“Sex! Crime! Horror!!!” is the subtitled promise of the Castro Theatre’s upcoming film series, “Hollywood Before the Code.” For these subversive vintage pictures, full of sex, drugs and not quite rock-and-roll, the exclamation marks are warranted.
The Pre-Code era is a strange, sexy, tragically short-lived piece of American film history. From 1929 to 1934, Hollywood was left to its own devices, free of an enforced production standard. For four years, movies openly featured amoral gangsters, drug addicts, corruption, crime, prostitution, interracial romance and startlingly modern depictions of independent, complicated women.
In 1934, Hollywood would succumb to pressure to sanitize “dirty pictures” and self-impose the Motion Picture Production Code, a laundry list of indecencies henceforth banned from the silver screen. But before that was this brief bubble of unfettered onscreen vice.
Castro Theatre’s film programmer Elliot Lavine has been doing Pre-Code shows for years in conjunction with “I Wake Up Dreaming,” his annual film noir festival. Those festivals were put on when Lavine worked with the Roxie, and he’s now bringing them to the grand, 1920s movie palace that is the San Francisco’s Castro. According to him, recent interest in the Pre-Code era has a lot to do with honesty.
“It’s one of the few types of older films that younger generations don’t find phony or corny because they’re very hard, hard-bitten,”Lavine said.
Each night of “Hollywood Before the Code” is a double or triple feature, all paired according to an overriding theme.
The festival kicked things off Feb. 24 with gangster night, opening with the 1932 “Scarface” (the 1983 Al Pacino film is a remake). If the movie seems formulaic, with its hard antihero and familiar rise and fall arc, it’s because it’s one of the early inventors of the genre. The second film, “Two Seconds”, is a brutal, lesser known Edward G. Robinson vehicle, about a man, John Allen, who is condemned to the electric chair for murder. “Two Seconds” refers to the two seconds it takes a man to die in the chair, and the film takes place almost entirely in flashback.
This upcoming Wednesday’s theme is women and sex, a triple feature of fast-talking, tough-minded fallen women. In “The Torch Singer,” Claudette Colbert gives her illegitimate child up for adoption and becomes a hard-drinking, sexually voracious nightclub singer. “Three On a Match” features Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell and Bette Davis as reunited elementary school classmates. The real star of the three is Dvorak as Vivian, who is dissatisfied with her perfect, nuclear family life. “The things that make other people happy leave me cold,” says Vivian. “I think I want things, passionately. And when I get them I lose all interest.” It’s human, modern and complicated — we sympathize with her boredom but not with the way she drags her toddler son into her new life of promiscuous partygoing. The third film is “The Cheat,” in which Tallulah Bankhead is ruined by her compulsive spending and gambling. These pictures have unsatisfying endings — a modern, sexually voracious woman can either die or reunite with a painfully bland man, but these finales don’t undermine the progressive performances at these film’s cores.
Other nights dive into topics ranging from prostitution to “shitkicker” movies about hardship and corruption in the Great Depression to classic horror. To watch a Pre-Code film is to see ourselves in what may have felt like an impenetrable past. As Lavine puts it, with these films “there’s a universal outreach, they seem to grab you.”
Lavine wants people to come see them the way they were meant to be seen, in 35mm on the big screen. He laments the diminishing sense of event going and “quest” in modern moviegoing, the encroachment of internet ease on the movie experience. Most of all, he urges everybody to make their way into the city on Wednesday nights because “the opportunity to see these on a big screen with a big audience is rapidly diminishing. The opportunity to experience that is unusual.” If Lavine has anything to do with it though, that opportunity won’t be going away quite so soon. We still have time.
“Hollywood Before the Code: Sex! Crime! Horror!” is running every Wednesday night from now until March 30 at the San Francisco Castro Theatre.
Contact Miyako Singer at msinger@dailycal.org.