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Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood
Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood
Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood
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Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood

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Between 1929 and 1934, women in American cinema were modern! For five short years women in American cinema were modern! They took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, led unapologetic careers and, in general, acted the way many think women only acted after 1968.

Before then, women on screen had come in two varieties - good or bad - sweet ingenue or vamp. Then two stars came along to blast away these common stereotypes. Garbo turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale. Meanwhile, Norma Shearer succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she'd never been: the bedroom. Garbo and Shearer took the stereotypes and made them complicated.

In the wake of these complicated women came others, a deluge of indelible stars - Constance Bennett, Ruth Chatterton, Mae Clarke, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, Ann Harding, Jean Harlow, Miriam Hopkins, Dorothy Mackaill, Barbara Stanywyck, Mae West and Loretta Young all came into their own during the pre-Code era. These women pushed the limits and shaped their images along modern lines.

Then, in July 1934, the draconian Production Code became the law in Hollywood and these modern women of the screen were banished, not to be seen again until the code was repealed three decades later.

Mick LaSalle, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, takes readers on a tour of pre-Code films and reveals how this was the true golden age of women's films and how the movies of the pre-Code are still worth watching. The bold, pioneering and complicated women of the pre-Code era are about to take their place in the pantheon of film history, and America is about to reclaim a rich legacy.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 5, 2014
ISBN9781466876972
Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood
Author

Mick LaSalle

Mick LaSalle is the author of Complicated Women and was an associate producer of the Timeline Films/Turner Classic Movies documentary of the same name. He is the San Francisco Chronicle's movie critic.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The author is calling the five years between when talkies became the thing and the enforcement of the Production Code- 1929 to 1934. It’s a time that many don’t even know existed; they think that strong women who had sex, had out of wedlock babies, got divorced, didn’t exist until the late 60s. Two women in particular embodied the woman of the era (five years barely constitutes an era!): Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. Now, everyone who has even a passing interest in film knows Garbo’s name, but many don’t have a clue who Shearer was. She was intensely driven and consistently strove to break barriers in film; she wore thin, close fitting costumes with no underwear, she had roles where she did the things women in real life were doing but weren’t considered ‘nice’. The fact that she was married to Irving Thalberg, boy-wonder producer at MGM helped; he gave her the green light for the movies she wanted to do. Shearer and Garbo were the flag bearers, but they opened the way for many, many other female actors. The pre-Code era was the era of actresses: Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, Dietrich, Loretta Young, Constance Bennett, Jean Harlow, and many more started their film careers during this era. The characters they portrayed were, as the title says, complicated women. They were women with choices, until the characters who were given the okay during Code years. During the decades of the Code, if a woman had sex outside of marriage she had to be punished- she died, got thrown in jail, lost her children, or found herself out on the streets. Women had to take whatever men dished out; they were martyrs to marriage and motherhood. If they had careers, they had to give them up or at least make them second to their duties as wives and mothers, and never have more success than their men did. I found the book very interesting; I’ve been a fan of old movies ever since I was a kid. I knew vaguely about pre-Code movies, but didn’t realize how much was done during those five short years. The book gives both the history of the pre-Code years and the biographies of Garbo and Shearer- especially Shearer. She dominates the pages. And I can see why the author chose her as his icon of the era; while many thing of Mae West when they think about this era, her first movie wasn’t made until 1932. It was fun to read about this era but sad that the Code came into being; the movies weren’t just about sex but about women having their own lives and destinies rather than being appendages of men. They were about how women were really living their lives after the changes of the roaring 20s. They had careers, they didn’t put up with cheating husbands, they gave their opinions. The were complicated! Five stars.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    So, this guy isn't a great writer but this book provides lots of interesting details about some obscure films I'll probably never get a chance to see. Nick LaSalle, is, like me, obsessed with Norma Shearer and her crossed eyes. We love you Norma.

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Complicated Women - Mick LaSalle

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Introduction

1. The Ingenue Gets a Life

2. Like a Virgin

3. I Said, Yes

4. Not Too Young and Not Too Nice

5. I’m in an Orgy, Wallowing

6. Shopgirls and Sex Vultures

7. Getting Away with Murder

8. The Ghastly Job of Living Together

9. The Censors Strike Back

10. The Great Garbo and Norma Who?

11. Garbo’s Granddaughters

12. Norma in the New Millennium

Epilogue

Appendix: Complicated Women on Television and Video

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Praise for Complicated Women

Copyright

For Amy,

who is as lovely as Ann Harding,

as gracious as Norma Shearer,

and as big a wise guy as Myrna Loy

INTRODUCTION

The best era for women on screen was not the forties, as has been commonly assumed. The best era had nothing to do with ladies with big shoulder pads and bad hairdos watching their boyfriends light two cigarettes at the same time. It had nothing to do with women apologizing for their strength in the last ten minutes of every film. It had nothing to do with weeping and constant sacrifice and misery.

Those movies may be enjoyable. We may like those movies. But they don’t represent the best in women’s pictures.

The best era for women’s pictures was the pre-Code era, the five years between the point that talkies became widely accepted in 1929 through July 1934, when the dread and draconian Production Code became the law of Hollywoodland. Before the Code, women on screen took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, held down professional positions without apologizing for their self-sufficiency, and in general acted the way many of us think women acted only after 1968.

They had fun. That’s why the Code came in. Yes, to a large degree, the Code came in to prevent women from having fun. It was designed to put the genie back in the bottle—and the wife back in the kitchen. We’ll discuss this wretched Code later, and at length. But suffice it to say, to a surprising extent, it succeeded.

Another assumption that needs disposing of is the notion that directors are more important than actors. That may be true enough sometimes, but if we’re talking about pre-1940 American film, the opposite is more often the case. Indeed, it’s pretty pointless to discuss pre-1940 American film as the art of the director when, in most instances, the stars and the producers called the shots.

Personality was something revered and worshipped in twenties and thirties cinema. People and faces were things to be marveled at. For the first time in history, human beings had the privilege of sitting in the dark and looking at the faces of other human beings, often beautiful ones, thirty feet high and lit up with emotion. Audiences became addicted. They wanted nothing but to bask in and contemplate the faces and personalities they encountered on the screen.

Keep in mind, the close-up was something new back then, newer than the movies themselves. The close-up had only come into widespread use in the second half of the 1910s. Before that, people not only never got to see a close-up in films—they never saw one in real life. Real life does not allow people to look at strangers so coldly, worshipfully, appraisingly—and safely. Is it any wonder then that audiences, in the first flush of this amazing newfound privilege, became entranced and fell in love—or that studios catered to that love? Or that it took a full generation for the huge, loving, glistening, soft-focus close-up to seem corny and to fade from view?

In a cinema that worshipped faces and personalities, the stars were, simply enough, people whose faces and personalities were deemed worthy of such contemplation. Their movies answered the need their essences inspired. Their movies were like the rock videos of today. They existed to put the star over, to capitalize on the image, and sometimes to advance the image. The stories were like little myths created around a screen personality, there to provide audiences with the opportunity to look at and think about the star.

Image—the public’s idea of a personality—was everything. Studios packaged images, sometimes clumsily, sometimes obviously, sometimes slickly, sometimes with great sophistication. And occasionally, when forced to follow a performer’s lead, they helped to create something powerful and socially important.

Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer were stars of the first order who emerged during the image-conscious era of the mid-twenties. Their movies are still worth watching. When we trace their evolution, from film to film, we do more than get entertained or see strong personalities flowering. We encounter a kind of story working underneath the stories. These actresses used the raw materials of their faces, personalities, and concerns to leave a body of work that reveals a lot about the journey of women in the transitional decade of the 1920s. To watch them is to see the culture move toward a modern sensibility and to see women come into their own.

*   *   *

WHEN GARBO AND SHEARER started their careers, there were only two kinds of women in the movies. Actresses’ images were confined to one-dimensional roles straight out of the nineteenth century. A woman of sexual power was evil, if she chose to exercise and enjoy her power. And a nice woman stayed virtuous, even if she did, like Clara Bow, put on a short skirt and go dancing every night. Those were the choices, vamp or ingenue. Take one or the other. Everything else was just a variation on a theme.

Garbo, by nature aloof and mysterious, was forced to play the vamp, a role she hated. Shearer, who radiated integrity, was forced to play the innocent ingenue, which frustrated her. So they rebelled. Over time, and with some struggle, they persuaded Hollywood to drop the stereotypes and greet the new day. They made the movies safe for real women, and a flood of actresses followed them.

It didn’t happen all at once, but they were able to succeed thanks to certain shared advantages. First of all, they had clout. Each had the power that goes with popularity, and each had that power by the time she was twenty-two. Secondly, they worked at MGM, the studio that cared most about cultivating stars over the long haul. Thirdly, they came along at a time when censorship was relaxed. And finally, their careers happened during a period in history when audiences could not get enough of movies about women.

That last point is all important. Since 1960, female stars have been second-class citizens, but in the twenties and early thirties, women dominated at the box office. The biggest stars were women, and it was a rare month indeed when a male face turned up on the cover of a fan magazine.

Offscreen and on, nothing was more interesting than women’s stories: Women got the vote and were increasingly attending college and pursuing careers. Ten times more women were enrolled in public colleges in 1920 than in 1900. Hemlines were raised from the ankles, where they had hovered for centuries, to just below the knees. Women got to throw away their corsets. In place of corsets, women wore brassieres (a new invention), bound their breasts for a boyish look, or, like Garbo, Shearer, Madge Evans, Jean Harlow, and many others, went braless.

Bobbed hair was part of the new freedom. Though later generations would associate freedom with long hair, to women in the twenties long hair just meant having to tend it, comb it, and tie it up in a severe bun. Short hair was loose and liberating. Young women started wearing makeup, too—and flaunting it, powdering up and applying lipstick in public. To the older generation, this was scandalous. Makeup was regarded as immoral, something associated with bohemians and prostitutes. So was smoking. Bryn Mawr caused a controversy when it lifted its smoking ban in 1925, at a time when a woman’s smoking was still reason for expulsion at many colleges. But by the end of the decade, most colleges had gone the way of Bryn Mawr. Meanwhile, the availability of diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, and pessaries in the twenties resulted in real changes in sexual behavior.

Today, repertory-house audiences get a kick out of the similarities between today and yesterday when they see Norma Shearer going on a self-described orgy through Europe in Strangers May Kiss. What the modern audience is less likely to appreciate is that in 1931, this sort of story was both shocking and extremely new. Not only could this tale not have been told ten or fifteen years earlier, but before the widespread availability of birth control, this story couldn’t have happened.

Movies of the silent era both reflected society’s changes and fueled them. Yet for all this turbulence and excitement, the sexual double standard held on. Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford played virgins—and so did Clara Bow and Gloria Swanson, though they were more fashionably dressed. In 1929, Aldous Huxley wrote of the new generation of women, "They have the right, if not to be less virtuous than their grandmothers were, at any rate to look less virtuous." Looking and seeming were as far as movies dared to go for a time.

Yet fast-forward three years to 1932: Norma Shearer has killed our grandmothers, wrote Motion Picture Magazine:

She has killed what they stood for. She has murdered the oldtime Good Woman. She has cremated the myth that men will never marry that kind of woman. She has abolished that kind of woman. There remain—free souls.

How Shearer did it was by taking the ingenue into the bedroom and making everybody like it. She transformed herself from a nice young thing into the exemplar of sophisticated modern womanhood and became the first American film actress to make it chic and acceptable to be single and not a virgin on screen.

Garbo went in the other direction. She took the evil vamp and turned her into a martyr, a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made every other human emotion or endeavor seem small. The vamp had been a stereotype based on male paranoia and misogyny, but Garbo turned it on its head and used it to give voltage to a romantic vision that was deeper and stronger than anything anyone had ever seen.

*   *   *

IN THE DECADES SINCE their retirement in the early forties, Garbo and Shearer have gone on to different critical destinies. Garbo, often lauded as one of the greatest screen actresses, has been the subject of scores of books and documentaries, while Shearer has been largely ignored, misrepresented, or misunderstood. If there were any justice, Shearer would be universally heralded as a feminist icon. Unfortunately, she made two mistakes that damaged her place in posterity: Romeo and Juliet and The Women.

In the former, at age thirty-three, Shearer flitted about preciously as Shakespeare’s fourteen-year-old-heroine. It was embarrassing. Conversely, The Women was a good picture by any stretch, and Shearer was quite respectable in it, but the role she played, the noble wife, was just this side of sainthood. The combination of those two films, which are the most frequently revived, has fixed an impression of Shearer as some kind of gracious, smiling Pollyanna.

In fact, Shearer was a gracious, smiling subversive. Her most characteristic films, such as The Divorcee and Riptide, told audiences that the loving wife and the proper society gal was, sexually, a loose cannon. Her movies explored women’s feelings about love and sex with an honesty that would be considered frank by modern standards. Garbo was not about confrontation. Garbo movies such as Mata Hari, As You Desire Me, and Camille were all about redemption through conformity. But the two actresses shared one odd, distinctive trait: Their films were invariably about the morality of the women they played. It was as if every plot were just a pretext for the real questions, Who is this woman? Is she good or is she bad?

Always, the answer was that they were good. But they stretched the boundaries of good with every move they made. Like many of the best stars, Garbo and Shearer came along in an era of cultural transition and showed audiences brand new ways to be good people.

Before long, a torrent of other actresses burst upon the culture, making risqué films, usually about fallen women. Garbo and Shearer may not have been responsible for their appearance, but to a large degree they paved the way and set the tone, and they remained the advance guard. Garbo’s Queen Christina, in which she played a bisexual, is the most daring and humane examination of sex and gender the studio system ever produced. And Shearer kept pushing the limits. The near-transparent gown she wore in A Free Soul, which still incites gasps at repertory houses, inspired a 1931 letter to Photoplay calling her (with Harlow) one of the least-dressed women in movies.

To see their films and those of other pre-Code women is to wonder where the American cinema might have gone had censorship not forced Hollywood to change course. Never again, at least not for the rest of the century, would Hollywood ever see such an eruption of female talent: Tallulah Bankhead, Constance Bennett, Joan Blondell, Ruth Chatterton, Mae Clarke, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Ann Dvorak, Glenda Farrell, Kay Francis, Ann Harding, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Dorothy Mackaill, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Margaret Sullavan, Mae West, and Loretta Young came into their own during the pre-Code era.

Many of them made great movies. Most of them made good movies, and all of them played women we’d recognize today as modern. The bubbleheads, the cry babies, and the evil sirens, who populated the screen after 1934 (and which many of these actresses were forced to play), were the result of a Code that did not approve of assertive, free, happy women.

But we approve of them, and it’s time we reclaim them and the pictures they left us. This book is written to help us do that.

1

THE INGENUE GETS A LIFE

At the end of the silent era, Joan Crawford was dancing the Charleston on tabletops, while Norma Shearer was wearing a hoopskirt in the costume romance, The Actress. Fan magazines extolled Shearer’s perfection, her patrician profile, her cozy home life. They talked about her supposed beauty secret, a hot comb she could attach to her car battery. Shearer knew something that her husband, Irving Thalberg, did not know: Safe movies combined with publicity like this was a recipe for oblivion.

It was the coming of sound that would enable Shearer to be seen in a new way. Two years after hanging up her hoopskirt with The Actress, she took the bold step of playing Jerry, the liberated wife in The Divorcee (1930). When Jerry finds out that her husband has cheated on her, she has an inspired reaction. She goes out that night and has sex with his best friend. The key moment in the film comes when the husband, drunk and outraged, decides to leave her. After pleading with him to stay, Jerry loses her temper and unloads on him:

And I thought your heart was breaking like mine. But instead you tell me your man’s pride can’t stand the gaffe. I don’t want to listen. I’m glad I discovered there’s more than one man in the world, while I’m young and they want me. Believe me, I’m not missing anything from now on. Loose women [are] great, but not in the home, eh, Ted? Why, the looser they are, the more they get. The best in the world! No responsibility! Well, my dear, I’m going to find out how they do it!… From now on, you’re the only man in the world my door is closed to!

Welcome to the pre-Code era. Welcome to Norma Shearer. Welcome to the twentieth century.

With The Divorcee, pre-Code films would take off with a vengeance. The picture unleashed a trend toward a sophistication in women’s pictures that would continue unabated until rigid censorship ended the party in mid-1934. Strong women in risqué situations became the winning box-office formula at every studio. While the women in the silent days were like soldiers fighting only up to a certain line and never crossing it, the pre-Code women never stopped taking territory.

Yet even as the era hit full sail, it would usually be Shearer who managed to be more daring than the rest. In one film, it might be a shockingly revealing gown. In another, a string of lovers. In another, a certain lack of repentance. Shearer’s films carried a social implication, suggesting that the stories they told were emblematic of larger truths. That consciousness of social purpose makes Shearer’s movies especially satisfying to modern viewers searching for something racy and unexpected.

That Shearer became the exemplar of modern womanhood was no accident. From the beginnings of her career on up through The Divorcee, her story is one of an unrelenting effort to define and redefine herself in sophisticated terms. She understood public taste as well or better than did Thalberg, at least when it came to her own career. Fan magazines marveled at her sixth sense, in the way that magazines like Rolling Stone marveled at Madonna’s grasp of public attitudes in the 1980s. Indeed, Shearer was as ambitious as Madonna. Marie Dressler, her costar in Let Us Be Gay (1930), called her the most ambitious woman she’d ever met—and Dressler, don’t forget, knew Crawford, too. While Garbo could have retired at twenty-one and lived happily ever after on a chicken farm, Shearer was always restless. Once she became a star, she wanted to become a big star; once big, she wanted to become the biggest. At the height of her stardom, she described herself as a young woman:

I was ferociously ambitious. Often a director, in a weepy scene, would ask me to visualize my mother dying so that I might cry easily.… I couldn’t do it. The only way I could bring the tears was to think about something horrible happening to me.

To read that is to wonder why anyone liked her, and yet it seems that most of her colleagues did, for even after Thalberg died there was no backlash against her. Shearer had spunk. People liked spunk. She once told a story of answering an audition call in New York, when she was still a wanna-be starlet. Universal was looking for eight pretty girls to serve as extras. Norma and her sister Athole showed up and found fifty girls ahead of them:

An assistant casting director walked up and down looking us over. He passed up the first three and picked the fourth. The fifth and sixth were unattractive, but the seventh would do, and so on, down the line until seven had been selected—and he was still some ten feet ahead of us. I did some quick thinking. I coughed loudly and, when the man looked in the direction of the cough, I stood on my tiptoes and smiled right at him. Recognizing the awkward ruse to which I’d resorted … he laughed openly and walked over to me and said, You win, sis. You’re Number Eight.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a particular Shearer fan. In the thinly-fictionalized first section of his story Crazy Sunday, he wrote about her kindness to him, following a party at the Thalbergs’ at which he’d made a drunken ass of himself. (I thought you were one of the most agreeable persons at our tea, Shearer had cabled him.) The rest of the Fitzgerald story was a romantic fantasy, in which the Thalberg character dies and Stella Walker Calman—who has a droopy eyelid rather than Shearer’s lazy right eye—throws herself at the drunken writer! A couple of years later, an inebriated Fitzgerald called MGM story editor Sam Marx in the middle of the night to say he had just completed a novel that he believed would make a great show for Shearer. After waking up Marx, Fitzgerald went ahead and woke up Thalberg, too. The novel: Tender Is the Night. The role he had in mind for her: Nicole.

Graciousness and fierceness. Warmth and ambition. Level-headedness and emotional turbulence. These juxtapositions were the essence of Shearer’s personality, and they’d always been at the heart of her appeal. What the talkies did was make explicit what had been quietly apparent in her silent days. Shearer had a fire inside that could not be concealed, that she did not want to conceal. From the beginning, she built for herself a complex screen image that placed her in an ideal position, when the time came, to be the actress who broke down the barriers.

*   *   *

NORMA SHEARER ENTERED MOTION pictures as an extra in 1920, at the end of what had been a long dark age for American women. The nineteenth century had not gone well. The twentieth century was at least looking interesting. Women had gotten the vote, and an upheaval in women’s roles, women’s clothing, women’s education, women’s employment, women’s sexuality, and virtually everything to do with courtship and marriage had begun.

In the nineteenth century, western culture had offered women a limited life. Men, apparently, wanted it that way. They did their best to sell women visions of themselves as household saints and strove to kill in them any desire for lives that consisted of more than that. The sentimentality with which men idealized good women was reinforced by pseudo-science. The craniologist Carl Vogt, for example, analyzed women’s skulls and concluded that women existed in a kind of arrested state between childhood and adulthood. Even Charles Darwin, in his The Descent of Man (1871), signed off on this quackery.

From the modern vantage point, such efforts to oppress women feel strained to the point of absurdity. But what besides an all-out, concerted effort could have succeeded? After all, for men to

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