I'm realizing that I haven't seen many pre-Code movies. That was legit shocking.
It is!
I have nothing like a systematic list of essential pre-Codes to point to (and tend to disagree with those kinds of lists when I see them myself), but I very strongly recommend the entire brief, vivid period. Its films can feel like alternate history simply by being so much closer to the world as it existed than the codified moralities of Code enforcement which followed them. Mick LaSalle's Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000) and Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002) remain groundbreaking and fun, if no longer cutting-edge introductions to the era. I anti-recommend the scholarship of Thomas Doherty.
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Date: 2022-10-20 06:58 pm (UTC)It is!
I have nothing like a systematic list of essential pre-Codes to point to (and tend to disagree with those kinds of lists when I see them myself), but I very strongly recommend the entire brief, vivid period. Its films can feel like alternate history simply by being so much closer to the world as it existed than the codified moralities of Code enforcement which followed them. Mick LaSalle's Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000) and Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002) remain groundbreaking and fun, if no longer cutting-edge introductions to the era. I anti-recommend the scholarship of Thomas Doherty.