posted signs, “Jobless men keep going—we can’t take care of our own.” Some towns denied medical care to travelers who fell ill or were injured, simply dumping them outside the city limits. Before the 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, many people felt the country was drifting towards anarchy or revolution.

Not all movies of the time were escapist fantasies; many pre-Code films were “ripped from the headlines.” Warner Brothers even confronted the Depression in a musical, Golddiggers of 1933. The opening number, “We’re In the Money,” is pure wish-fulfillment, as chorus girls wearing only strategically placed gold coins crow that “Old Man Depression” is through and that, “We never see a headline about a breadline today.” This giddy fantasy shatters when it is revealed to be a rehearsal for a show that has to close down because the producers can’t pay rent for the theater. Soon the chorus girls are staying in bed all day (three to a bed) because they have nothing to eat. The plot invites us to enjoy watching Joan Blondell earn money the easy way again, squeezing it out of a man who is rich, self-righteous and not very bright. Golddiggers is fluff, but it concludes with a musical number that makes a powerful if disconcerting stab at social realism.

This is social realism à la Busby Berkeley, so Blondell dons a black satin dress and stands under a lamppost, suggesting that unless the government helps jobless men their wives will be reduced to peddling themselves in the street. “Remember my forgotten man,” she sings, “You put a rifle in his hand / You sent him far away / You shouted hip hooray / But look at him today…”4 The song is taken up by a black woman sitting in an open window, surrounded by other women posed to look like F.S.A. portraits: a gaunt and worried farm wife, a starved and empty-eyed grandmother. Meanwhile endless lines of men are seen marching off to war, stumbling through the muddy trenches, then shuffling along in breadlines. This was torn from some very fresh headlines: in the summer of 1932 thousands of World War I veterans, known as the Bonus Army, had camped out on the Mall in Washington, D.C., asking the government to pay them the financial bonuses they were promised for their war service in advance, since many of them were unemployed and destitute. The army under Gen. Douglas MacArthur violently dispersed the men and their families, inspiring outrage. In this frivolous Hollywood musical, Blondell confronts a policeman who is rousting a bum out of a doorway, pointing to the military medal pinned to the inside of the man’s shabby lapel. Her eyes burn with pure hatred for the cop.

In these desperate times, both socialism and fascism were touted as viable alternatives to America’s problems. Several Hollywood movies offered glowing visions of benevolent totalitarianism: in Gabriel Over the White House, produced by William Randolph Hearst in 1932, Walter Huston plays a president who seizes dictatorial powers for the good of the country and proceeds to get rid of gangsters by trying them in military courts without constitutional protections. (Sound familiar?) In The Mayor of Hell, the boys in an ethnically diverse and racially integrated reform school are offered the chance to run the place as a children’s democracy, and when a tyrannical director tries to destroy this system, they try him in a kangaroo court complete with flaming torches.

The government’s helplessness or callousness in the face of economic crisis was not the only source of disenchantment with authority. The prohibition of alcohol, enacted in 1920, turned the vast majority of Americans into criminals, law enforcement into hypocrites, and bootlegging gangsters into society’s pets. Meanwhile, in the late 1920s the lingering wounds of the Great War, initially suppressed by a generation desperate to forget, resurfaced as people began to take stock of what they now viewed as a ghastly waste of life. Pacifism was widely embraced; in 1933 the hallowed Oxford University Student Union debated and passed the statement, “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its king and country.” Movies like All Quiet on the Western Front and The Last Flight expressed horror at the costs and pointlessness of the war, while others called attention to the plight of veterans struggling to survive in the country for which they had fought.

Heroes for Sale (Wellman, 1933) is one of the bleakest films to come out of Hollywood during the studio era. What the confidence trick is in Blonde Crazy, gross injustice is in Heroes for Sale: the basic building block of American society. Richard Barthelmess plays the American everyman as Job, afflicted not by mere bad luck but by unfairness, misunderstanding and the heartlessness of the powerful. In the teens and twenties, Barthelmess had played pure-hearted farm boys in silent melodramas like Way Down East and Tol’able David; he stood for integrity, trustworthiness and boyish optimism. By 1933, his fresh handsome face looked tired and worn, prematurely defeated even at the start of the movie, when he supposed to be just 25. The story begins in the trenches during the War, and the first thing we see is an officer issuing a command for a raid intended to gain prestige by capturing a German officer. When a subordinate objects that the plan will amount to suicide, he snaps, “Suicide or not, it’s orders,” and tells the other officer to take nine or ten men, because “that’s all I can afford to lose.” This kind of callous abuse of power will recur throughout the film, until the penultimate scene in which armed policemen drive homeless men from their shelter into the rain, ignoring the plea that they are not bums but veterans.

Tom Holmes (Barthelmess) is one of the nine or ten expendables chosen for the mission, and when his superior officer turns yellow and refuses to leave the shell-hole where they are hiding, he single-handedly knocks out a machine-gun nest and captures a German officer, only to be wounded and left for dead on his way back. His own officer, Roger, takes credit for the escapade and wins the Distinguished Service Cross, while Tom is taken to a German hospital where he is treated humanely but given morphine to ease the pain of shell-fragments in his spinal column, starting him on the road to addiction. Back home, he winds up working in the bank owned by Roger’s father, who self-righteously fires him when he learns of his drug problem. Roger is a weak, nervous, sweaty-palmed villain; he feels bad about stealing Tom’s glory and allowing him to suffer unfairly, just not bad enough to do anything about it.

For a while things look up for Tom. In Chicago he falls in with a friendly father and daughter who run a café, gets a good job at a laundry, and marries a beautiful young woman (Loretta Young). But as soon as he reaches higher he is shot down. He agrees to help promote a friend’s invention to mechanize the laundry, but when his benevolent boss dies, the new owners use the machine as an excuse to fire all their workers. The workers blame Tom and start a riot, in which his wife is accidentally killed. As if that weren’t enough, he is blamed for leading the riot he was trying to stop and sentenced to five years hard labor. When he gets out, he’s still marked as a “Red” and driven out of town by government agents. By now the country is in the grip of the Depression, and he joins the army of hoboes riding the rails. Achieving secular sainthood, Tom gives away the fortune he earned from the laundry machine to fund a soup kitchen. And when he finally encounters Roger again, also on the bum after serving jail time for embezzling, Tom counters Roger’s pessimism (“The country can’t go on this way. This is the end of America”) with a pat speech about how the country isn’t licked and will rise again, just like Roosevelt said in his inaugural speech. Angry and anguished throughout much of the film, by the end he has slipped into a kind of haloed masochism. Despite his clichéd words, what he embodies is not can-do optimism but the kind of enlightened detachment that comes from having nothing more to lose.

“The only thing that matters is money. Without it you are garbage. With it you are a king.” These words are spoken by Max, the German inventor who makes Tom rich and indirectly ruins his life. Max is a ludicrous stereotype, starting out as a ranting communist and abruptly turning into a greedy plutocrat (when someone points out that he used to hate capitalists he responds, “Of course—because I had no money then!”) In its one idyllic interlude, the film shows a workplace where capital and labor cooperate in smiling harmony and the boss is even willing to use mechanization to give employees more leisure and easier jobs without cutting the workforce or lowering salaries. This utopian fantasy, along with the café whose owners give to the poor even as they struggle to survive, suggest that the only solution to the country’s problems is selfless generosity. Unfortunately, the movie also implies that heartlessness and blinkered malice are far more common.

Heroes for Sale is not a lucid analysis of economic problems, and despite a gritty atmosphere it lacks the objectivity of neo-realism. At once bitter and sentimental, it portrays the whole of American society as a “you-must-pay-the-rent-I-can’t-pay-the-rent” melodrama, with villains as vile and heroes as pure as those in a D.W. Griffith tale of wronged innocence. Many pre-Code movies invite the viewer to identify with and root for people who cheat to get ahead: gangsters, con artists, gold-diggers. Heroes for Sale instead asks us to identify with an innocent and virtuous but hapless and often helpless hero. If people fantasized about being one of Cagney’s confident, cynical operators—predators rather than prey—they saw themselves as Tom Holmes: down on their luck, taking one hit after another, but struggling on and clinging to hope.

Wellman’s next film was Wild Boys of the Road, his famous portrait of teenage hoboes, which grinds through hardship and injustice only to veer into shining idealism in the last five minutes. Two middle-class high-school boys turn into ragged panhandlers, one a cripple, the other stooping occasionally to petty theft. A crowd of vagrants bands together to attack and kill a brakeman who has raped a teenage girl, and to fight off the “bulls” who try to put them off a freight train. It’s easy to imagine audiences cheering as the young bums pelt the cops with eggs and fruit, and booing when the cops use fire hoses to drive them from the shanty-town they have built in disused sewer pipes. The hobo community is painted as loyal, diverse and supportive (blacks and girls are treated as equals), but no one is having any fun. They’re not wild, just bone-weary. The protagonists wind up in New York, living in a garbage dump, and one is tricked into taking part in an attempted robbery. But when they are hauled before a judge, instead of coldly meting out injustice like the judge in Heroes for Sale, the kindly man lectures the youths on how things are going to be better now, they will get a fresh chance, as the camera pans up to the National Reconstruction Administration poster above his head (“We Do Our Part”). The ending looks like a cop-out now, but audiences of the time probably cheered it too.

The pre-Code era was vanquished not only by stricter censorship but by the mood swing following Roosevelt’s inauguration, when the desperate country embraced the promise of a “new deal for the American people.” Pictures of FDR went up next to icons of Jesus; at the end of Footlight Parade, another Warner Brothers musical, solders marching in formation create an American flag, the president’s face, and the NRA eagle. Roosevelt campaigned to the tune of “Happy Days are Here Again,” and one of his first actions in office was to repeal Prohibition. The New Deal failed to end the Depression but it did stop the free-fall of the country’s spirits, ending the sense that the people had been abandoned by their leaders. Hollywood diligently promoted the new tone of wholesome optimism, strictly punishing vice and rewarding virtue. But can you regain innocence once you’ve lost it?

The Age of Experience: Baby Face

Pre-Code movies finally went too far. The last straw may have been the lesbian “dance of the naked moon” in The Sign of the Cross, Miriam Hopkins getting raped in a barn in The Story of Temple Drake, or Mae West just being Mae West. America was divided then as now, and the backlash that ushered in the Code crackdown was driven in part by heartland resentment of movies pitched at sophisticated urban audiences. 5 Outraged by the increasingly salacious tone of Hollywood, in 1934 the Catholic Church formed the Legion of Decency and ordered its congregations to boycott the movies it condemned. In fact, box office receipts rose for movies that were banned by the Legion, but Hollywood’s producers panicked at the prospect of shrinking audiences; of being attacked as foreign corrupters of America’s youth, since most were Jewish immigrants; and of federal government intervention. They capitulated. After 1934, the studios could no longer flout the Production Code Administration and its viciously anti-Semitic head, Joe Breen; unless movies earned its seal of approval they would be blackballed. For a few years filmmakers fought hard against the Code6, but as ticket sales rose with the easing of the Depression, they settled into acceptance of its strictures. For the next twenty years married couples would sleep in twin beds and no couple would kiss for longer than three seconds. The most damaging aspect of the Code was not that it limited what could be shown, but that it forced movies to uphold conservative values, to show respect for authority and religion, and to present a simple dichotomy of good and evil, virtue and sin. The censors did not want controversial subjects like abortion, prostitution or racial tensions discussed from any angle, no matter how morally serious. Hollywood managed to produce great movies under the Code’s restrictions, but sometimes its stifling effect gave them a sterile, airless, homogenized quality.

Some of the pre-Code spirit survived in screwball comedy, a genre created by the Code—the sexes must battle lest they wind up in bed. Even at the height of the Code, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder consistently subverted its precepts, probably because their dialogue was too clever or just too audaciously dirty for the censors to decipher. After World War II the hard-boiled, wised-up attitude went underground, flourishing in film noir, but what became of the pre-Code sensibility after the end of the noir cycle? Our own time may be rife with irony and black comedy, but sneaky innuendo can’t thrive without restrictions, and all-pervasive, indiscriminate irony becomes shallow and facile. The gritty, sassy tone of pre-Code flourished precisely because it still had the power to shock.

The proponents of censorship cited the overwhelming power and mass appeal of movies, which made them particularly dangerous to the young. And after all movies were not art, so they couldn’t claim first-amendment protection as books or plays might: one journalist wrote in 1934 that no “classic” movie had been created yet. Hollywood’s producers were all too ready to agree, viewing their creations only as commercial products. Even pre-Code films weren’t safe from retroactive censorship. Those that were re-released during the Code years or the early years of television had bits cut out: Myrna Loy trilling “Mimi” in a sheer nightgown in Love Me Tonight, Edward Woods tussling in bed with Joan Blondell in Public Enemy. Ironically, films that were considered too thoroughly offensive to be salvaged remained intact. In 2004 a complete, uncensored print of Baby Face, perhaps the crown jewel of pre-Code, was discovered at the Library of Congress. Baby Face (Green, 1933) was so sordid that it was rejected outright by state censorship boards and heavily altered before being released, but a copy of the original camera negative showed the film as only censors had ever seen it.

Sold-out crowds packed New York’s Film Forum on a snowy Monday in January 2005 to be the first audience ever to watch Barbara Stanwyck smash a beer bottle over the head of a man molesting her, then lie down in the straw with a brakeman in return for a free ride on a freight train; to hear a sinister German cobbler quote Nietszche to Stanwyck and advise her to stamp out all emotion and use her power over men to get the things she wants. A New York Times piece on the rediscovered print stated that “you couldn’t make this film today.” Baby Face’s heroine, Lily Powers, is sexy and heartless, with a hidden, wounded fury built up during a lifetime of mistreatment. Accompanied by a growling rendition of “The St. Louis Blues,” she climbs a ladder of weak and venal men from a dreary steel-town speakeasy to the inevitable Manhattan penthouse. With her all the way is the only person she really cares for, her black maid and best friend, played by the beautiful Teresa Harris. Baby Face has all the kick, the style, the shocking laughs and underlying bleakness that exemplify pre-Code.

During the Depression, with so many men unable to support families, women became responsible for their own and their children’s survival as they had rarely been before. Many pre-Code movies focus on the predicament of women looking for ways to support themselves outside of marriage. While the flappers of the 1920s were young girls sowing their wild oats, the women of pre-Code are looking for security, and they aren’t too scrupulous about how they get it. They are neither virtuous helpmeets nor destructive vamps; they are adults who have faced some cold, hard facts. Actresses like Constance Bennett and Miriam Hopkins played a new kind of woman who was hardened, experienced, far from spotless, but who instead of paying for her sins usually triumphed in the end.

World War I shattered the traditional manly and womanly ideals of the nineteenth century; World War II brought back the celebration of the he-man and the homemaker. Between the wars there was a blurring and mingling of the sexes. Women bobbed their hair, smoked and drove cars; men got manicures, sang falsetto and danced the Charleston. A novelty song of the time complained: “Masculine women, feminine men / Which is the rooster, which is the hen? / It’s hard to tell ‘em apart these days.” Homosexuality was an object of sniggering fascination, and caricatures of effeminate men and butch women show up regularly in pre-Code movies. In Ladies They Talk About, a new inmate in a women’s prison is warned about a hefty cigar-smoking lady in a monocle: “Watch out for her, she likes to wrestle.” In Wonder Bar, a fey young man cuts in on a dancing couple and dances off—with the man. “Boys will be boys!” Al Jolson comments with a swishy gesture.

In the Victorian era, Europe and America embraced the ideal of woman as untouched by experience, the “angel of the house.” One of the arguments against granting women the vote or allowing them to enter universities and the work-place was that if they left the domestic sphere they would lose their purity and moral authority. The working women of thirties Hollywood triumphantly backed this argument: they are hard-nosed, pragmatic, independent. The “double standard” for pre- and extra-marital sex was a common theme in films of the early thirties: why shouldn’t women act like men? The feisty yet vulnerable pre-Code woman was more compromised than the fast-talking dame of later screwball comedies, who usually worked as a reporter or secretary and relished her self-sufficiency. One aspect of pre-Code movies that might actually shock contemporary audiences is the ubiquitous equation of sex and money. It’s taken for granted that women will sell themselves for furs, jewels and apartments, as “kept women” or free-lance party girls. This reflects the Depression too, a time when—so the movies warned—the scarcity of honest jobs might tempt girls to take “the easiest way.” Men, meanwhile, might turn to crime, bootlegging, gangs: selling their souls for flashy suits, cars and women. Unlike their female counterparts, the fallen men always pay, dying in the gutter or going to the chair. Women who break commandments—even a hard-bitten ex-felon like Constance Bennett in Bed of Roses—can be redeemed through the love of an honest man, in this case the poor but hunky Joel McCrea.

The thirties were a golden age for women in Hollywood movies, the only decade when they were regularly allowed to be smart, competent, funny and sexy all at once, and seldom required to be tamed or put in their place by men (Female is a dispiriting exception.) Throughout the decade, women continued to embody the toughness and cynicism of the Depression years in romantic comedies, where they were habitually both more dazzling and more down-to-earth than their male counterparts. The experienced woman paired with a naïve, virginal man is partly a comic reversal of a more traditional trope, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. But while these women take economic advantage of their male prey, they are also seduced by male innocence. They yearn for what they themselves have lost.

The uncensored version of Baby Face makes it clear that Lily was forced into prostitution by her own father when she was fourteen. Hence the cruel irony of the title: while she poses as girlishly helpless (“Nothing like this has ever happened to me,” she pleads when she’s caught in the restroom with her boss) she has been, as the cliché goes, robbed of innocence. This is the festering wound behind her hard, defiant poise. No one could play the part better than Stanwyck, with her devastating ability to face the facts; her sudden lashing rages; and the enticing warmth that she could—chillingly—turn on or off at will. Douglas Sirk spoke later of how Stanwyck seemed to have been “deeply touched by life.” Her most arresting trait is her level, unwavering gaze, both bold and sad—what Sirk called her “amazing tragic stillness.” The simplicity of her style comes from a steely inner resolve, a hard-won self-mastery that allows her to look at the world without fear—but not without anger or sorrow. “My life has been hard, bitter,” Lily tells her husband. “I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed.”

Movies of the early thirties revel in the victory of experience over innocence, but they mourn it too. James Cagney stumbles into the gutter in the rain muttering, “I ain’t so tough.” Ann Dvorak, as a drug addict whose sleazy lover has kidnapped her son, crashes through a window and plummets to the street below to save the boy’s life. Paul Muni, fugitive from a chain gang, fades into the darkness, answering his girlfriend’s question, “How do you survive?” with the despairing words, “I steal!”7 It is this sense of bitter knowledge, of deeply-felt experience, that makes the best pre-Code movies truly “adult.” W.H. Auden said that the purpose of art is to make self-deception more difficult: “by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.” Enchantment and intoxication have always been Hollywood’s stock in trade, but occasionally—in Out of the Past, in The Lady Eve, in Blonde Crazy—the studios blended cocktails of fantasy and disillusionment, of disappointment and romance. Hollywood in the 1930s cast its lingering spell not with cynical magic, but with magical cynicism.

by Imogen Sara Smith

NOTES

1. In, respectively, Man’s Castle, Baby Face, Murder at the Vanities.

2. What happened to the cut footage? Most of it probably wound up in the wastebasket, though some found a home elsewhere. In his book The Silent Clowns Walter Kerr recounts how a boyhood friendship with his local projectionist enabled him to amass “what must unquestionably have been the most extensive collection of shots of Vilma Banky’s décolletage existing anywhere in America.”

3. Native New Yorkers Cagney and Blondell were appearing together in a play called “Penny Arcade” when they were both offered contracts by Warner Brothers, the studio that, with its Vitaphone process, had pushed the changeover to sound. “Penny Arcade” became the film Sinners’ Holiday; Cagney and Blondell made six more films together and formed a life-long friendship.

4. Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which echoes the great Depression anthem, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in its complaint that the men who built the country and fought to defend it were now reduced to begging for bread. These two songs were exceptional; Tin Pan Alley churned out hundreds of “keep smiling” ditties during the Depression, leaving it to Woody Guthrie to express the nation’s bitter mood in songs like “I Ain’t Got No Home in this World Anymore.”

5. The pre-Code Two Kinds of Women opens with the governor of a western state rehearsing a passionate speech decrying the evil influence of New York City on the rest of the nation, leading America’s youth astray with the lure of glamour and fast living. The scene cuts to the next room where the governor’s daughter (Miriam Hopkins) lounges on a sofa in sexy pajamas, reading The New Yorker and listening to a radio program broadcasting jazz from a Manhattan nightclub. The movie makes no secret of which side it’s on. At the end the daughter says that she and her New York playboy husband will announce that they are moving to South Dakota for the fresh air and clean living—until her father is re-elected, after which, “We’ll come back and live on East 58th Street!”

6. Producers and filmmakers at Warner Brothers were particularly hostile to the new regime. Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade features a puritanical censor who keeps popping up to warn Cagney, a director of musical prologues, “You’ll have to put some bathing suits on those mermaids—you know Pennsylvania.” Ultimately, he’s revealed as worse than just a buffoon when he’s caught in flagrante delicto with the film’s floozy.

7. In, respectively, Public Enemy, Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

#Imogen . Sara Smith #The Chiseler #Sinner's Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code #Joan Blondell #James Cagney

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jacksauvage-blog · 5 years

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tw: death, suicide, nazi references, homophobia, nsfw content

Jean-Baptiste Sauvage was a silent-era French filmmaker who has often been described as one of the fathers of modern horror cinema. He is credited with the discovery a number of techniques in lighting and editing that gave his films a sense of unreality. Though many of these techniques have been rendered obsolete by technological advances, they are still closely mimicked in many super-natural horror films today.

During his life, Sauvage wrote and directed five films and left behind countless reels of experimental footage. His first two films were produced in America and predate the rise of the studio system that most film historians believe pushed the filmmaker to return to his home country of France. There he would go on to produce three more feature films, including the film that catapulted his work to national attention, L'enfer dans Chaque Homme.

All but Sauvage’s final film, Jour de la Résurrection (ironically titled, considering its posthumous release), were thought to have been destroyed during the German occupation of France at the start of the second world war. However, in 1967, a trunk containing original reels was found in the basement of the estate that had once belonged to his parents.

American Short Films

The Devil in Distress (1919)

Despite a number of small, experimental projects produced in the early 1900s, this is considered Jean-Baptiste Sauvage’s first film. Running at exactly 21 minutes, the film shows one continuous shot of a lake from a considerable distance. A man walks into the frame, just on the edge of the water, and is attacked by an inhuman looking creature. He struggles for several minutes before eventually being pulled underwater. The creature emerges from the lake, pulling its body on all fours and moving towards the camera. Its movements are disjointed and a close examination of the film suggests that Sauvage painstakingly cut and rearranged several frames by hand. Eventually, the creature makes it to the camera, stands up straight, and the scene abruptly cuts to black.

The film is considered, even now, to be one of the most disturbing sequences in cinema. One early reviewer of the film remarked that the bizarre movement made him physically ill, forcing him to leave the theatre before the film’s completion.

A Dark and Empty Place (1920)

Sauvage’s second and final American film follows a woman as she explores a large house. The stationary camera is situated so that the audience can see the entire living area, the upstairs balcony above, as well as the ornate staircase. The woman spends the entirety of the film looking for something in the house, while three actors dressed in white move from one area to another, unseen by the woman. They move items around on set, throw things across the room, and otherwise disrupt the protagonist in her quest.

At the 13 minute mark, the woman finally comes face to face with the apparitions who grab her, screaming, and carry her out of frame.

This film is notable for just how much it feels out of place in the rest of Sauvage’s catalog. There is a sense of whimsey and slap-stick to the way the apparitions move across the set. This is also the film that would launch the career of Irene Walsh, who would go on to star in several more similar films throughout her career, making her one of Hollywoods original Scream Queens.

French Films

L'enfer dans Chaque Homme / The Hell In Every Man (1923)

Upon his return to his native country, France, Sauvage produced his most ambitious project yet. Running at a length, unheard of in his time, of a fill hour and twenty-two minutes, L’enfer dans Chague Homme is split into three vignettes following the main character, Cyrille as he faces the deaths and ghosts of his parents. In the first act, Cyrille is laying his loved ones to rest, though their apparitions can be seen standing in the distance, watching the proceedings. In the second act, Cyrille is haunted by the ghosts everywhere he goes. Finally, in the third act, the two ghosts who have driven Cyrille absolutely mad help him fashion a noose so that he can hang himself from the rafters of his home.

Sauvage uses a similar, though refined version of the splicing technique used in his first film. Even when the ghosts are in frame with mortals, their movements seem utterly out of sync with their surroundings.

The film was a hit with French audiences and Sauvage’s success here is what would cement his status as one of the most prominent early filmmakers. This was also his first attempt at making horror psychological, rather than simply visual.

It is believed that Sauvage wrote the script for this film as a way to cope with the death of his own father, which happened just two years before the film’s release.

Dans la Morte / In Death (1927)

The final film that Sauvage produced, in full, before his death tells the story of a young woman, attempting to take part in the daily activities of her life just days after her brutal murder in the Catacombs of Paris. Dans la Morte has often been described by critics as Saugave’s Magnum Opus, marrying the most refined versions of techniques he created throughout his career with the themes of death, introverted pain, and isolation.

The film starred actress Annabelle Walker as the leading role, though several reports from the time claim that she had initially turned down the role and footage uncovered 1976 shows a few early scenes filmed with a different actress entirely. In a joint interview in La Vie Parisinne, Saugave raved about Walker’s performance claiming that “without her, I would have cancelled the entire production.” And, though this would be the only film in which Sauvage would cast the actress, her impact on him can be seen in his work in other mediums that he explored throughout the rest of his life. His obsession with the actress was well documented in his journals as is his praise for her both as an individual and in her work.

Dans la Morte is also notable for being Sauvage’s only attempt at using color in any of his films, feature or experimental. Using a Kinemacolor filter, the film changes from a standard black and white to a deep red hue after Walker’s unnamed character is killed. Though critics were fascinated by the choice to firmly place the majority of the film outside of the real world through the use of color, Sauvage has been quoted claiming that he regretted the decision.

Jour de la Résurrection / Day of Resurrection (1940)

Jour de la Résurrection is Jean-Baptiste Sauvage’s final film, though it was not released to the public until four years after his death. The film is a notable and significant departure from the rest Sauvage’s work. Actor Tristian Roche stars as the lead character, Luc, a young nomadic loner who is taken in by a wealthy young artist, Marco. Luc and Marco’s tender and sensual relationship takes place against the rural backdrop of rolling hills and farmland in southern France.

The film is quieter than Sauvage’s previous work . Though, Luc’s suicide in the third act does serve as a thematic through-line to his other films as well as a potential lens through which his own death can be examined.

Jour de la Réssurection was edited and released by his longtime friend, writer and anti-fascist propagandist Ambrose Gage in protest against the Third Reich’s crusade against homosexual art. Until the discovery of his early works upon the auction of his family’s former estate, this film was thought to be Sauvage’s only work to survive the crusade. Sauvage’s public and rumored relationships with other men thorughout his life made his work, along with a number of his known associates, targets in Nazi occupied France. Jour de la Résurrection is undeniably a part of the queer canon of film and, though subtext can be found in his other works, this is Sauvage’s most explicit exploration of homosexuality in any of his narrative work.

Other Works

Étranger dans les Catacombes / Stranger in the Catacombs (1920)

In this 32 minute reel of film discovered in 1967, Sauvage sets up a camera somewhere inside The Catacombs beneath Paris, France and an unknown camera operator films him pacing back and forth, in and out of frame. His movements are at times languid and seem off balance, and at other times jerky and erratic. He can be seen, on camera, smoking and eventually taking several unidentified pills. This footage is frequently cited as evidence of mental deterioration that would explain Sauvage’s known eccentricities as well as his eventual suicide.

At the 30 minute mark, Sauvage can be seen jerking around to look behind him, obviously started. He moves directly towards the camera and off screen. Just before the film cuts to black, the shadow of a third person can be seen entering the shot.

Le Paradis dans Chaque Homme / The Heaven Inside Every Man (dated 1929, discovered in 1967, circulated in 1979)

Released well after his death, this is Sauvage’s most meticulously edited, most experimental, and most controversial films. With a run time of 61 minutes, this film is actually several test reels spliced together. It opens with a shot of an unidentified man sitting on the edge of the bed, facing off screen. A few minutes later, Sauvage enters the shot, nude, and gets into bed as well. The two men perform various sexual acts together in front of the camera.

The scene between the two men is edited and spliced with various other raw footage from a number of Suavage’s own experimentation and, what are thought to be, outtakes from his previous films. There are twenty frames of footage that appear to have been taken from Étranger dans les Catacombes, in which Sauvage is seen confronting the man who entered his shot. Another shot shows a large spider crawling over the bones imbedded in the Catacomb walls. Yet another scene spliced in shows footage of the “lake monster” from his first film. The addition of these scenes turn the film, that would otherwise be entirely erotic, into something much more disturbing.

In addition to the added footage, a number of the frames on the reel are cut out and replaced out of order, the same technique found in Sauvage’s other work. So, even the erotic scene between Sauvage and his unidentified partner have a disjointed and unnerving quality in their movements.

Le Paradis dans Chaque Homme was among the reels uncovered when his family estate was put up for auction. However, because of its age and the extensive editing work done to the film itself, there was significant concern that it would fall apart if it was played too many times. Presumed to have some connection to his 1923 film, it was shown to a small audience at Institut des hautes études Cinématographiques, and simultaneously recorded onto a fresh 8mm reel. The content of the film caused a significant controversy for the institute, but the original reel is still on display in the university’s library.

#( the cinephile )#( about )#anneewiki #//this is so extra

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keanuital · 6 years

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John Wick solidified Keanu Reeves as one of the greatest action stars of all time

With A History Of Violence, Tom Breihan picks the most important action movie of every year, starting with the genre’s birth and moving right up to whatever Vin Diesel’s doing this very minute.

John Wick (2014)

In the entire history of American action cinema, there are very, very few movies that take their fight scenes as seriously as John Wick does. Some of the action set pieces in John Wick—the home invasion, the one-man nightclub siege—are straight-up masterpieces, and the movie never lingers long between these exquisitely crafted depictions of mayhem. But my favorite scene in the movie isn’t a fight. It’s the part where Viggo, the movie’s lead Russian gangster, has to tell his son just how badly he’d fucked up. Viggo’s boy, Iosef, has broken into the home of a “fucking nobody.” He’s killed the man’s dog, stolen his car, and left him unconscious. Viggo, played by the late Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist, doesn’t mind any of this. He just minds that Iosef did all this to the wrong guy.

Carefully and patiently, Viggo tells Iosef that he and his associates used to call John Wick, that nobody, baba yaga—the bogeyman. And then he continues, “John wasn’t exactly the bogeyman.” Dramatic pause. “He was the one you send to kill the fucking bogeyman.” A moment later, as that sinks in: “I once saw him kill three men in a bar with a pencil. A fucking. Pencil.”

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That scene comes before any of the movie’s fights, and it tells us a whole lot of things we need to know. It tells us that Wick is an absolute avenging angel of death, of course, and it gives us context for the life that he left behind when he fell in love and got married. But that scene also tells us what kind of movie we’re watching. It’s a movie that takes place in its own universe, that leaves behind any notion of realism or naturalism. It tells us that we are watching myths and archetypes, that the movie is going to be a sort of tone-poem homage to history’s great bleak, existentialist action movies. It tells us that directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch know their Melville and their Woo. The first time I watched John Wick, I spent that entire scene cackling with glee. That scene promised a lot, and the movie paid off on it.

I have to imagine that the person who greenlit John Wick thought he’d be getting another Taken clone; 2014 was the era of the Taken clone. A few years earlier, Liam Neeson had revitalized his career by playing a leathery, regretful death-dealer in a cheap, unpretentious B-movie, and other aging movie stars were trying to do the same with theirs. Denzel Washington made The Equalizer. Sean Penn made The Gunman. John Wick, originally titled Scorn, could’ve turned out to be one of those.

Instead, John Wick turned out to be a whole new mold: a sleek, stylish, and deeply silly studio B-movie that takes place in its own fully realized world. And after years of choppy, illegible Hollywood action scenes, it revived the visceral beauty of a well-shot, well-choreographed fight, succeeding in making Keanu Reeves look like an absolutely unstoppable killing machine. These days, people aren’t making their own Takenknockoffs anymore. They’re more likely to make John Wick clones, like Ben Affleck in The Accountant, say, or Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde. That’s a good thing. The John Wick clones have been way better than the Takenclones.

In some ways, John Wick was a very familiar movie. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of quiet, soulful, and well-dressed hitmen pulled back into the killing game by tragedy, forced to eliminate their old bosses. We’ve seen a lot of broken loners going on quests of revenge after seeing their families die. We’ve seen badasses so cold that they take out entire armies of anonymous cannon-fodder types. We’ve seen underworld stories in which the police barely even seem to exist. John Wick is, in a lot of ways, a traditional action movie, one that works very much within the rules and structures of the genre.

But in other ways, John Wick is a strange statement of a movie—one that takes all those tropes and makes them as weird and otherworldly as possible. For one thing, when John Wick goes to war with the Russian mob of New York, he’s not avenging any actual people. Instead, he’s avenging the death of a dog, an adorable puppy gifted to him by his dead wife. Iosef insists, over and over, that it was just a dog, as if this is going to help him in any way. It’s a beautiful little subversion of an old revenge-movie trope. People hate seeing dogs die in movies, so we’re spared the usual Death Wish-style scene of rape and murder. Even the dog dies offscreen. Instead, we get to skip straight to the revenge. And the movie knows it’s absurd for Wick to be killing dozens of people to avenge a dog that he’d only had for, what, a day? But it works on a couple of levels. At one point, Wick says that the dog represented all the hope he had left in the world, telling us that that’s what sent him off on that killing spree. So it’s an effective story device. But it’s also a grand cosmic joke. Because after all, it was just a fucking dog.

Taking this simple and unreal pretense as its starting point, the movie builds an entire world. This is a universe full of hitmen. There are so many, in fact, that they have their own hotel, a place where any actual killing is expressly forbidden. That’s one of the rules of this hitman world that everyone understands. Another is that everyone is supposed to pay for stuff in gold coins. Even the police seem to know what’s going on. At one point, a cop comes to Wick’s door and sees a body lying on the floor behind him. His response: “You, uh, working again?” Wick: “No, just sorting some stuff out.” That’s good enough for the cop, who backs right out. John Wick: Chapter Two, the movie’s 2017 sequel, builds on all of this and turns it into something even more gloriously alien. But it’s all there in the first movie—a violent hidden world, right under our noses.

A year before starring in John Wick, Keanu Reeves went to Hong Kong and China to make his directorial debut. Man Of Tai Chi isn’t what you might expect from the moment that an aging movie star steps behind the camera. Instead, it’s a great little underground-fighting movie, one made with a slightly incoherent plot and a great respect for fight choreography. The movie almost makes more sense as a collection of fight scenes than as a traditional narrative. It’s mostly in Chinese, but Reeves himself plays the villain, a glowering evil American billionaire who makes people fight to the death. And he made the whole thing as a vehicle for Tiger Chen, a Chinese martial artist who’d been one of the fight choreographers for The Matrix.

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Man Of Tai Chi was, for me, the moment that Reeves became an all-time elite action star. He’d already had a surprising number of classic action movies on his résumé: Point Break, Speed, the Matrix movies. He’d done many of his own stunts in Speed and trained hard in wire-fu for The Matrix. But I’d always thought of him as an actor who sometimes did action movies, not as a straight-up action star. Man Of Tai Chi revealed Reeves to be something else: someone so in love with the genre that he’d make a labor of love like that. And John Wick is the moment he solidified his spot in the history of the genre. Keanu Reeves is, quite simply, one of the greatest action stars of all time. He might be the single greatest, no qualifiers necessary.

Think about it: Reeves was 50 when John Wick came out, and he still went out of his way to make the movie as hard and physical as possible. He recruited his Matrix stunt doubles Stahelski and Leitch to direct the movie even though they’d never directed a movie before. (Reeves’ devotion to the Matrix stunt team is, to my mind, one of the most endearing things about him.) He threw himself into training, learning styles of martial arts that he’d never attempted. And he pulled off these incredible fight scenes—scenes that mix gunplay with hand-to-hand grappling in believable ways, scenes in which he has to pull off these great stunts without the benefit of quick-cutting. He even did a fair amount of his stunt-driving. And he put in an affecting, grounded performance on top of all of that, bringing this absurdist world to life with the sheer weight of his facial expressions and body language. And he delivers his best badass lines with absolute panache and confidence. (Viggo: “They know you’re coming.” Wick: “Of course. But it won’t matter.”)

There’s a ruthless efficiency to the way Reeves moves in the movie. The way he kills people tells more of a story than the actual story does. He’ll punch someone, then shoot him, then punch him again. Sometimes, he’ll take a bad guy down in a leglock, holding him immobile while he shoots a couple of other bad guys, and then shoot the original bad guy while that guy is lying helpless on the floor. A scene like that one-man nightclub invasion is put together with absolute precision, ratcheting things up gradually until it becomes something insane and surreal. It’s beautifully lit and shot and edited, like Drive or something, but all of that atmosphere serves to highlight the action. There’s a scene near the end where Viggo, on the way to his final showdown with Wick, laughs maniacally. It’s not because he thinks he’s going to win. He knows he’s about to die. He’s just having so much fun watching Wick work. We, the audience, knows how he feels.

John Wick made an impact. It made money and earned critical raves, something that I don’t think anyone expected of it. It spawned a whole universe‚ two movies, with another on the way, and a spin-off TV series called The Continental reportedly in the works. One of its directors went off to make Atomic Blonde, an instant-classic action movie in its own right if only for that incredible single-take apartment-building fight. John Wickspawned imitators. But more to the point, it proved that an American studio B-movie could be truly great, that it could compete with anything coming out of South Korea or Thailand or Indonesia. It proved that we don’t have to settle for bullshit. It raised the stakes. People keep asking if American action movies are back, and I hadn’t really had an answer. But now, yeah, I’m thinking they’re back.

#keanu reeves #john wick

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larryland · 5 years

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For theatre goers “of a certain age”, the mention of Sunset Boulevard may very well conjure up images of beloved comedienne Carol Burnett’s loving homage to this classic 1950 Billy Wilder film. Burnett’s entrance as the faded Hollywood film star Norma Desmond slowly –at first—descending the staircase of her mansion to the applause and adulation of her faithful butler (played to perfection, of course, by the stalwart Burnett sidekick Harvey Korman) remains one of her many “Most Memorable” moments.

With this production of Sunset Boulevard, veteran Mac-Haydn Producing Artistic Director John Saunders has created his own Most Memorable offering; indeed this show may very well turn out to be the crown jewel of the season. With a glorious score by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, performances soar as high as the HOLLYWOOD sign that looms over the set.

Intertwining the stories and lives of long-forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond and the desperate and virtually poverty-stricken screenwriter Joe Gillis, the plot develops, unfolds and ultimately unravels to a tragic conclusion . Underscoring the seduction of the young screenwriter by of the fading film star is the “B reel” plot of Joe’s attraction to, and eventually reciprocated, love for Betty Schaefer, and of course we cannot overlook the faithful to a fault Max , butler-cum ex-husband to the vulnerable, delusional, Norma Desmond as he protects with unwavering loyalty “The Greatest Star” who lives in a world where only she hears the echos and whispers of the applause that surrounded her in her heyday.

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As the aging, faded from glory and memory silent film start Norma Desmond, living in a mansion as dilapidated and tattered as the shreds of the wardrobe she clutches around her, Elizabeth Ward Land’s performance is a true tour de force. From her entrance as she intriguingly inquires “Are there any laws against burying him in the garden?”, she captures and mesmerizes the audience, who are not released from her spell until the final flicker of spotlight leaves her face at her last “close-up.” Her hand gestures through the performances are absolutely mesmerizing—the flick of a wrist, crook of a finger, wave of a hand– each and every movement adds a depth to the character she has become.

Her voice is as perfect as her presence, capturing the pathos and the delusion of the world in which she lives. Her vocal presentation more than holds its own against the Norma Desmond’s who have gone before her …Patty LuPone, Betty Buckley, Glenn Close —yes, Glenn Close ! In what is probably the “signature” musical number of the show, her performance of “As if we never said Goodbye” is a show stopper in the truest sense of the word. As Norma arrives at Paramount Studio, which long ago and far away was her home and her life, she is both labored and sustained by the illusion that her triumphant return to film is upon her. She gives voice to the memories of her glory days and the soon to be unrealized dreams of a triumphal return in an opening night performance not soon to be forgotten. The single split second of total silence at its conclusion, before the audience, rightfully, gave her the applause due such a bravura performance, and testified to the magic of the moment. For 2 1⁄2 hours, Land IS Norma Desmond, and the audience in Chatham ARE the adoring fans she remembers from her glory years.

As the ultimately doomed screenwriter Joe Gillis, Pat Moran holds his own against Land’s Norma. His spiraling ascent and descent from a slightly jaded, debt-ridden screenwriter on the run from debt collectors to “a kept man” who ultimately shatters the mind and the life of his keeper is well-played and believable; he has both the voice and the presence to play against Land’s larger than life Norma. Their scenes together are fraught with increasing ardor—on Norma’s part-, and a gradual abandonment of principle and to some extent self-respect, as Joe yields to the pathetic passionate yearnings of the aging star, clinging desperately to the remembered vestiges of the youth she long ago left behind. In a rather awkward ending to Act 1, Joe yields himself to Norma following yet another suicide attempt thwarted and tended to by the faithful Max. As the music swells, and the lights begin to dim, the “couple” come together in an embrace that leaves little to the imagination as to its inevitable climax. Cue the less than subtle hints of writhing undulations…and was that “Mrs. Robinson, You’re trying to seduce me” we heard as the lights faded to black? A little more subtlety, a little less graphic detail would have made the point of the moment sufficiently.

In the almost obligatory sub-plot romance, the relationship between Joe and would-be screenwriter Betty Schaefer develops almost as slowly as the movie script they attempt to write together. Fortunately for the audience, the chemistry between Moran and Rachel Pantazis provides a much-need touch of reality and innocence amid the decay and delusion swirling through Sunset Boulevard and beyond. Their duet “Too Much in Love” showcases Pantazis’ lovely voice already on display in “Boy Meets Girl”. Hopefully Pantazis will offer her talents in other roles during the season.

James Zennelli as the faithful- to- a- fault Max guards the faded star and her memories with the intensity of a pit bull; you can almost hear the merest hint of a growl should anyone dare to threaten the fragile mindset of his beloved “Madam”, as she lives in her world of fan mail (that comes no more) and fawning, adoring fans (who never call). With relatively few musical moments, Zennelli nonetheless creates a full-bodied character whose presence is as essential to the production as it is to Norma Desmond.

As frequently is the norm at the Mac, production values hold their own against the performances. Original productions of Sunset Boulevard were encumbered and in some cases hampered by the huge and expensive set pieces, including a grand staircase which is essential to the plot and the “look” of the piece. Saunders has worked with Scenic Designer Erin Kiernan to use the theatre’s in-the round space to best advantage. The staircase integral to plot and action dominates in its permanent placement off to one “side” of this theatre in the round, and occasionally “doubles” as Betty’s office on the movie lot .

For the most part scene changes are made effortlessly if occasionally a bit slowly . Such is almost a necessary evil in the available space. Clad in black, stage crew shift the center stage from the house on Sunset Boulevard to Paramount Studios to with relative ease.

Jimm Halliday’s costuming is especially noteworthy, with his almost exclusive use of black and white attire for Norma Desmond, subtly reflecting her past and passed life in the silent film era. Costumes for the ensemble cast, representing the would be stars and starlets, casting directors, and players in the Hollywood business world perfectly capture the 1950s “movie biz” atmosphere. Special kudos go to the staging, choreography, direction, and costuming efforts that went into the “transformation” of Joe when “The Lady is Paying” for a new wardrobe for her soon-to-be lover. A full and complete change of clothes, top to bottom, inside and out, was performed with an ease and grace that would make many a backstage dresser envious.

Lighting designer Andrew Gmoser generally “shines” with his use of lighting to capture both the teeming, cut-throat world of Tinsel Town in 1950 , and the decaying, faded glory of Norma Desmond’s mansion. The classic “HOLLYWOOD” sign towers over Sunset Boulevard and the theatre in the round stage, reminding all comers they are living in a world where the camera rules, records, and cannot repair or , a world of illusion and of dreams both realized and shattered.

There are, however, several literally glaring miscues which not only detract from the impact of the scenes underway, but have the potential to negatively effect audience members with a particular sensitivity to their use. Strobe light effects throughout the performance, particularly in Act 2, are strident and overly extended, causing more than one audience member to remark on the almost painful impact. The use of the strobe is so prevalent and so frequent that perhaps it would be valuable, in a program note, or even included with the pre-show announcement, to let the audience know of its heavy and frequent presence. In another unfortunate moment, lighting in the final climactic murder scene is entirely too harsh; a spotlight aimed directly into the audience effectively blinded those unfortunate enough to be seated in Section 2. If I had not already been familiar with the action taking place in this moment, I would be left wondering “what happened?”

Also somewhat perplexing is the over-zealous use of atmospheric haze effect, which permeates the theatre from pre-show through curtain call. While a fan of the effect, in moderation, it seems in many moments of this production to be more gratuitous than

Under the guidance of Music Director David Maglione, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s soaring score is given the tender loving care this production needs and deserves. With violin, reeds, percussion and horns, the orchestra does justice to Webber’s work; it is always astounding how big a sound comes from the tiny corner of the theatre where the musicians ply their trade and their instruments.

Despite its few flaws, Sunset Boulevard at Mac-Haydn is a must-see show. Big, bold, and over the top in performance and production, this IS classic musical theatre done almost to perfection. The standing ovation given Leading Lady Land on opening night was more than justified; hers was a triumphant performance. The cast was collectively and individually a match for her talents, performing flawlessly with energy and empathy from start to finish. As a side note, the English major/Grammar Nazi was thrilled to hear cries of “Brava”, rather than the typical “Bravo,” as Land took the accolades and applause so rightfully earned .

A trip to Sunset Boulevard, via Route Route 203 in Chatham, is highly recommended. Almost assuredly, this production will be remembered and talked about for quite some time.

Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, directed by John Saunders, runs from June 20-30, 2019, at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, NY. Musical direction by David Maglione, set design by Erin Kiernan, lighting design by Andrew Gmoser, costume design by Jimm Halliday, sound designer Corbin White, props designer Joshua Gallagher, hair and makeup designer Matthew Oliver. CAST: Elizabeth Ward Land as Norma Desmond, Pat Moran as Joe Gillis, James Zannelli as Max von Mayerling, Rachel Pantazis as Betty, and Gabe Belyeu as Sheldrake.

The Mac-Haydn Theatre is located at 1925 NY 203 in Chatham, NY. 518-392-9292; http://www.machaydntheate.org

REVIEW: “Sunset Boulevard” at the Mac-Haydn Theatre For theatre goers “of a certain age”, the mention of Sunset Boulevard may very well conjure up images of beloved comedienne Carol Burnett's loving homage to this classic 1950 Billy Wilder film.

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