Master Thesis Dani Vilu Final

Lund University Daniela Vilu
Centre for Languages and Literature FIMT08, FIMT08, Spring 2020

Spring 2020 Master’s Thesis (One
Master Programme in Film and Media History Year)
Master’s Thesis (One year)
Supervisor: Christo Burman
Seminar Date: 2020-06-03
Feminism, Sex Politics

and Power Dynamics in
Pre-Code Hollywood
Abstract:
The purpose of this work is to investigate the period in Hollywood history called Pre-Code, covering
the years from 1930 through to 1934. This analysis is done from a feminist perspective, looking at
the careers and films of a number of key actresses of the era and the business model of the big
studios of the time. The methodology employed is that of film theories such as semiotics,
psychoanalysis, gender and genre theory in order to find a pathway to answering these questions:
How were the feminist tendencies of the 4 years of Pre-Code carrying subversive messages in
contrast with the status quo of a patriarchal society, which seemed, albeit briefly, to have lost its
identity in the wake of the Crash of 1929? Are the Pre-code films something more than just
“melodramas”, “sex pictures” and “women’s pictures”? For example, how can we talk about cinema
as mirror or the concept of artistic reflexibility when analysing early 1930s Hollywood products?
Presented in a historical context of the Great Depression, this research reflects upon a few films of
the era, aiming to bring to the fore the almost forgotten narratives of valiant female characters upon
the Golden Age of Hollywood and the ‘woman’s film’ of the war era was founded.
Keywords: Pre-Code cinema, feminism, censorship, stars, psychoanalysis, Great Depression, studio
system, 1930s Hollywood
1
Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 3
Purpose and aim ........................................................................................................................ 4
Research question ...................................................................................................................... 4
Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 4
Previous scholarship .................................................................................................................. 6
Context ...................................................................................................................................... 7
Cinema as entertainment for women.............................................................................................. 8
Cinema as mirror......................................................................................................................... 10
Stars ............................................................................................................................................ 16
Psychoanalysis ............................................................................................................................ 24
Spectatorship............................................................................................................................... 30
Marketing and Advertising .......................................................................................................... 33
Genre .......................................................................................................................................... 35
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 44
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 48
Webliography ............................................................................................................................. 50
Filmography................................................................................................................................ 51
Appendix .................................................................................................................................... 54
2
Introduction
The term Pre-Code has been used for decades to define that period in cinema that stretches between
1930 and 1934. One definition comes from an article that appeared in the British film magazine
Sight & Sound in 2014 and reads as follows:
The phrase Pre-Code is bandied about so much in writing about film censorship that one would be forgiven for thinking
it’s a genre term. Historically it refers to a specific period between the announcement of the Hays Code and the formation
of the PCA to actually enforce it. Culturally, the interregnum represented a fertile few years in which the studios tested
the outer limits of propriety with movies of increasing frankness and fearlessness. 1
I believe that this period signifies more than just a time in Hollywood film history when studios
could run amok unsupervised and uncensored before a real censorship institution could be set up.
Rather, it represents an echo of the Jazz Age, but with sound, making cinema all the more vibrant
and all the more exciting. The glamourous lifestyle of the flappers was still fresh in everyone’s mind
and its gaiety was much needed after the 1929 Crash.
Although today they are considered as films about attempts at a sexual liberation of women, the Pre-
Code films revealed to be more about power dynamics in the couple and the representation of
women on screen. The Pre-Code films were successful in displaying the changes that were taking
place in the American society as they were happening. Women were beginning to desire variety in
their lives, different roles than those of wives and mothers. It had begun with the 1920s flapper, but
it was epitomised by the Pre-Code girl and her long, often backless satin cocktail dress.
If the 1920s showed signs of an emerging modern woman in the American society, the early 1930s
helped reinforce her status as equal to the man, both personally and professionally. The late 1930s
would slowly try to channel that feminine power back into the domestic sphere, but for these four
years of Pre-Code, romantic love wasn’t the only thing on women’s mind, or if it was, they could
love the same way men could: with no strings and no past. The studios would call these films “sex
pictures”, the people in charge of censoring them also referred to them as such 2 (fig 8 of Appendix)
and when the Code started being strictly enforced, these became the “women’s pictures”, the
melodramas of the 1940s. By contrast, the appeal the early 1930s films hold to a 2020 audience
means they captured a transitionary phenomenon, immortalised forever on film as a period in which
equality between men and women was attainable. It was seen looming on the horizon as the actresses
of the 1930s began to carve their niche for posterity. Norma Shearer was the liberated professional
who loved fiercely but depended on no man. Greta Garbo was a love priestess, temptress and fallen
1
Mashon, Mike; Bell, James. Sight and Sound; London Vol. 24, Iss. 5, (May 2014): 20,22-26.
2
Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections, Joy, Jason S., Columbia Feature Scrips
http://digitalcollections.oscars.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15759coll30/id/13995/rec/1
3
woman, exquisite in her ‘sins’ committed in the name of love who no man could find fault with.
Marlene Dietrich was the sophisticated and sexually liberated playmate, who enjoyed love and the
seduction game. Mae West was the unconventional woman who beat ageism and the size zero
beauty standard, creating her own persona and adorning it with plenty of sexual innuendos.
Without the breakthrough roles of these screen actresses as well as those of lesser known early
Hollywood sirens like Joan Blondell, Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins and many others, I believe that
the films of the late 1930s, 1940s and 1950s would have been poorer, sadder and less sophisticated.
Stars like Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford all started their careers during the Pre-
Code era, during which they tried on various star personas for size, emerging glorious and more
radiant than ever.
Purpose and aim

The purpose of this research is to analyse a few key films belonging to the Pre-Code era in
Hollywood. My focus with this research will be strictly on films where the main character is a
female. Moreover, I shall also limit my analysis to the drama and the comedy genre, which, for the
purpose of our discussion will represent two sides of the same coin. The aim of this research is to
shine a light on a particular period in film history which finds itself in a Hollywood limbo between
the silent era and the Golden Age, between the silent sexuality of the 1920s and the covert double
entendres of the late 1930s and 1940s.
Research question
The questions we wish to raise in analysing a few selected films from this era are: How were the
feminist tendencies of the 4 years of Pre-Code carrying subversive messages in contrast with the
status quo of a patriarchal society, which seemed, albeit briefly, to have lost its identity in the wake
of the Crash of 1929? Are the Pre-code films something more than just “melodramas”, “sex
pictures” and “women’s pictures”? For example, how can we talk about cinema as mirror or the
concept of artistic reflexibility when analysing early 1930s Hollywood products?
Methodology
The tools at my disposal to help answer these questions are: feminist readings of the chosen films,
reception theories as formulated by well-known film scholars and the capitalist perspective of the
studio system in Hollywood within the context of one of the greatest financial crises the world had
ever seen. These theories will be helpful in establishing whether one could refer to the “women’s
pictures” of the Pre-Code era as feminist in nature or whether the male-dictated male-oriented film
4
industry only created an illusion of catering to a female audience, but busying itself with only
making profit, while maintaining the status quo.
There are two lines of thought that have been recurrent during my research on this period in
Hollywood history: the more sensationalist approach, which focuses on highlighting and enflaming
the differences of the modes of productions of the early 1930s from the post-Breen era, and the more
pessimistic approach, which focuses on the overarching messages that the Pre-Code films carry. If
we are to take the sensationalistic approach, we can look at these films as mere products created for
consumption. The script follows a tried and tested formula, guaranteed to bring in people in the
cinema theatre. This is also reinforced by a cleverly devised marketing strategy, which we shall see,
uses the “sex sells” slogan in a wide array of variations. However, one can argue that the
sensationalistic approach is derived from reality, especially if we are to pay attention to the gritty
dramas and melodramas produced by the Warner Bros. studio.
This brings us to the latter approach, which comes as a response to the situation in society at the
time. The majority of Americans were thrown into abject poverty, so the films of the era provided
not just escapism by showcasing a different world, but also a mirror of the society at the time, in
which the rules were all but forgotten and people resorted to any means necessary in order to survive,
if not thrive. Facing poverty, the law of the jungle is applied. Moreover, one can argue that in this
new bleak society, men and women are equal. The Great Depression meant that both women had to
share in their misery equally. At the same time, the great American public didn’t renounce its puritan
values, thus making sure that once the Jazz Age party was over, it stayed over. The Catholic Legion
of Decency would soon make its mark on the film industry in the States, employing testimonials
from various psychologists who claimed that overly sexual and violent films had a negative
influence on the great public, particularly teenagers.
With the benefit of several decades of hindsight, film scholarship, several film theories as well as
through intermediality, one can map out a way to navigate through the research questions formulated
and advance towards a pertinent and hopefully scholarly conclusion, which will undoubtedly open
the way for more in-depth research and analysis. I shall then employ several film theories when
discussing the films chosen for analysis, in order to avoid any pitfalls that might arise from lack of
depth or breadth. I shall also take into account less cinematic media, like advertising, for the same
purpose, that of comprehensiveness of this complex epoch. This is not an exhaustive research, but
merely an endeavour to better understand feminism in cinema.
5
Previous scholarship
There have been a great number of theoreticians and film scholars whose work has been instrumental
in shaping up this current research. The psychoanalyst theory (Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan) and
semiotics theory have been applied to film by theoreticians such as Christian Metz, Roland Barthes
and Laura Mulvey. Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema as well as her book
Fetishism and Curiosity have been essential research material in helping interpret the cinema of the
early 1930s through a feminist prism.
The extensive feminist work of Molly Haskell, Mary Ann Doane, Jeanine Basinger, Ann Kaplan,
Annette Kuhn and many others have been essential in helping me establish pre-feminist trends in
the Hollywood cinema of the early 1930s.
The films of the early 1930s shaped up a different type of female heroine, distinct from both the
previous decade and the subsequent one. The heroine of the 1920s couldn’t speak so she had to find
other means to express herself, so she belongs to a class of her own. The heroine of the late 1930s
and 1940s had to mould herself to the restrictions of the Code and thus invent another language,
which would turn her either into a femme fatale or a self-sacrificing mother figure. Molly Haskell
sums it most competently:
When the Code went into full force, […] women were conceived of as having sexual desire without being freaks,
villains, or even necessarily European […] Women were entitled to initiate sexual encounters, to pursue men, even to
embody certain “male” characteristics without being stigmatized as “unfeminine” or “predatory.” Nor was their
sexuality thought of as cunning and destructive, in the manner of certain forties’ heroines. 3
Cinema as both an art and mode of entertainment was born out of technology and has represented
modernity par excellence. Thus, as the Jazz Age created the modern woman (as exemplified by the
drastic change in fashion, among other things), this was reflected on the silver screen. We shall thus
argue that cinema was created for women. One might argue that capturing the female face through
the close-up was a product of the male gaze and male imagination. However, as Laura Mulvey and
a fair few other theorists have proven, both men and women can identify with the male gaze. We
shall analyse this theory in detail to prove or invalidate its value. However, a number of essays
written by women about cinema in the early days of the medium suggest that the pleasure of looking
isn’t exclusively male. We shall use these essays to place certain films and film stars in the context
of the era, thus benefitting from a contemporary view on reception theory.
Feminism as a theory is a very complex one, notably when applied to film, which is why I shall aim
to refer to the pro-feminist angles which may surface during my research as ‘pre-feminist’ precepts.
3
Haskell, Molly, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Third edition Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2016, p 123
6
This is to avoid confusion and contradiction with the many other readings of feminist theory that
exist. Mary Ann Doane writes about feminism, when applying it to the concept of ‘femme fatale’:
Even within the space of nine years (1981-1990), feminist theory has witnessed a number of ruptures, displacements of
emphasis, internal antagonisms, and shifting alliances as well as a confrontation with its own assumptions […] Indeed,
it is something of a misnomer to use the term ‘feminism’ since this implies a monolithic position which the sheer variety
of feminisms belies. 4
Feminist theory as a doctrine will encapsulate most readings on a text, for in itself it lacks a rigid
definition, but it always presents the researcher and the reader with a fluid one. I shall not aim to
redefine the concept, but merely to offer a refreshing angle to texts that may at first seem obsolete.
Context
For us to better understand the climate in which the films subjected for analysis were made, we must
also understand the atmosphere surrounding this period, seminal in the history of cinema.
In his paper, Hollywood Censored, Gregory D Black observes:
By 1934 films had become a collaborative, corporate art form. The industry had come a long way from its beginning as
a provider of cheap entertainment for urban immigrants at the turn of the century. Films quickly evolved into a form of
mass entertainment that attracted viewers from every segment of American society. Box office success, it turned out,
frequently resulted from sexually titillating themes and from stories that seemed to glorify gangsters and social deviants.
This in turn brought increasing demands for regulation. 5
In July 1934, the PCA (Production Code Administration, led by Joseph Breen) was created as a
department within the larger institution which was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America (MPPDA). The MPPDA had been founded in 1922, following a series of celebrity
scandals, of which the most famous was the Arbuckle case. Postmaster General Will Hays was the
face of the MPPDA, which at the time of its inception was little more than a PR machine aimed at
making sure that stars in Hollywood were upholding the star images they had been portraying on
film. Since their inception, the major Hollywood studios had no means of self-censorship, which
was now beginning to create problems. During the silent era, issues of morality had been less
flagrant, mostly because actors couldn’t be heard and thus film was more of an art than the realistic
form of entertainment it soon became. However, in 1927 a list of Don’ts and Be Carefuls was
comprised by the MPPDA (see Appendix). It was promptly ignored. In 1930, a journalist, Martin
Quigley, together with a priest, Daniel Lord, came up with a more comprehensive document, The
Code, which took almost four years to be fully enforced (see Appendix).
It is believed that one of the reasons it took four years for the code to be enforced was the Great
Depression. After the Crash of 1929, film studios started seeing significant decline in cinema
4
Doane, Mary Ann, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, New York, 1991
5
Black, Gregory D., Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics and the Movies, Cambridge Univ. Press,
Cambridge, 1994
7
attendance. Thus, banking on the tried and tested formula of “sex sells” and bearing in mind that the
cinema theatres were frequented mostly by women, studio producers began churning out a great
number of films that catered for the female audience, with women as the main characters. Often
these films presented women’s plights in realistic situations, thus mirroring the audience’s feelings.
This was deemed unacceptable by newly formed institutions like The Catholic Legion of Decency,
which fought vehemently for a strict enforcement of the code, going so far as to boycott cinema-
going as a leisure practice.
Despite the idea of sex as sin that was perpetuated and upheld by institutions such as the Catholic
Legion of Decency, some of the films of this period approached sex as less a taboo subject and more
as a device enabling certain protagonists (women) to get ahead in life. This was a world in which
dreams of easy riches lay forgotten, as the Great Depression took over the lives of many Americans
at the start of the 1930s. 6
Cinema as entertainment for women

Women’s roles in cinema have been important since its inception, although research on the roles of
women in this industry that focuses on the beginning of cinema has been insufficient. For instance,
until recently the name of Alice Guy Blanche has been all but forgotten, almost wiped off the annals
of cinema history. With hindsight we are able to assess the heritage left to us by female filmmakers,
screenwriters and screen sirens of the early 1930s. And yet we feel that more could be said or written
about the women who paved the way for Agnes Varda, Ida Lupino, Lynne Ramsay, Amma Assante,
Celine Sciamma. In 1930, British actress Alma Taylor spoke about the importance of cinema in the
lives of women, declaring that cinema “completed Mrs Pankhurst’s work by establishing the
Modern Girl’s right to a good time and evoking her capacity for enjoying one. Women and films
have been closely associated from the commencement of moving pictures. With the invention of
cinema, women secured, for the first time, a form of entertainment which was peculiarly their own." 7
This is a bold statement which must be read within the context of the 1930s, when it seemed that
women were unstoppable, especially on the screen. It had started with the cinema as entertainment
for women and peaked in the late 1920s and 1930s, just before the enforcement of the Production
Code. At the same time, one must feel there was some truth in this statement. When we look at the
information gathered by film scholars like Lea Jacobs and Antonia Lant, who together with Ingrid
6
Jacobs, Lea, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1997
7
Lant, Antonia & Periz, Ingrid (red.), Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, Verso,
London, 2006, p 7
8
Periz curated a valuable collection of essays written by women about the first fifty years of cinema,
we get the impression that cinema presented a major threat to the patriarchal society, showing
women that it was possible to be a successful woman in a specific field. The films of the 1930s had
such women as protagonists: Ruth Chatterton in Female, Bette Davis in Ex-Lady, Katharine
Hepburn in Christopher Strong, Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, Norma Shearer in The Divorcee
and Strangers May Kiss, Tallulah Bankhead in My Sin and many others. A notable observation is
that most of these women embraced their femininity and sexual freedom, succeeded in a world that
was still tailored for men, some even having to overcome great obstacles like being social outcasts,
fallen women, single mothers. Intriguingly enough, Alma Taylor continues by saying: “Already
weakening, the authority of fathers, husbands and brothers over their womankind came definitely
to an end with the opening of cinema”. 8
This might be perceived as a prophetic statement, although the patriarchal authority did cling on to
power for much longer than expected and prophesised in Taylor’s quote. It is important here to note
that, then just like now, Hollywood films were extremely influential outside of the US, setting the
tone for how films were made and how they were supposed to look. It would take decades and
another world war for other countries’ cinema to catch up with the American cinema and surpass it.
It would be even longer until Taylor’s quote would come true. However, if it hadn’t been for the
work laid out by the brave Pre-Code films, the sexual revolution of the 1960s might have happened
later or looked radically different.
Cinema as entertainment for women provided them with an outlet not only for their emotions, but
also served as a projection of their imagination. During the Great Depression in America, studios
looked for and found a great formula for keeping women entertained and coming back to the cinema
theatre. In an essay in 1930, which appears in Red Velvet Seat, curated by Antonia Lant and Ingrid
Periz, writer Violet Taylor exclaimed: “Indeed, the extraordinary novelty of moviegoing for women
[…] cannot be overestimated. Where before had droves of women been allowed, indeed invited, to
amass, to stare, to assemble in darkness, to risk the chance encounter, the jostling and throng of the
crowd?” 9
At Warner Bros they had stories about real women facing real hardships and overcoming them with
equanimity. The roster was led by Joan Blondell and Kay Francis, who offered real women in the
8
London, 2006, p 7
9
London, 2006, p 37
9
audience a glimpse of inspiration which they could use in their own lives. These actresses were
relatable, and they provided the female audience with much-needed entertainment during the bleak
days of the Great Depression. MGM took the concept of entertainment even further, finding that the
more money and glamour they added in a project, the more entertaining the film became. Why?
Because sometimes the audiences were looking for a way out of the hardships of day to day life.
They were looking for the level of glamour that could only come from a star-studded vehicle with
Shearer, Garbo and Crawford at its helm. MGM was the one studio that had “more stars than there
are in heaven” and it lived up to its name, providing the audiences with a high-level entertainment
rarely equalled at the other studios.
Cinema as mirror
The concept of cinema as mirror has a twofold interpretation. First, we take the concept of
reflexivity, meaning that which we seek, find and project onto the characters we see on film. It might
be our own thoughts, fears, feelings and emotions, thus creating a bond between ourselves and said
characters. On a cognitive level, this phenomenon might be explained as a human need to understand
the cinematic story. The first way, and for some the only way, to understand and interpret what is
happening on the screen is to project our thoughts, experiences, part of our being onto the characters,
thus identifying with them, to a certain extent. Secondly, the concept of cinema as mirror has the
implication of the ‘doubling’, the doppelgänger motif. The concept of the doppelganger existed
before cinema was invented, with the most well-known story that of The Strange case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. The idea that one person, one body, can hold two opposite
personalities has fascinated humanity perhaps for many centuries. Thus, cinema as mirror presents
the duality of a character, who, through the mirror motif might reveal a hidden face, a previously
unexplored angle that comes as a surprise and has the ability to shock the audience or other
characters on screen. By contrast, the mirror might also help conceal or apply a new face, a mask,
thus creating a new identity for the character as they interact with the others.
I would like to take the example of a 1933 Barbara Stanwyck vehicle called Baby Face. The film
centres around Lily, a young woman from the wrong side of the train tracks. In order to get what
she wants from life, she must use men, she is told:
A woman, young, beautiful, like you, can get anything she wants in the world. Because you have Power over men! But
you must use men! Not let them use you. You must be a master! Not a slave. Look, here, Nietzsche says, "All life, no
matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation." That's what I'm telling you! Exploit yourself! Go
to some big city where you will find opportunities. Use men! Be strong! Defiant! Use men! To get the t'ings you want.
Taking her friend’s advice, she has been sleeping her way upwards to a top position in a bank. There
is a brief shot of Lily when she is caught kissing her boss in the ladies’ powder room of the bank
10
where she works. Her boss’ boss looks at her through the open door. We can only see the man
framed in the door, and two walls of the powder room, both which have mirrors, through which we
see our protagonist reapplying her lipstick. She is framed, not by one, but by two mirrors. It is
suggested that, by this point in the film, she has applied and reapplied countless of masks, layer
upon layer to hide her true self and advance in her career, that the double mirror motif is used to
great effect. The scene is not only indicative of her duplicitous identity, but also by the idea of
threshold signifying the crossing of an invisible line, a boundary. The man looking at her as she
reapplies her lipstick is standing on the other side of the door (line). He won’t enter the room; thus
he won’t cross the line from his turf to hers. He will not be inappropriate. However, it is Lily who
will walk over to him, thus moving into his turf. Her agency is showcased throughout the film either
through her body movement or camera movement. She will move in towards him, indicating that
she will eventually seduce him and that he cannot resist. She is audacious but not fully duplicitous,
until she is forced by circumstances to play the victim.
As she turns from the mirror towards the man who caught her in flagrante with her boss, for one
moment she looks as if to say “so you caught me. So what? As a woman how else am I going to
advance in this man’s world?”, but then she puts on a demure mask to catch her prey. This idea of
her seducing yet another manager of the bank is reiterated by the film editing and the camera work
which shows the outside of the bank where Lily works panning up yet another floor, while the
audience hears once again the jazzy tunes of St. Louis Woman. Lily has made yet another conquest.
One of the recurring jokes in the film, which is also suggestive of Lily playing a role, putting on a
mask is that whenever she is offered a drink she says “No, thanks, I never touch it” only to change
her mind the next moment with “oh, maybe just a sip” and end up sculling the drink down like a
professional drinker. This can be indicative of Lily hating her background and wanting to move
away from it, but always being made to return to the sort of experience she grew up with, the “swell
start in life” she got from her father, who pimped her out to his friends.
For the audience, having this background information about Lily makes her more of a complex
character than the other Lil from MGM’s Red Headed Woman (1932), played by Jean Harlow.
MGM’s Lil is just a gold-digger with an unsatiated passion for her boss and no scruples. Modern
audiences would find it hard to identify or relate to her, as she comes across as acting on a whim,
rather than forced by circumstances. Warner Bros’ Lily is more realistic in that respect and less of
a caricature. Her being more realistic might also be the reason she has to give up her million dollars
in favour of love. Janine Basinger writes:
11
Of all the genres in Hollywood's history, the woman's film is the most deceptive, as appropriate to the sex that has had
to achieve its goals partly through subversion. Everything the woman's film is, it also isn't. Everything it endorses, it
undermines. Everything it destroys, it reaffirms. This is fundamental to a full definition of the woman's film, and it is
also, I suspect, the main reason for its success. These are not films that tell a lie, like many of Hollywood's escapist
dreams. These are films that tell the truth, but only because they are about the unhappiness of women. They'll tell all
the lies in the world to make that one point clear. 10
Both Baby Face and Red Headed Woman are, for all intentions and purposes, ‘women’s pictures’,
both holding a mirror to the Depression era society, albeit slightly distorted.
Having worked her way to the top of the corporate ladder, Lily has to renounce her wealth and stay
with the man she’s fallen in love with. However subversive this ‘happy ending’ might be, what leads
up to it cannot be clearer: women will need to be without scruples if they want to succeed in a world
of men. This abused and knocked around Lily resonates with a post #Metoo audience more than the
flamboyant, happy-go-lucky Lil from Red Headed Woman, who gets to have her cake and eat it too.
Both women have a lot of agency, they never lack focus and they don’t let minor and major obstacles
like wives, private detectives, murder and suicide get in their way. Lil continues her crusade in
Europe, while Lily becomes the wholesome martyrial woman, renouncing money for love. The
duality of the two characters is evident: while they both seem to be working on the same principles,
one woman type is to recant her errors and choose love, while the other is to go ahead and enjoy
life, sex and adventures in exotic places with millionaires.
Continuing the comparison between the two major studios of this era, MGM and Warner Bros, and
still focusing on the concept of cinema as mirror, we shall now look at two films which at first might
not seem too similar. In A Free Soul (MGM 1931), Norma Shearer, the reigning queen of the MGM
lot, lusts openly after Clark Gable, who plays a mobster that deals with opium and white slavery.
She doesn’t seem too concerned about this at first, as she only wants to have a sexual adventure.
However, the adventure spirals out of control when it is taking over her life completely. As she
comes to realise the extent of her dependence on the new toy boy in her life, her own father descends
into alcoholism before her very eyes. Another mirror scene is evocative of her duplicitous nature.
Jan (Norma Shearer) was left to experiment with a carefree life, encouraged by an unconventional
father. When he finds her in Ace’s (Gable) den, he understands that she, like him, acted on her dual
nature of both upstanding citizen and addict. As she looks in the mirror, Jan sees herself, dishevelled,
dressed in a flimsy robe, evidence of many a passionate night. As Elsaesser and Hagener come to
explain “A look into the mirror necessitates a confrontation with one's own face as the window to
one's own interior self. Yet this look at oneself in the mirror is also a look from outside, a look that
10
Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960, Wesleyan University Press,
Hanover, 1995, p 7
12
no longer belongs to me, that judges or forgives me, criticizes or flatters me, but at any rate has
become the look of another, or "the Other". 11Jan has stepped out of herself in this scene. She looks
at herself in the same way an outsider would. This way she finally realises the extent of her downfall.
The film does not punish her for living free and being governed by her instinct, only for her lack of
self-reflection. After seeing herself in the mirror just as she really is or has become, Jan then sees
her father behind her, finishing another glass of alcohol and understands that both she and her father
have let their addictive selves take over their lives. She will show agency once again, by working
towards the opposite result: she promises her father that she will end the affair with the gambling
mobster as long as he will give up drinking. Her intentions of rescuing herself as well as her father
from a life of ruin are dashed when her father breaks the pact after only a few months of sobriety. A
Free Soul is perhaps one of the more honest and realistic portrayal of sexual dynamics as well as
class dynamics. When mobster Ash (Gable) makes his intentions to marry Jan known to her father,
played by a Lionel Barrymore, the latter exclaims: “The only time I hate democracy is when one of
you mongrels forget where you belong.” Despite being free thinking and unconventional, stooping
to make marriage alliances with a murderous mobster is beneath even him, an alcoholic has-been
lawyer.
Moving from the queen of the MGM lot to a former MGM chorine – Ann Dvorak. In 1932, Dvorak
starred in Three on a Match (Warner Bros), alongside Joan Blondell and Bette Davis. The film,
despite presenting the audience with three central female characters, gives enough screen time to
only two out of three – Vivian (Dvorak) and Mary (Blondell). The third one, although played by
Bette Davis 12, remains two-dimensional. Continuing the mirror motif, the two central characters,
Mary and Vivian are two opposite stereotypes, who, as the narrative unwinds, prove that they have
more in common than initially envisaged. Vivian (Dvorak), having led a sheltered passionless life,
doesn’t know how to react when passion seemingly enters her life. Her spiral into a life of vice and
debauchery is reminiscent of MGM’s Jan in A Free Soul.
However, unlike Jan, Vivian has no agency and no control over her life, until, in a last desperate
act, as she looks in the mirror and sees what she has become, she commits the ultimate sacrifice in
order to save her son. Mary (Joan Blondell), on the other hand, represents Jan’s other side, the one
who had prompted her to make salutary changes in her life. Having ‘been in port for repairs’ on
occasion, as she herself confesses, Mary is street smart. She has learned life’s lessons the hard way
11
Elsaesser, Thomas & Hagener, Malte, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, 2nd edition, Routledge, New
York, 2015 p 57
12
Bette Davis who in time would become much bigger star than both Dvorak and Blondell
13
and is now ready to do the decent thing and become a respectable person, ultimately mirroring Jan’s
happy ending. The ending of Three on a Match also represents a mirror onto society at the time.
Since the film deals with a child kidnapping, in the midst of the Lindberg baby case, the felicitous
denouement of Three on a Match, in which the baby is returned safely to his loving father, was seen
as enough of a morale boost for the American audiences to be passed by censors. Despite the
grittiness of the first two acts, notably the very detailed drug withdrawals that affected Vivian, the
film was championed by the head of the censoring board, Col Jason Joy, who said: “In this case, the
kidnappers come to grief. They can’t get away with it! And it seems to me there is clearly presented
a moral to the effect that kidnapping is one business the American people will rise, as one man, to
overthrow.” 13 Thus, the concept of reflexivity is summoned once again to account for what was
clearly considered questionable behaviour from the censors: in identifying with the characters on
screen, they feel vindicated when the son is reunited with the family and the perpetrators are brought
to justice.
A lot more can be said about cinema as mirror from the perspective of the close-up, the ultimate
symbol of scrutiny, self-reflection as well as awe. Malte Hagener and Thomas Elsaesser explain:
Now the metaphor of the cinema as mirror blocks this passage to any world clearly labelled either ‘outside’ or ‘inside’,
rendering the relationship of spectator and screen considerably more complicated […]Close-ups enable the spectator
not only to see (aspects of) the world in a previously unknown light, but also to look at him/herself as if in a mirror,
since the close-up typically shows a face, or gives the world the ability to look back at us. 14
Elsaesser and Hagener quote Béla Balázs extensively when discussing the metaphor of cinema as
mirror. Balázs’ writings on the close-up in cinema are very perceptive, especially when we consider
that they were written at a time when the art of the close-up was just being discovered and explored
to its fullest potential. Balázs observes: “Since film permits of no psychological explanations, the
possibility of a change in personality must be plainly written in an actor's face from the outset. What
is exciting is to discover a hidden quality, in the corner of the mouth, for example, and to see how
from this germ the entire new human being grows and spreads over his entire face.” 15
Elsaesser and Hagener comment: “With this observation Balazs outlines a crucial distinction
between "to-belooked-at-ness", or "spectacle" and "progress-through-juxtaposition", or "narrative"
(an opposition which was to become so important in feminist film theory of the 1970s), while he
13
Jason S. Joy to Vincent Hart, September 2, 1932, Three on a Match file, Production Code Administration papers,
MPAA Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Center for Motion Picture Study, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Beverly Hills.
14
York, 2015 p 57
15
Bela Balázs, preface to Visible Man, cited from the translation by Erica Carter and Rodney Livingstone, in Bela
Balázs: "Visible Man, or the Culture of Film" (1924). Screen, 48, 1, 2007: 101
14
also points to another constant tension that has haunted film theory ever since, namely an oscillation
between mimetic-phenomenological and semiotic-symbolic approaches. 16
On the relationship between the close-up, spectatorship and the feminist theory as formulated by
Laura Mulvey, Gillian Rose writes: “The implications for cinema spectatorship are that audiences
may refuse to be positioned in the ways that Mulvey suggested they would be, as men. Instead, men
and women in the audience may be positioned while watching a film in ways that correspond to the
dynamics of their own fantasies.” 17
Rose also uses the concept of ‘masquerade’ to make her counter argument about the castration
theory, detailed in Laura Mulvey’s famous essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975). To
summarise Mulvey’s arguments, Rose states:
Mulvey focuses on certain aspects of the cinematic image – its spatial organisation, the scale of what it shows, its
orchestration of looks between the actors on the screen and between the audience and the screen, and in particular the
gendering of who sees and who is seen in certain ways – in order to characterise a way of cinematic seeing that is both
gendered and engendering. 18
Let us take again the example of the 1932 film Three on a Match to test both Mulvey’s theory and
Balázs’ posit. The director Mervyn LeRoy’s effective use of close-ups, particularly in the dance
scene between Vivian (Ann Dvorak) and her new acquaintance, soon to be lover, Mike, is an
indication of both the “orchestration of looks between the actors on screen” and “the possibility of
a change in personality [that] must be plainly written in an actor's face”, which Balázs postulates.
During this pivotal scene, the audience can clearly register both the physical attraction between the
two characters as well as the change suffered by Vivian, which will prompt her to leave her husband
and child and pursue a life of indulgence and debauchery. The film continues using close-ups to
highlight the changes in personality suffered by Vivian. In one striking close-up, she is seen
emaciated and without make-up, with dark circles round her eyes, as she asks her old friend Mary
to help her with money. Her progression, or better said regression is further pinpointed by another
close-up towards the end of the film, when she is seen and heard as having drug withdrawal
symptoms. As she overhears her son’s kidnappers plot his murder, Vivian’s sense of despair is
marked by a brief close-up. This encapsulates all her pain, anguish and dejection at having failed as
a mother and as a woman. This is followed by her sudden spring into action for one last attempt at
redemption. She must do something lest her very young son might end up paying for her follies. We
16
York, 2015 p60
17
Rose, Gillian, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th edition, Sage,
London, 2016, p 175
18
Rose, Gillian, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th edition, Sage,
London, 2016
15
finally see her in a heart-breaking close-up as she is looking in the bathroom mirror, just before she
jumps to her death in a bid to let the police know the whereabouts of the kidnappers. Her split-
second mirror close-up just before she jumps, contains the essence of her tormented character: a
face almost distorted in both physical pain from the drug withdrawals and spiritual pain from having
put her son at risk of death. Her ultimate sacrifice is etched on her face, an almost beautifying sense
of elation and redemption.
Matthew Kennedy, in his biography on Joan Blondell, makes a poignant observation on the film’s
ending “The idiom-filled dialogue had forward momentum and gutter-inspired realism. With its
uncompromising conclusion, Three on a Match became a primal scream against the injustices
visited upon women.” 19 There is only redemption in death for Vivian, whose transgressions are too
unfathomable to be forgiven by a 1930s audience, who think that, with her death, justice has been
served. She had committed a sin against the institution of marriage and, worse still, against her own
sacred status as a mother. The psychological details of her character, that a 21st century audience
might find plausible enough to justify her, if not excuse her, were almost inexistent at the time.
Fortunately for contemporary gender studies scholars and film historians, Three on a Match exists
to offer a perspective on the real and imagined struggles, battles and successes of a 1930s woman.
Stars
MGM was the studio that boasted “more stars than there are in heaven” and that was only a slight
exaggeration. As far as the female stars were concerned, for the audiences of the time there was
none greater than Norma Shearer, who was the queen of the lot. She was apt to come out of her
comfort zone as a performer and even change her image completely with a series of films that
ignored the rules of the Production Code at every turn. She won an Oscar for her role in The Divorcee
(1930), which was a far cry from the virginal ingenues she portrayed on the screen until then. If
Norma Shearer had one major competitor for her audiences’ affections, this was Greta Garbo, whose
mystique and famously private nature makes her today as great a star as she was when she was at
her peak. If Norma Shearer’s star persona diminished over the years, despite her portraying
womankind’s many facets (ingenue, whore, mother, wife, mistress), Garbo’s remained just as
mystifying, mesmerising and attractive, perhaps due to her always keeping a part of herself hidden
from the public, allowing them to guess what she was really like in real life as well as project their
own dreams onto that mesmerising face. Garbo’s appeal remained undefined. There was no label
one could pin on her and make it stick. Her vamp roles in the 1920s transcended the vamp image as
19
Kennedy, Matthew, Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes (Hollywood legends series) University of Mississippi, 2007
16
trademarked by Theda Bara in the 1910s. Her fallen woman roles of the early 1930s transcended
the sexual insatiability, playfulness and magnetism portrayed by Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford.
There was more spiritual passion and yearning for supernatural love in Garbo’s performances that
put her on a different league from most of her contemporary stars. Comparing Garbo to Mae West,
Molly Haskell writes: “Mae West, self-created, is both anima and animus, while Garbo as that other
great androgyne, is the anima of no single auteur or even society, but is a natural force, a principle
of beauty that, once set into motion, becomes autonomous.” 20
In a league of her own, but with much earthier, if not camper attributes, stands Mae West, the star
of Paramount. Paramount, despite having been one of the big five, it was the most affected by the
Great Depression. It went into administration in 1933 and was saved only by Mae West’s success
at the box office. Her camp, almost satirical performances are hard to place in a panoply of screen
goddesses of the 1930s. Molly Haskell writes of her:
Mae West, who shared some of Harlow’s low-down lasciviousness, could not be used in the same way, for with her, as
with Dietrich, there was no room for any other member of the female sex. Indeed, so complete was West’s androgyny,
that one hardly knows into which sex she belongs, and by any sexual-ideological standards of film criticism, she is an
anomaly – too masculine to be a female impersonator, too gay in her tastes to be a woman. 21
Hers is one of the most recognisable names of the Pre-Code screen actresses, alongside such names
like Norma Shearer and Miriam Hopkins (who was also at Paramount and whose sophistication,
sass and ethereal qualities made her perfect for a Lubitsch heroine “who often played the “wild-nice
girl,” the southern lady of breeding who would try anything once” 22), Joan Blondell and Kay
Francis. Unlike such stars of more conventional beauty, Mae West was representative of such
sexuality that is hard to take seriously, notably for a contemporary audience. Film historian Mick
LaSalle writes of Mae West:
West embodied the power of sex, but her looks didn’t match the representation, lucky for her. That West was a husky
woman in mid-life, not a gorgeous woman of thirty, made what she did palatable and possible. […] That men should be
so helpless before the sight of this middle-aged, heavy set lady seems comical in itself – at first. West turns the tables
on us. In one of the most unsettling and bizarre scenes of the entire era, she sings “Sister Honky-tonk” and then,
stretching out her arms, she moans and groans and licks her lips in a simulation of pre - orgasmic ecstasy. This is
tasteless, alarming and wonderful. And it’s no joke, it’s just enough of a joke. Had West looked like Garbo, they would
have burned her at the stake. 23
20
21
22
University of Chicago Press, 2016, p131
23
LaSalle, Mick, Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, 1. ed., St. Martin's Press, New York,
2000), p 198
17
What she represented was not just female sexuality, but female wit and empowerment. Her heroines
weren’t necessarily required to fall in love and get married by the last reel. They didn’t need to.
They were self-sufficient. This in itself was threatening the status quo. The powerful men in
Hollywood weren’t exactly threatened, as they were ultimately to gain from the box office success
of these modern women. From this angle, Mae West was more powerful than Shearer, Garbo and
Stanwyck, for they all had to concede that the power of love was the all-conquering force in a
woman’s life. Mae made her own rules based on her passions and desires, governed by her instinct
and acumen as businesswoman who made free love her business. Her star image was carefully and
cleverly chiselled, taking the double standards and turning them on their heads. Her attitude towards
love didn’t have the spiritual reverence of Garbo’s love, ‘who loved just for the sake of love, who
loved the love and not the lover’. Mae West loved the lover as well as the love, and as many as she
liked. Unlike West, most other stars of the Pre-Code era had to conform to the rules of the day. Even
Norma Shearer, the biggest star at the biggest studio in town, at the end of films like The Divorcee,
Strangers May Kiss and A Free Soul had to give in to traditional form of love, compromise and get
married at the end, most often to a man who, at least to modern audiences, showed very few
redeeming qualities. The French novelist Colette writes about Mae West:
She alone, out of an enormous and dull catalogue of heroines, does not get married at the end of the film, does not die,
does not take the road to exile, does not gaze sadly at her declining youth in a silver-framed mirror in the worst possible
taste; and she alone does not experience the bitterness of the abandoned “older woman”. […] To enlighten my
judgement, I would have liked America to send us a great deal of Mae West, since she is the auteur and the principal
interpreter of her films. 24
With regards to the compromise ending, Jeannine Basinger does make a poignant observation in her
book A Woman’s View, How Hollywood Spoke to Women: “Isn't it interesting, then, that when a
woman's film shows a woman in power for eighty-five minutes and reverses that in the last five
minutes ("Oh, Maude, give up your presidency. Come back to me and the children."), everyone
seems to feel that this reversal defines the entire movie more than the rest of the film does?” 25 Indeed
it is, but most screenwriters of the era had to compromise and shoehorn in a fairy-tale ending for
fear the films would not attain that much coveted box office success. Despite the apparent freedom
of sprit, the double standard was alive and thriving. However, some films managed to add well-
scripted commentaries to the double standards that were practiced in society at the time (and which
are still alive today).
24
London, 2006, p 441
25
Hanover, 1995
18
For instance, The Divorcee goes beyond the concept of double standard by implying not only that
men are allowed to philander, and women aren’t, but also by suggesting that when women do it,
they cease to be “decent”. When the husband in the film finds out that the wife has “balanced our
accounts”, he retorts by saying “I always thought you were the most decent thing in the world!” By
this he not only implies that he had fetishized her, condemning her of being incapable of human
mistakes, but also now, that she’s proven herself human, she is no longer a decent person. Men are
allowed to cheat on their wives and still be considered decent people, but for women, the concept
of decency is, as most things that are pinned on the “fairer sex”, a much more complicated one. Jerry
(Norma Shearer) stops being “decent”, at least in the eyes of her husband, as soon as she’s lowered
herself to the same level as him. The man can live and thrive in the society without being decent, or
better yet, can redefine the concept of decency any way he might choose.
This idea is reiterated by the scene following the wife’s confession: embittered and frustrated, with
his masculinity in tatters, the husband arrives to their friends’ wedding party completely inebriated
and causes a scandal. While evidently uncomfortable, the friends at the party try to smooth things
over by forgetting the incident. Strangely enough, the husband’s confession of infidelity to the wife
was also followed by a party, in which, albeit hurt, the wife managed to keep her composure in front
of the other party friends, even though she was in the presence of the woman her husband had slept
with and she knew it. The nature of the emotions felt by both the wife and the husband as well as
the manner in which they react to those emotions is a perfect illustration of the inherent flaws in the
society of the 1930s as well as of today: The wife must keep up appearances, suffer in silence and
endure the pains of the heart when she is betrayed. The husband cannot and will not keep up
appearances, even though no more than his pride is hurt. In the end, the reconciliation is imminent,
mainly due to the overarching wisdom and unending love the wife has for the husband. The message
is quite a traditionalist one: that the wife belongs to her husband and that, in spite of him not being
a decent person, she will still love him unconditionally (almost as a mother).
However, one can argue that by highlighting the two ways in which the man and woman differ, the
stances they adopt and the maturity with which they deal with the situations they are facing, the
film, while not fetishizing the female character, allowing her to make mistakes, gives her the
opportunity to make a strong case against the double standards women are faced with. The Divorcee
might have been too subtle a fable for the American society to draw wisdom from, if we are to judge
by how little changed in society at the time. One might also argue that things were already changing
at a rapid pace, gender roles were becoming more fluid and the foundations of the status quo were
beginning to show wear and tear. With such threats from such prominent public figures like Mae
19
West and Norma Shearer is it any wonder that the male Catholics in power saw it necessary to form
the Catholic Legion of Decency so that they continued to “protect their American values” and stop
giving women so much power, both onscreen and off?
The terms ‘star system’ and ‘studio system’ are interchangeable, as they define the same structure
of the American film industry that was active in the 1930s and 1940s (and to some extent in the
1950s and 1960s). It is important to keep both denominations in mind when we discuss the films of
the 1930s in a pre-feminist context, for as much power as stars of the era had, the studios were the
ones ‘running the show’.
Warner Bros was self-titled the ‘workingman’s studio’, and Molly Haskell cleverly observes that, it
“led the way as the toughest and the softest, the studio most likely to advance the cause of woman
as a working member of society and most likely to pull the rug out from under her with a sentimental
ending.” 26 Warner Bros was known for gritty realistic films like I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,
Heroes for Sale, The Mayor of Hell and boasting names like Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney,
but also for the lavish Busby Berkeley numbers which are not only more spectacular and indigenous
to Hollywood than the imported follies of Ziegfeld, are also more celebratory and less degrading of
the female image. Maintaining a careful balance between abstraction and personalization, between
the symmetrical and the erotic, Berkeley pays tribute to both the whole and the parts of a woman in
a way that none of the fetishists of later decades and decadence have seemed able to do. 27
The queen of the lot at Warner Bros, and certainly the best paid star, was long considered to be Kay
Francis, whose exotic beauty and tall frame made her stand out. Despite being a big box office draw
at Warner Bros, it was when she was loaned to Paramount that she scored one of her biggest hits –
Trouble in Paradise (1932). In this, she forms a love triangle with Herbert Marshall and Miriam
Hopkins after she hires Marshall to be her secretary. Francis plays a successful corporate executive
in this delicious Lubitsch comedy, who ultimately lets Marshall rob her blind, both of her heart and
the contents of her safe. Her star power diminished greatly after the strict enforcement of the
Production Code and she is now lesser known than most of her peers (except among early film
afficionados), who were less successful than her at the time. Unfortunately, Kay Francis’ star
persona didn’t last beyond the mid-thirties, despite her magnetic presence on-screen. Jeanine
26
27
20
Basinger dedicates almost an entire chapter to Kay Francis and even has her beautiful face on the
cover of her book A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women. Of Francis Basinger says:
When one thinks about Hollywood and fashion and glamour, there is one star of the woman's film who stands out
beyond any other as representative of those concepts. It is Kay Francis, who became a star only because of fashion and
glamour, and only because of the woman's film genre. Her career is absolute proof of the importance of clothes, makeup,
and jewelry both on and off the screen. 28
Her sophisticated and alluring screen persona was only paralleled by that of Norma Shearer of
MGM, even though her legacy could not compare with that of Shearer’s. For one, Shearer had acting
range, while Francis, as Basinger said, had only glamour.
Obviously, Kay Francis can't act. Acting is not what she is doing onscreen. Being there is what she is doing, and at that
she is an Olympic champion. She is presence, not talent. Acting for Kay Francis is a matter of fashion. She depicts
boredom by lifting her arm to allow the slow fall of a sleeve off her shoulder. Anger she shows by crushing some roses
worn at her waist, and passion is fingering a brooch on her bosom. Defiance is kicking a long skirt around behind her
to facilitate and announce her departure, and happiness is lifting up the full skirt of her dirndl with both hands to reveal
her lace-edged petticoat. For tragedy, she wears no jewelry, no ruffles, and no flowers, for she knows that a serious
situation calls for a plain dress that offers a viewer no distractions, no apologies. 29
What is important to observe here is that Kay Francis was not the only one in her star category to
have the allure, the presence without the talent. In the 1930s, just like today, there were stars who
became stars not for their talent, but for the aura they brought to the screen. They were the spectacle
in themselves, regardless of the narrative they were presenting to the audience. In the early 1930s,
Kay Francis is the best example of that type of star. She might be in the same league as Jean Harlow,
except that Jean Harlow’s star persona has lasted much longer due to her almost boundless sex
appeal. Kay Francis, on the other hand, can be regarded as a time capsule, where women glorified
a certain type of glamour and style and couldn’t get enough of it, at least for a while.
If the audiences were looking for more grit and realism, they would turn to stars like Barbara
Stanwyck, who is perhaps the only female star who started in the late 1920s and had a career that
lasted until the 1980s without becoming a caricature of herself or advertising her availability in the
newspaper. Her career encapsulated melodramas, film noir, westerns, screwball comedies and TV
dramas. Her realistic portrayals fit in with all these genres and her female characters were always
the strongest and most resilient. Being a freelance actor in a time where the rules were made by the
big studios perhaps meant that she was free to create her own image, which brought her the longevity
much coveted by her peers.
The quintessential Warner Bros Pre-Code star was Joan Blondell, who starred in Berkeley
trademarks like Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Dames. Outside of the musical
28
Hanover, 1995, P 152
29
Hanover, 1995, P 153
21
comedies she also appeared in a number of melodramas at the studio, chief among them Three on a
Match. Blondell played the street-smart girl next door type with an utmost vivacity and energy,
making every one of her characters likeable. In many ways, she was the precursor of a Rosalind
Russel in His Girl Friday (1939) and even Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938), being
able to be sexy, witty and strong-willed at the same time. Her performances had almost the same
realism qualities as those of Barbara Stanwyck, with the only exception that Barbara Stanwyck
managed to avoid being typecast, her career spanning many decades, film genres and even media.
Blondell’s star persona was, although not one-dimensional, quite straightforward, not bringing much
sophistication to her roles and not building an aura of mystery surrounding her characters, like Garbo
would. She almost always portrayed strong willed women who know how to look after themselves
and who will not let any man humiliate them. Her screen presence always commanded attention.
Women of the 1930s could identify themselves easily with the characters she portrayed – often
street-smart dames who had been pushed around, perhaps misunderstood by the society, but always
able to crack a joke and a smile and ultimately always acting on their best intentions.
While the Warner Bros stars had wit, charisma and a naturalness that resonated with the audiences,
the MGM stars has glamour and sophistication. Paramount was in a league of its own with European
talent galore (Dietrich, Lubitsch, von Sternberg) and stage talent Mae West thrown in for good
measure. Norma Shearer was the MGM queen and it is considered that she was the one to set the
tone to what is now known as ‘Pre-Code’.
Molly Haskell defines two types of the Hollywood woman: the superwoman and the superfemale.
The superfemale, as exemplified by Norma Shearer, Joan Blondell, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis and
Barbara Stanwyck, manages to survive and thrive in a society ruled by men while keeping her
‘womanly’ attributes, her femininity. The superfemale has a higher than average intelligence, most
often more so than that of her male counterparts and she isn’t afraid to use it to her advantage. The
superwoman, on the other hand adopts male attributes, either instinctively or after a series of failed
efforts, in order to gain respect in a man’s world. Examples of the superfemale are Katharine
Hepburn in Christopher Strong, Ruth Chatterton in Female (although she will eventually have to
play being a superfemale in order to win over her man who wants just a woman, not a superwoman)
and Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. Similarly, Mae West’s screen persona fits in with the
superwoman, for, despite being “all woman”, she is not without male attributes and attitudes. The
“superfemale” is:
22
a woman who, while exceedingly “feminine” and flirtatious, is too ambitious and intelligent for the docile role society
has decreed she play. She is uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to rebel completely; her circumstances are
too pleasurable. […] The other type is the “superwoman”—a woman who, like the “superfemale,” has a high degree of
intelligence or imagination, but instead of exploiting her femininity, adopts male characteristics in order to enjoy male
prerogatives, or merely to survive. 30
To understand better the concept of superwoman, we shall look at Queen Christina in more detail.
In Queen Christina, Greta Garbo embodies the superwoman par excellence. In a male dominated
world, there are few examples of the superwoman character that illustrate Haskell’s definition more
perfectly. Before the Hepburn androgyny ideal there came the Garbo embodiment of androgyny in
its splendour. Although she is dazzlingly beautiful in the classical sense, Garbo’s extra quality that
transcends sexual labels of pure femininity going so far as define gender fluidity in a pre-feminist
cinematic reading. She can rule like a man, act like a man to the point where she is mistaken for a
man and she can love both like a man and a woman. She can also love both a man and a woman
with almost the same intensity. In Queen Christina, Garbo’s character can also live like a man, a
privilege very few other Pre-Code female characters can boast. Her strength allows her to love
whoever she wants, regardless of the consequences. The end of the film sees her defiant and
triumphant, taking her destiny into her own hands. True, her lover lies dead and she has had to
abdicate the throne, but in the end, she has won her independence. One feels that the circumstances
of the production of Queen Christina must also be mentioned. This was Garbo’s pet project, for
which she greatly fought and negotiated with MGM. It feels like an anomaly when discussed within
the context of the Pre-Code environment, but Garbo’s star power accounts for her being allowed to
make this film. Greta Garbo also had executive power over who would star alongside her in the
film, as her contract with MGM allowed her creative control.
However, despite the promise of feminism and femininity that came with the freedom and
occasional sexual adventure of the early 1930s, the new woman didn’t arrive. She was merely
glanced, previewed, modelled then taken off production. Even with the female form and substance
in high profile as she was during what were the ‘women’s pictures’, her multifaceted persona didn’t
allow for a full flourish, for the soil wasn’t ready. It would take another great war and decades of
kitchen drudgery and hundreds of “women’s pictures” in which the heroines had to be femme
fatales, wives, mothers, whores, but mostly asexual goddesses fetishized not only by a public, who
felt ‘stuck’ with too many screen sirens and not enough American heroes, since they were off to
fight the war, but also by their on-screen partners.
30
23
Molly Haskell is right in claiming that the denomination of ‘woman’s pictures’ was detrimental to
a film’s being taken seriously by both audiences and critics. Having a film labelled as such made it
unworthy of full praise or less of a contender to be seen as not only proper art, but even proper
entertainment. There has always been a stigma that accompanied labels such as “woman’s picture”,
“like a woman”, “girly”, “like a girl”, implying that there was something inherently wrong with said
film, feeling, mode of expression. We are finally starting to realise the shortcomings of our language
use, which has been inherently patriarchal. For instance, film scholars have avoided the term
“actress” because they felt there was something demeaning about it, denoting cheapness or a statute
lesser than that of an actor. In the English language there’s also been the word “starlet”, suggesting
a lesser star, but only to define and denote a woman. We’ve never heard of male starlet, indicating
that the occurrence was too rare to earn a name. If a male actor was not an A lister, he would be
referred to as a B picture actor, but never a starlet. Thus, we are biased against gender from the get-
go.
Psychoanalysis
Christian Metz makes a startling observation in his book Psychoanalysis and Cinema – The
Imaginary Signifier:
The child who sees its mother’s body is constrained by way of perception, by the ‘evidence of the senses’, to accept that
there are human beings deprived of a penis. But for a long time – and somewhere in it for ever – it will not interpret this
inevitable observation in terms of an anatomical difference between the sexes (=penis/vagina). It believes that all human
beings originally have a penis and it therefore understands what it has seen as the effect of a mutilation which redoubles
its fear that it will be subjected to the a similar fate (or else, in the case of the little girl after a certain age, the fear that
she has already been subjected to it). 31
First, the use of ‘it’ instead of ‘he/she’ is unnerving and indicative of a disregard for a specific
distinction between male and female. This, as Laura Mulvey has proven, is an important one,
especially when considering the psychoanalysis theory. The lack of a penis in the female
appearance, which presents itself as a menace.
The female body is not only seen as ‘the other’, something to be both revered and feared, but also
as what the male is not, something which needs an external factor in order to feel complete. In all
the standard Hollywood films, both pre and during the Production Code, the overarching message
shoehorned in the last reel of the film was that women needed the right man in their lives to feel that
their life is fulfilled. In her article Gazes/Voices/Power, Jackie Byars observes on this Freud claim,
31
Metz, Christian, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
Ind., 1982, p 69
24
which has been further posited by Metz, and further cites Nancy Chodorow’s work on
psychoanalysis:
Because girls are parented by a person of the same sex […] they experience themselves as more continuous with the
external world than do boys. Chodorow finds that female ego boundaries are more flexible than those of males and that
their sense of identity is more fluid; females define themselves in terms of relationships rather than in terms of
separateness and individuality. 32
Even for the independent, intelligent and sophisticated Pre-Code woman, love, the right kind of
love, embodied by the right man (usually in the form of the matinee idol) prevails. Taking both
Metz’ and Mulvey’s readings into consideration one can ascertain that, driven by the fear of
‘castration’, men are working to convince themselves that the woman’s psyche is uncomplicated
and that women’s needs do not go beyond the traditional dream of having a home and a family.
Let’s take the case of Female (1933). In it, Ruth Chatterton plays the CEO of an automobile
company. Moreover, she is not married, nor does she want to get married. She is strong, confident
and independent, running her father’s business ‘just like a man would’. In the boardroom she strikes
fear into all her male employees. She then selects an attractive one from her staff to invite home for
dinner. She seduces him. When he confesses his love to her, she bangs her fist on the table, says
“That’s enough of that!” and arranges his transference to the Montreal branch. She confesses to one
of her friends: “a long time ago, I decided to travel the same open road that men travel. So, I treat
men exactly the way they've always treated women.” This bold statement is, of course, received
with surprise and scepticism, by both the audience and her friend. However, she follows her life
philosophy through. Jeanine Basinger cleverly points out that in Female, Ruth Chatterton’s
character succeeds in manipulating her love interest, played by George Brent – the epitome of 1930s
matinee idol, all through to the end:
As she conducts a masterful search for Brent, finally finding him in a small-town carnival, once again having fun in the
shooting gallery, […] She rushes right up to him and says, "I can't go on without you. I'm not playing a part. I'm not a
superwoman. I'll marry you if you still want me to." This, however, is actually yet another performance, her last brilliant
act of tycoonery. When he ignores her, she adds that she is going to lose her business because she was supposed to be
in New York the next day but came looking for him instead. While she watches him shrewdly, his face is to the camera,
his back to her. An audience can see her wise look as she waits for him to do exactly what he does: rescue her. It's the
firewood trick all over again. When he agrees, the audience can see the knowing twinkle in her eye: she's landed her
man the way she ran her factory. 33
Thus, a seemingly docile Ruth Chatterton promises to George Brent that she will have “9 children”
and that she doesn’t want to see the automobile factory or the boardroom ever again, leading the
audience to believe that love or what is superficially perceived as such, has conquered once more.
However, as Basinger points out, the male character is duped into thinking he is the one saving the
32
Pribram, E. Deidre (red.), Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, Verso, London, 1988, p 113
33
Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, Chatto & Windus, London, 1994, p 462
25
day and implicitly having his manhood restored. His pride, fuelled by his fear of castration, is what
prompts him to reject her when she actively tries to seduce him: "I was engaged as an engineer, not
a gigolo." Later, when, after a night of passion (after she’s finally seduced him by posing as a damsel
in distress), he comes to her office with a marriage license only to be turned down, he explodes:
“I suppose you think you're too superior for marriage and love and children, the things women were born for. Say, who
do you think you are? Are you so drunk with your own importance you think you can make your own rules? Well,
you're a fake. You've been playing this part so long you've begun to believe it. The great superwoman! Cracking your
whip and making these poor fools jump around. You and your new freedom. Why, if you weren't so pathetic, you'd be
funny.”
In this instance, the man is using the marriage license as a weapon to ‘domesticate’ the woman, or
better yet as a shield against her menacing sexualised being that is threatening his masculinity. What
is also interesting to observe here is that when Chatterton behaves like a man, she is so intimidating
to Brent that he doesn’t even consider her as a potential sexual partner. To him, a woman being as
sexually free as a man is a much more dangerous element than a woman being feminine, her
aggressive seduction game being perceived as a clear attack on his ego. It spells an unknown and
unprecedented danger. Therefore, Chatterton has to let him believe she is a damsel in distress,
feigning the familiar vulnerability of the “weaker sex”, when she pretends to need his help to make
fire. Her ruse pays off, as he falls in love too quickly to even propose, jumping ahead of himself,
making plans of marriage without considering what she wants. In the last act the audience are led to
believe that, despite acting contrary to all we’ve seen so far, Chatterton’s character has finally come
to her senses and chosen to dedicate her life to making her husband happy. But, just as Basinger
observes, she is just continuing the masquerade. The audiences of 1932 were entitled to their
conventional happy ending and even with the lax Hays Office policing the studio releases, Female
wouldn’t have gotten the seal of approval had Chatterton’s character seduced Brent and then
forgotten all about him after a while or if they had both agreed that marriage was too great a
commitment for a modern couple.
As strong a female character as Chatterton portrays, hers isn’t the quintessential fetishized female
persona. She falls under Haskell’s category of the superwoman, not the superfemale. At the border
between the superfemale and the superwoman sits Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich loves to play with the
societal conventions of femininity, flaunting them one minute and returning to them the next. She
is all woman and yet she is more than that. She dons the occasional male suit, like in Blonde Venus
and Morocco, but she remains inherently feminine in her relationships, knowing where her strengths
lie and how to take advantage of the male gaze as a ‘steppingstone’. Of Dietrich’s type of screen
performance, which in a way is also related to that of Mae West’s, Molly Haskell writes: “At its
best, the sex goddess’s alienation is Brechtian, preserving a dramatic unity while suggesting a
26
certain consciousness of effect: Beyond the pantomime of the regal presence—the seduction, the
surrender, the posture of helplessness—we occasionally hear the actress chuckle, or see her peeking
out from behind her lines.” 34
One of the best examples of such performance is Blonde Venus, with an overtly and covertly
fetishized Dietrich as the nucleus around which all the men in her life must circle. The film starts
with the image of a lake, on which a young woman glides gracefully as if she were a water nymph.
She is even referred to as such, a mystical creature, the object of adulation by many men. The men
are a group of students led by Herbert Marshall. An almost ethereal looking Marlene Dietrich is
seen in the water, wearing nothing but a frown, urging the group of students who came to ogle at
her and the other chorines to go away. Josef von Sternberg’s choice of scene transition is quite
suggestive: from a naked Dietrich splashing in the water we see a naked young boy, her son,
splashing in the water, this time a bathtub in a shabby looking flat instead of the idyllic pond we see
at the start. The almost imperceptible hint of the mother and son bathing together is given to the
audience, moving into oedipal territory. This is one of the layers on which the entire plot of Blonde
Venus is built. The setting has changed and several years have passed. It is suggested that Dietrich’s
Helen fell under the charms of Marshall’s rather bland medical student, Ned Faraday. In the years
which have passed he graduated and has become a fully-fledged chemist. However, he is not rich,
and the ever-glamourous Dietrich looks simply out of place in their small apartment, struggling to
look after their young son. When she has to step off her humble pedestal her husband has built for
her, she does it to step on an even higher one, built by the audiences, represented in the film by Cary
Grant’s millionaire Nick Townsend. From being fetishized by her son and her husband she becomes
fetishized by an adoring audience led by an adoring Grant.
E. Ann Kaplan, in her article Is the Gaze Male? makes a rather insightful observation with regards
to the concept of ‘woman as the object of the male gaze’:
If women were simply eroticised and objectified, things might not be too bad, since objectification may be an inherent
component of both male and female eroticism. But two further elements enter in: to begin with, men do not simply look;
their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession that is lacking in the female gaze. […] Second, the
sexualisation and objectification of women is not simply for the purposes of eroticism; from a psychoanalytic point of
view, it is designed to annihilate the threat that woman (as castrated) poses. 35
Thus, in Blonde Venus, the possibility of Helen to go back to work in order to provide for the home
she and Ned have is rejected at first due to Ned’s imagined psychological threat of castration. He
would feel less of a man if he were to let her work and earn the money he desperately needs to save
34
Haskell, Molly, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women. Third edition Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2016, p 138
35
Kaplan, E. Ann (red.), Feminism and Film, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2000, p 121
27
his life. Moreover, later in the film, when he finds out that she saved his life with the money given
to her by her new lover, Nick, he exclaims that he would have rather died than to know his life was
saved by her. Helen, the woman, is not to have agency. She shouldn’t overstep the mark by taking
on the role of the hero of the narrative. That, as we have seen in Female, must be left for the male
to embody, or at least believe he is. By being a mother, Helen’s power to manipulate the man, or
men, she is in love with, is somewhat diminished. She must then don yet another persona, the Blonde
Venus sex-symbol, which is more powerful and multi-layered than here mere mother/housewife
one. The sex-symbol persona is fuelled by the male gaze and thus carries with it the threat of
‘castration’. Why is it that, for men, once the sexualised woman he loves/fetishizes has become a
wife or a mother (or in the case of Blonde Venus, both), they consider the threat to be gone, with the
woman implicitly tame?
Feminism is overtly expressed in Blonde Venus, since parts of the script were written by Dietrich
herself (she wasn’t allowed a screenwriting credit). Despite her being presented to the audience as
the ethereal water nymph for a few seconds at the start, we first see Dietrich as a mother, looking
after her young son. She is a mother first. However, she is more than that. When her husband is in
need of money, she jumps at the opportunity of going back to work, doing what she does best:
performing. Just as we’ve seen with Female, the knack of performance is the woman’s saving grace.
She has to perform various tasks and roles at any given time, just to be able to survive in the man’s
world. As a performer, Dietrich’s Helen becomes the Blonde Venus, not before tantalising the
audience, as she emerges dressed in a gorilla suit. As the viewer awaits impatiently for her much-
anticipated performance, they will find they have to wait even longer, for she is denying us the gaze
for a few moments longer. We know where she is, but we can’t see her in all her sexualised,
objectified glory. She is hidden in the gorilla suit, like a butterfly still in its cocoon. When we do
get to see her, we are blown away not just by her sensual persona, which the gorilla costume, like a
larvae cocoon, has transformed from the dutiful mother and wife into a purely sexual being, but also
by the strength of her persona. Here is where Dietrich is at her ease, for she knows that all eyes are
on her, yet she uses the objectification and adulation as strength to get what she wants. Jeanine
Basinger writes of the moment Dietrich emerges from the gorilla suit:
28
What a moment! It contains glamour, transformation, fashion, sex, slapstick comedy, horror, fear, music, filmic
references, all laced together by some mad effort that manages to entertain, comment, mock, and frighten. It also
satisfies. When one realizes that Marlene Dietrich has emerged out of the hairy presence of an ape in a film in which
she plays a sacrificing mother who loses custody of her little boy because she has had to go to work to earn money to
pay for her husband's operation . . . well. 36
In response to the male gaze, “Dietrich looks back or initiates the look. The simple fact contains the
potential for questioning her objectification.” 37
Indeed, as she is being hounded throughout the country after fleeing with her son, Dietrich makes
the choice to give him up to the detective that’s on her tail. She initiates a rendezvous by luring him
seductively, gazing at him. She knows who he is (“your badge is stuck to your face”), but he doesn’t
know her identity until she reveals it to him. Just as she has emerged from the gorilla suit before,
she has again revealed her true identity, that of Helen the mother, the woman, the sex-symbol. She
flaunts convention and social labels once again as she decides to give up her son in favour of her
estranged husband. Her agency is shown throughout the film and even as the elements of
sadomasochism in her behaviour come to the fore, she is ready to expiate her sins. She is the one to
decide when enough suffering is enough and we see her reborn, reglamourised, having become the
toast of Paris. This second performance in the film is just as important as the first, showcasing her
talent for reinvention, but also her powerful star persona. The audience aren’t certain whether they
are watching Helen the grieving mother becoming a cabaret singer or ‘just’ Dietrich being Dietrich,
enjoying the gaze but also having the power to look back, dressed in a white tuxedo. She flaunts the
social conventions according to which only men should wear trousers, but she does so in the context
of a cabaret number, which offers her a leeway into still presenting herself as a sex-symbol. A sex-
symbol to whom? Her husband, her lover, her audience, perhaps even her young son? The answer
is: everyone. Dietrich succeeds in rising above norms of earthly sexuality by not taking her sexuality
too seriously, by being ironic of her status as a woman and becoming iconic in the process.
The standard male gaze is being flaunted on occasion in MGM’s Red Dust as well. As if to remind
themselves that the majority of the paying audiences in 1932 were female, there comes a seemingly
gratuitous scene of a bare-chested Clark Gable in the first few minutes of the film. He is established
as the epitome of masculinity, the ultimate macho man with a high streak of savagery, endangering
the reputation of a very married and very sexualised Mary Astor. In this world of the jungle, set in
the jungle, Clarke is the king. And what does the king do? He sleeps with any woman who takes his
fancy. Thus, the epitome of masculinity is reached when he steals another man’s wife. We observe
36
Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960, Chatto & Windus, London, 1994,
p 151
37
Studlar, Gaylyn, edited by Kaplan, E. Ann (red.), Feminism and Film, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2000, p 212
29
here that alongside the standard male gaze we also have a female gaze. The male voyeur observes
the female, object of his attraction, in her boudoir, undressing for bed. Later in the film, as he’s
crossed her threshold, he will appear as an object of desire for both the woman he desires and another
woman. The other woman, Vantine played by Jean Harlow, might represent the audience through
her ‘voice of reason’ traits. She is not considered a ‘decent’ person due to her being a prostitute,
thus presented in contrast with the ladylike Barbara Willis, played by Mary Astor. Hiding behind
the label of decency, Barbara (Astor) and Denis (Gable) end up engaging in an adulterous affair.
Thus, Vantine is not only the voice of reason, but she is also the one most people find themselves
identifying with – the truly decent one. Despite being a prostitute who should be kept away from
the upper class, she has no hidden agenda, she is observant, and her agency is what directs the
narrative to a satisfactory conclusion. She is ‘damaged goods’, but she is also genuine, never shying
away from speaking her mind and revealing her true self, while the other characters are duplicitous.
Therefore, as the object of her affection, Denis represents the epitome of manhood verging on
savagery. He is part of the jungle in which he lives, and he intends to follow his instinct by running
away with his employee’s wife. However, a burst of conscience brings him down or lifts him up to
the level of the kind-hearted prostitute. In the end, she is the knight in shining armour who saves
him. In a fit of jealousy, Barbara shoots him for “trying to be noble” and let her go back to her
husband. It is Vantine who not only covers for the adulteress, but nurses him back to health, being
both mother, saviour, friend and wife. A poignant scene shows Vantine cleaning Denis’ wound with
almost uncomfortable detail. She sticks a rod with iodine through the hole in his belly, thus marking
his transformation complete. From masculine pin-up, he has been castrated as a ‘punishment’ for
assuming the female traits of sacrifice and nobility. He has betrayed his male instinct in favour of
doing the right thing and now he has to settle with a woman of loose morals. He also has the gunshot
wound as a symbol of his transformation. Vantine has the decency to cover not just for Denis, for
whom she has feelings, but also for Barbara, to which she has been unfavourably compared from
the beginning. She is the epitome of the fallen woman with a heart of gold that would disappear
from the big screen during the Production Code, but who over the decades has managed to become
well represented in Hollywood (Klute, Pretty Woman, Mighty Aphrodite).
Spectatorship
In her essay on Mildred Pierce, Linda Williams states that a “contextualising of textual analysis can
account for specific and changing, forms of feminine repression in response to specific and changing
30
historical moments.” 38 Thus, it is not enough to analyse a text only from the
psychoanalytical/semiotic perspective. One needs to delve further into a sociological approach and
try to identify the importance of cinema in women’s lives in the early 1930s. We have long assumed
that women made up to 85% of the total cinema-going audience of the 1930s, but a shadow has been
cast upon that percentage when it was suggested that the reason this number was so high was that
only women would be willing to fill in the feedback forms while exiting the cinema theatre. Where
were the men? Were they busy working? One knows that during the Depression what jobs were left
to the great American public was divided between both men and women, men taking the harder
labour work and women working mostly as secretaries, as portrayed on the big screen.
Even if we are to only take into consideration the basest evidence, the feedback cards filled in by
85% more women than men, it is enough to show that women were more affected by the cinema
experience and more receptive to its influences than men. Moreover, despite a progressive feminist
theory postulated by the likes of Laura Mulvey, there have been some loose ends when it comes to
the feminist theory and the early 1930s. Mulvey proclaims that: “Traditionally, the woman displayed
has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic
object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either
side of the screen.” 39
While this has become almost an axiom since Mulvey published her article in 1975, it is hard to
look at the audiences of the early 1930s and see only sexual pleasure derived from the act of cinema
going. Lured into the cinema theatres with attractive prices, prize draws and other package deals,
American audiences during the Great Depression went into the dark screening rooms to escape the
world outside. The pleasure of looking is indubitably one of the reasons they were going to the
cinema (and they were visiting much less in the 1930s than in the previous, pre-Crash decade), but
the fantasy element was also a strong deciding factor. Both fairytale-like narratives and gritty
realistic dramas with happy endings were sought after, as they portrayed either a world of plenty
where there was no depression, no job shortages and no misery, or a world where one, despite almost
insurmountable obstacles, can identify the corner round which prosperity has been hiding and finally
escape misery. The women of the 1930s didn’t flock to the cinemas, but only because of lack of
funds. They did saunter to see Norma Shearer in almost see-through cocktail dresses, making love
to Clark Gable or Robert Montgomery. They did enjoy seeing street-smart Joan Blondell and
38
Linda Williams, Feminist Film Theory: Mildred Pierce and the Second World War (Female Spectators, ed E Deidre
Pribram, Verso 1988), p 12
39
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen Vol 16, no 3 (1975), p7
31
Barbara Stanwyck succeed in life despite considerable obstacles, especially since these “tough
broads” had a connection with real world, having come from a deprived milieu. They may have
experienced sexual pleasure when seeing such screen sirens in all their glory, but they did more than
that: they identified with them, fancying themselves is similar situations, with similar problems that
always had a solution and more importantly dressed in similar manners, striving to look like them.
This pleasure of looking can thus be interpreted in two ways: scopophilia – the pleasure of looking
at and mirroring – the pleasure and desire of identifying themselves with the characters on-screen.
As such, marketing campaigns promoting the films of the 1930s followed this audience psychology
and capitalised on it. The products the studios were selling were now not only on the big screen, but
on billboards and in ladies’ magazines. In her essay on feminism Ann E Kaplan explains:
In the one film genre that constructs a female spectator, that spectator is made to participate in what is essentially a
masochistic fantasy. Doane notes that in the major classical genres, the female body is sexuality, providing the erotic
object for the male spectator. In the woman’s film, the gaze must be de-eroticised (since the spectator is now assumed
to be female), but in doing this the films effectively disembody their spectator. 40
I am not all too congruent with Doane’s views on the female spectator, mainly because the women’s
films do the opposite. They may be perceived as disembodying the female spectator, but they also
perhaps grant them a different avatar, a new face, and a new life to experience for the time they
spend in the cinema theatre. They identify themselves with the female stars and by doing so they
adopt certain characteristics (fashion, cunning, independence) which they didn’t know they could
enhance. If they hadn’t seen what women like Mae West, Carole Lombard, Kay Francis or Claudette
Colbert could do on the screen, they might have thought it impossible for women to become
independent, famous and admired. In the previous century, women’s social lives were always behind
closed doors and they could not go out in public unless chaperoned. This was changing perhaps too
fast for comfort. For many women, learning to stand up for oneself was still being tried on for size,
after having just gotten the vote. They were just beginning to earn their own wages after centuries
of depending on their husbands’. If we look at the ease with which women returned to domestic life
following WWII, it is apparent that the evolution of the modern woman had been stopped. We must
take the historical context into account, as always, and equality in misery during the Great
Depression did not translate into equality in society and in the workforce once things started to shift
for the better. We may look upon the Great Depression as a ‘no man’s land’ part in history, a
ravaging hangover from the Jazz era, felt by entire nations. If female audiences in the early 1930s
were going to the cinema, it was to look upon a window into a future that would mirror a gay past:
cocktails, evening gowns and no money problems. Affluence was the hallmark of the 1920s America
40
Kaplan, E. Ann (red.), Feminism and Film, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2000, p 126
32
and audiences yearned to see it again. It did not matter that it was economically unfeasible to have
a country of millionaires (as it was nearly the case in the US), the American Dream was alive and
well and it lived through the glow of the silver screen. Disembodied audiences lived through near-
perfect bodied screen queens and kings, putting their hopes and dreams on their shoulders,
projecting their smiles and tears on their faces.
We are not taking for granted the assumption that cinema has always been skewed towards the
female population. When Emily Altenloh did her study in 1914 it transpired that the cinema going
experience was enjoyed mostly by men. Yet, the space in which films were being shown was
transformed more and more to cater to the female audience. In Red Velvet Seat, Antonia Lant
succeeds in gathering an overwhelming amount of information to indicate that not only did the
cinema affect the female audience more than the male (as witnessed by the great number of essays
written on the subject), but the architecture of the cinema theatre itself suggests that it was conceived
to accommodate the female spectator:
Lejeune says as much: “the small cushioned seats are women’s seats; they have no masculine build.” 41Her assessment
joins Marian Spitzer’s “deep-piled velvet divans,” Miller’s “soft plush cushions”, Langer’s “soft, velvety chair”, Hurst’s
“fauteuils of marshmallow plush”[…] This collection’s title, Red Velvet Seat, plumbs this synechdochal female
fundament, and the feminine occupation of cinema it underscored. Women formulated other theories as to why people
gathered before the screen […] Filmgoing was for “solace and distraction” (Jane Adams), and fulfilled social and
emotional needs born of modernity. It was a safety valve, for “most of us are not able to be as rude […] as often as we
should like to be, for fear of the consequences, such as the loss of our jobs. It offered escapism, from the ambiguities of
life (Jesenka). 42
Marketing and Advertising

The writing in the fan magazines of the times (Photoplay, Movietone, Movie Mirror) reveals that
what we perceive of the past is somewhat erroneous. Based on the very conservative stance taken
by the Production Code in 1933 and 1934, one would imagine that the vast majority of Americans
in were staunch supporters of the strict censorship measures imposed after 1934. However, if we
are to browse through some of the most popular magazines of the era, such as Photoplay, we are
met with frequent anti-censorship comments from the audience. Moreover, the style in which some
of the articles are written shows a level of brazenness that the modern audience might not have
expected. For instance, an article referring to Clark Gable’s rapid ascent to Hollywood royalty reads:
41
Lejeune, C.A “The Week on the Screen: The Women”, Manchester Guardian 16 January 1926, p 9
42
London, 2006, p 42-47
33
It is a remarkable thing, but typical to Hollywood, that a few years ago Gable was working in inconspicuous and
unpublicised parts at the same studio where he is now the sensation of the lot. Even the waitresses in the commissary
wouldn’t give him a tumble then. He was just another ham actor. Now the feminine stars who wouldn’t give him a nod
are using all their coyest come-hither glances to get him to play as their leading man. 43
It is perhaps quite refreshing to see that not all voices (and glances) raised were aimed at objectifying
and sexualising females. However, the case of Clark Gable, adored and admired both men and
women, is an exception. What is more striking is the space dedicated in these magazines to
advertising aimed at the female audience, employing the power and image of various stars of the
era, which were almost exclusively female. The power of marketing and advertising was just
beginning to come into its own in the early 1930s and this is evident when looking at publicity stills
for film releases as well as the aforementioned magazines. Photoplay had a dedicated section to
haute couture as seen worn by the greatest female stars of the era, presenting every month the ins
and outs of Hollywood fashion.
Interesting to note that, compared to the movie mags of today (Sight & Sound, Empire), which cater
to both sexes, the early film magazines were visibly tailored for the female audience. Moreover, so
were the majority of films made in Hollywood, regardless of the moniker “women’s pictures”. What
we can understand from the evidence available is that the film industry both reflected and catered
for the female public. The main reason for this was that going to the movies was seen as
entertainment, a leisure activity, which men, making up the bulk of the workforce in America, had
little time for. Women were long considered as having plenty of idle time due to the fact that their
chief job was that of wives and mothers (in that order). Therefore, it is fair to assume that, once the
female population began gainful employment, cinema had to change with the times: fewer damsels
in distress on the silver screen and more strong female characters who knew their minds and who
had the luxury of choice. They could choose a new partner, a new job, a new outfit, a new lifestyle.
This visible change is what makes cinema an excellent tool for anthropological studies. Cinema
succeeds in both influencing society and mirroring its transformations from generation to
generation. A film made in 1930 about the early 18th century will say more about 1930 and how the
18th century was perceived at the time than the actual 18th century. Similarly, a film made in 2020
about the 18th century will reflect the 2020 way of thinking rather than the 18th century. If the film
is considered historically accurate, that denotes the intricacy and level of detail, as well as technical
advancement, which our society has achieved at present to be able to present the 18th century with
as much accuracy as possible. Thus, the way film genres have evolved over the decades speaks
volumes of the way society itself has evolved: “A Western is a Western is a Western, yet what
43
Photoplay, September 1931. P 34
34
audiences expected from a Western in its epic and empire-building stage in the twenties is very
different from what audiences expected from a Western in its neurotic and revisionist stage in the
fifties: the changes in the genre reflect changes in the marketplace itself” 44 William Paul explains
in his introduction of his book on Ernst Lubitsch.
A film’s premiere is usually something anticipated and looked forward to months in advance. During
the 1930s, like today, there was an entire marketing and advertising machine behind the release of
a film. Moreover, the marketing machine would often employ less conventional strategies in order
to bring about box office success. Taking the example of Joan Blondell and the films Gold Diggers
of 1933 and Three on a Match (Appendix fig 5 and fig 7), when looking at some of the publicity
stills, one can conclude that they are significantly less tame than what we see in the film. Harvey G
Cohen points that sexier elements of the film were stressed in the marketing. The studio made
available to newspapers a ten-part serialisation of the film, the titles emphasising the more prurient
moments: “All Show Girls are Gold Diggers”, “Sleeping in Strange Beds” […] Such prurient
marketing was forbidden by the Advertising Code, an adjunct policy of the Production Code, “that
mandated decent copy and demure illustrations”, according to Thomas Doherty. Yet the studios
knew from years of experience that the “sex angle… led audiences in a straight line to the box
office. 45
Genre
It is difficult to talk about Pre-Code cinema without mentioning the gangster film genre. It is even
harder to include them into the conversation about feminism, for strong female characters were not
to be found in this film genre. If found, they would be reduced to size by having half a grapefruit
shoved in their faces. The genre was rife with overinflated masculinity and so there was little room
for independent women. However, as a social observation, one must mention the gritty realism of
films such as I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), if only to use it as an example of how
cinema managed to influence real life and invite change. It showed the real power of the media over
the great American public, which led to the abolishment of inhumane and barbaric practices in the
prison system. As a genre, the gangster film was very popular, perhaps because it showed regular
Americans standing up to ‘the man’, carving a life for themselves despite the Great Depression
knocking on their door. From the anthropological point of view, characters like Toni (Scarface),
Little Caesar and Tom Powers (The Public Enemy) are important in carving up American types
44
Paul, William, Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983, p 4
45
Cohen, Harvey G., Who's in the Money?: the Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood's New Deal, Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh, 2018, p 68
35
which will always be associated with the Pre-Code era and the way in which daring narratives helped
paint a realistic story of corruption, gambling and bootlegging during the Prohibition. Director
Mervyn LeRoy was quoted as saying:
I met the cops and the whores and the reporters and the bartenders and the Chinese and the fishermen and the
shopkeepers”, LeRoy recounted. I knew them all, knew how they thought and how they loved and how they hated.
When it came time for me to make motion pictures, I made movies that were real, because I knew at first hand how
people behaved. 46
The film genres that appealed the most to the female audience were the comedies, including musical
comedies, and melodramas. Affairs of the heart with unrealistic complications helped lift the spirits
of the Depression era female audiences. They were rarely taken seriously as good pictures and were
perhaps seen as second-rate entertainment time-fillers. William Paul takes his time to dissect Ernst
Lubitch’s comedies in his book Ernst Lubitch’s American Comedy: “Lubitsch has not been taken
seriously enough in the past because comedy itself is not taken seriously enough. Yet the real genius
of the American cinema has most often been found in its romantic comedies and its Westerns, two
genres that are usually overlooked when critical awards are handed out.” 47
When looking at Pre-Code film genres with female characters as protagonists, the list of dramatic,
i.e. melodramatic, roles supersedes that of comedic roles by a significant number. We have looked
in great detail at films starring Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Ruth Chatterton
and others, but these were mainly dramatic roles that pulled at the audiences’ heartstrings. When we
look at the great comedies of the era two things stand out: films like Twentieth Century and It
Happened One Night were the precursors of the screwball comedies that were epitomised in the late
1930s by films like Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, and films like Gold
Diggers of 1933, Dames, 42nd Street and Footlight Parade were the precursors of the great tap
dancing musicals of the mid to late 1930s. One will notice that when it came to tap dancing musical
comedies, the peak might just have been the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas of the early 1930s. But
what about the comedies?
Not as well known today as he might deserve to be, Ernst Lubitsch carved an incredible career as a
filmmaker. He has been cited as favourite with great film directors, ranging from Billy Wilder to
Francois Truffaut. He was also the only film director of the Golden Age of Hollywood to have been
appointed in charge of production at a studio – Paramount. He is arguably the only true auteur who
worked in the Pre-Code era and made successful films. Scott Eyman, in his book Ernst Lubitsch
46
Meyer,William, Warner Brothers Directors: The Hard-Boiled, the Comic and the Weepers (New Rochelle, NY:
Arlington House, 1978): 223.
47
36
Laughter in Paradise, describes him perfectly: “he was the creator of “The Lubitsch Touch,” as
insultingly superficial a sobriquet as that of calling Hitchcock “The Master of Suspense.” […]
Lubitsch’s movies take place neither in Europe nor America but in Lubitschland, a place of
metaphor, benign grace, rueful wisdom.” 48
Ernst Lubitsch was given as an example by the MPDAA censors during their multiple battles with
the studios for his ability to tell stories of adultery and sex before marriage in a way that was not
shocking to a younger audience. He liked to leave a lot to the imagination, being quoted as saying
“I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?” 49
Lubitsch relied on the fact that audiences were intelligent and sophisticated enough to understand
the humour of his films. Also, the sense of humour is appreciated more than anything else, especially
with the sophistication of the European directed films in Hollywood, like Lubitsch. Laughter was
indeed the best medicine, especially during the Great Depression. This might be a reason for
Lubitsch’s popularity during the early 1930s. He does not infantilise the audiences. Instead, he
invites them into the Lubitsch world where the main character has a complicated life and is usually
made to choose between either two types of life, two loves, two different worlds.
When Lubitsch chooses to have his camera look at a door rather than what’s taking place behind it, the door itself
necessarily shapes our understanding of the event. Most of all the indirection of Lubitsch’s style endows his films with
a strongly metaphorical quality: in his apparent refusal to look at certain events or actions head-on, Lubitsch in effects
colours our perception of the main action with the object or event he chooses to look at. 50
Lubitsch employs all the semiotic tricks in the book to tell his stories. An image of a clock in Trouble
in Paradise, paired with off-screen laughter creates a specific image in the viewer’s mind. The
director knows how to carefully select a specific object and leave the camera lingering on it for as
long as possible. In semiotics, one assigns a meaning (signified) to an object, image or sound
(signifier). Lubitsch knows this very well and succeeds in playing with the meanings of objects and
sounds, employing them for his own advantage thus creating a new language of film, which has
been labelled as the Lubitsch touch. He chooses a mundane object, activity or situation and
manipulates it to tell a story.
The marker of this choice is always the door. Mary Pickford was quoted as saying that Lubitsch was
not a director of actors, but a director of doors. Let’s take the opening scene in The Smiling
Lieutenant for instance: it shows a tailor knocking on the door of one of his customers, Lt. Nikolaus
'Niki' von Preyn. He has quite an extensive unpaid bill to present to him, should he venture to open
48
Eyman, Scott, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000
49
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0523932/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
37
the door. The tailor rings the bell twice, then knocks on the door. The knock is just a simple
unassuming knock, so the door doesn’t open, and the tailor leaves dejected. Seconds later, an
attractive young woman passes the man on the stairs only to stop in front of the same door. Instead
of ringing the bell or knocking just as the tailor did seconds ago, she knocks in a coded way. This is
no ordinary knock. The knock is a sign, for the door opens and the young lady walks in. The camera
doesn’t follow the lady in but stays out. The audience doesn’t know what’s happening behind the
door, but we can imagine. They may be playing checkers. A closeup of the lamp outside the door,
showing the lamp being lit and then extinguished, indicates the time that passes before the lady
finally emerges from the flat. The audience is left to imagine what has been happening in the interim.
Therefore, before we are even introduced with the main character, Niki, we know a number of things
about him: that he doesn’t open his door unless he hears a special knock, that he likes to wear well-
tailored clothes (and not pay for them) and that he likes to spend most of his time in his flat with
attractive young ladies. When we finally see him, he clarifies with a song that he is a lover:
A soldier’s work is never done
And though we never use a gun
We’re still on active service though we’re through with fighting.
For when a lady takes the field
She knows the guards will always yield
And every man deserves a medal every night.
To arms, to arms. We’re used to night alarms
We hold the parade each evening in the park
We’re not afraid to skirmish in the dark.
We’re famous near and far for our … ra-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta!
Self-proclaimed “boudoir brigadier”, Nicky will use the “ra-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta!” as an analogy for sex.
Thus, in the first 5 minutes of the film we’ve been presented with a lieutenant who confesses his
love of sex, and who has young women spending the night at his place, yet not a single sexual act
has been shown, not even a kiss. With careful and elegant camera setups the audience is informed
that the characters engage in illicit sexual relationships and no judgement is passed. Niki’s friend in
the army is a married man who would love to have an affair with a beautiful violinist. The film deals
with infidelity and sex before marriage in a matter-of-fact way, not diminishing its importance, but
playing its flaunting of the societal rules for great comedic effect. When Niki and his new girl,
Franzi (played by Claudette Colbert), negotiate whether to say goodbye or stay together after the
date is over, the metaphor of sex as food is used:
Franzi: Perhaps, tomorrow night we could have dinner together?
Lieutenant Niki: Oh, don't make me wait 24 hours. I'm so - hungry.
Franzi: Well, perhaps, then, we could have tea tomorrow afternoon?
Lieutenant Niki: Why not breakfast tomorrow morning?
Franzi: No. No. First tea and then dinner - and then - maybe - maybe breakfast.
Lubitsch’s Pre-Code films include both comedies with screwball qualities (Trouble in Paradise,
Design for Living) and musical comedies (One Hour with You, The Merry Widow). The former
38
usually had Miriam Hopkins as its star, while the latter had Maurice Chevalier as a singing lothario,
always getting into mischief. Miriam Hopkins is the quintessential Lubitsch heroine, oozing charm,
seductive playfulness and a tendency to make her own rules and get her own way. In The Smiling
Lieutenant, she plays Princess Anna, innocent and pampered, but unspoiled in the ways of the world.
She falls for Lieutenant Niki and is determined to have him as her husband at any cost, although
Niki’s violin-playing girlfriend Franzi gets in the way at first. Scott Eyman suggests that the problem
of this film is with the ending, not the over-saturated Chevalier musical numbers “with the actor
rolling his eyes rather more than is absolutely necessary” 51:
The primary problem is that the wrong girl gets the man. The always-wonderful Colbert, in a sisterhood-is-powerful
moment, sings “Jazz up your Lingerie” to Hopkins, who plays a shrill, unsympathetic pill quite convincingly. […]
Colbert gives up her man because “girls who start with breakfast don’t usually stay for supper”. It’s an oddly moralistic
ending to a cheerfully amoral film. 52
While this may be the case, there is little colour and range to Colbert’s performance, who is defined
only by her love she has for Niki. Her job as a violinist and conductor of an all-female orchestra (the
Viennese Swallows) is always side-lined every time there’s a chance she might steal a moment with
her beloved Niki. She might be an independent woman, but she is also one subservient to her
boyfriend’s needs. Her character suffers no transformation and although she gives up the man she
loves for another woman, she does so willingly twice. She’s too nice a girl, who knows her place all
too well and won’t stand up for a better one. While the ending is an indication that the censors board
might have requested that Franzi be punished for her loose morals, this is unverified. Hopkins’
Anna, on the other hand, shows that she is adaptable. She transforms rapidly from a sheltered
spinster into a Jazz-playing, cigarette smoking flapper right before our eyes and we adore her for it.
She might have started as “shrill” and “unsympathetic”, but she has blossomed into a wife worthy
of such a philanderer as Niki. Thus, when she is heard singing the last of the film’s “ra-ta-ta,-ta-ta-
ta,-ta!” we see that the transformation is complete and we jubilate along with the happy couple.
The Smiling Lieutenant is the first of three collaborations between Miriam Hopkins and Ernst
Lubitsch. The third and final film is the 1933 comedy Design for Living, based on a play by Noel
Coward. With screwball conceptual elements, the narrative follows the lives of three people “who
love each other very much.” 53 Miriam plays Gilda, a commercial artist who falls in love with two
men at the same time:
51
Eyman, Scott, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000, p 168
52
Eyman, Scott, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000, p 169
53
Ellenberger, Allan R., Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel, The University Press of Kentucky,
Lexington, 2018
39
Gilda: A thing happened to me that usually happens to men. You see, a man can meet two, three or four women and fall
in love with all of them, and then, by a process of interesting elimination, he is able to decide which he prefers. But a
woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice. Oh, it's quite all right for her to
try on a hundred hats before she picks on out.
Tom: Very fine. But, which chapeau do you want, Madam?
Gilda Farrell: Both.
Moreover, in a stroke of screenwriting genius that was bound to go past the censors and which
became more common during the Production Code (the whistling dialogue in To Have and Have
Not and the horse betting dialogue in The Big Sleep spring to mind), she describes sex with the two
men as wearing a hat: “You see, George, you're sort of like a ragged straw hat with a very soft lining.
A little bit out of shape, very dashing to look at, and very comfortable to wear. And you, Tom,
piquant, perched over one eye, and has to be watched on windy days. And both so becoming.”
The film is probably one of the most daring of the Pre-Code films, for it deals with an overt ménage-
a-trois in which the girl chooses to stay with both men, after running away from a third, her
legitimate husband. Gilda is the ultimate Pre-Code female heroine who “is no gentleman” and who
refuses to conform to any societal rule that deems women sexually inferior to men. Moreover, she
will not apologise for being a highly sexual person but enjoy her power and ultimately attempt to
tailor society’s expectations to her own needs or ignore them altogether. The screwball qualities are
derived from the male dynamic in the film: as the two men she loves, Tom and George, alongside a
third, Max Plunkett, who represents the “morals of the day” 54, fight for her affections, hilarity
ensues. Later, as Gilda has conceded to marry Max to escape George and Tom’s ego wars, the
elements of screwball abound from the large discrepancy between Max’s upper-class expectations
and Gilda’s bohemian tendencies. The bohemian tendencies win the day as Gilda is whisked away
from a dull party by her two knights in not-so-shinning armour. She rides in the sunset with both
hats, onto a new beginning that may or may not resemble the tried and tested previous design.
There are two important factors that make Design for Living a successful comedy and one that
heralds the golden age of screwball: its sophisticated central character and the witty dialogue that
always leads to complicated situations. Moreover, Lubitsch’s direction and Ben Hecht’s script are
full of double meanings that were hidden enough to go past the censors.
Let’s analyse for instance the scene in which Gilda decides to choose both men as part of her life,
with subsequent changes in the lives of all involved. Being a quintessential Pre-Code heroine, she
knows that she enjoys sex and that may cause problems with the egos of the two men, so she hopes
to eliminate any chance of rivalry between them by eliminating sex. The male ego and sexual
54
“Immorality may be fun, but it isn't fun enough to take the place of one hundred percent virtue and three square meals
a day.”
40
prowess are tightly connected, so when she suggests to “talk it over from every angle like a
disarmament conference”, she truly means it. Disarmament means disarmament. The next shot
shows both men running, perhaps racing, to the nearby shop to buy food, indicating that they’ve
been debating on the best ménage-a-trois arrangement for some time and that they’re all hungry.
What do they buy? Three frankfurters on a string. What are they hungry for? Sex. The three
frankfurters on a string not only suggests sexual equality between the three main characters, but
perhaps also that to them sex is as natural and important as food. As the three characters finish eating
the frankfurters, Gilda declares: “The only thing we can do: let's forget sex.” The eating of the
frankfurters is an indication that they must swallow their feelings, eat up their libido in order to save
the friendship. Does it work? Of course not. After everything fails and Gilda marries financially
stable, extremely moral but incredibly dull Max Plunkett, the explosion arrives in true screwball
comedy manner:
Gilda: Now listen, Plunkett, Incorporated. You go to those customers of yours and give 'em a sales talk. Sell them
anything you want, but not me. I'm fed up with underwear, cement, linoleum, I'm sick of being a trademark married to
a slogan!
Max Plunkett: Gilda...
Gilda: Don't you tell 'em I've got hiccups. Tell them I've got the advertising blues. The billboard collywobbles! Slogans
and sales talks morning, noon, and night, and not one human sound out of you and your whole flock of Egelbaurs!
In true Pre-Code fashion or perhaps more so than any other Pre-Code heroine, Gilda abandons the
idea of marriage and financial security, exchanging it for a bohemian life with the two men she truly
loves.
When discussing film genres and comedy subgenres, Richard B. Jewell, in his book The Golden
Age of Cinema, talks about the “sex comedy”, which “were snuffed out by the Production Code
Administration in 1934.” His focus is on Mae West, whose films “created an immediate sensation,
made sizeable profits for her studio and brought rapid, apoplectic reactions from the moral
watchdogs of the screen.” 55 He continues:
Sexual behaviour was also usually an issue in sophisticated comedies. These urbane pictures emphasised questions of
class, status, wealth and social decorum, as well as sexual politics. Set primarily in Europe, the sophisticated films
developed out of the “comedy of manners” tradition. The writers, directors and, often, the stars of sophisticated comedies
generally hailed from Europe, and their tales reflected a sensibility that American filmgoers sometimes found artificial
and uninvolving. 56
Jewell then gives a series of examples of ‘sophisticated comedies’: Private Lives (also based on a
Noel Coward play), The Guardsman (1931), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933),
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) and others. He also considers “two of the best sophisticated
comedies with American settings” Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). What Jewell
55
Jewell, Richard B., The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929-1945, Blackwell Pub., Malden, MA, 2007), p 227
56
Jewell, Richard B., The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929-1945, Blackwell Pub., Malden, MA, 2007, p 228
41
fails to discuss is the screwball aspects of the sophisticated comedy that manage to grow from the
early 1930s into the late 1930s and establish itself as a separate comedy genre. In his categorisation
there are strict delineations between subgenres, but he does not mention a general overlap between
the sophisticated comedy and the screwball, defining the latter as:
Screwball comedy appeared in 1934, in response to the Depression and to the stifling of sexually titillating humor
effected by the industry’s internal censorship machinery. In one sense, screwball replaced sex comedy […]
Screwball films were, in essence, romantic comedies which focused on the pursuit of the opposite sex (usually the
woman chasing the man, e.g. Bringing Up Baby (1938) or, a favourite variant, the perfectly matched couple whose
marriage is on the rocks (The Awful Truth, Columbia 1937). Screwball characters were typically ‘daffy’; most had a
‘screw loose’ and behaved in ways that were bizarre and unpredictable […] The humour in the films developed from
these wacky characters, breakneck pacing, witty dialogue and eruption of slapstick which punctuated the narratives. 57
Under this category we can find films like It Happened One Night (1934), Twentieth Century (1934),
My Man Godfrey (1935), Ball of Fire (1942), His Girl Friday (1940). There is some inconsistency
in the separation of genres, as we have seen that films with a similar style and often written and
directed by the same people, are put in different categories. It is somewhat inconsiderate to
categorise Holiday and The Philadelphia Story as sophisticated comedies, without considering their
clear screwball elements. If Tracy Lord doesn’t present evident screwball qualities, her baby sister
Dinah has them in spades.
Returning to the Pre-Code era, despite It Happened One Night always being crowned as the best
Pre-Code screwball, the quintessential screwball comedy which came to mould all future films of
the same genre, I feel it’s another film that deserves that accolade: Twentieth Century. It not only
established Carole Lombard as the queen of screwball, but it also showed why John Barrymore was
once considered one of the best actors of his generation. It’s true that he received that accolade
mainly for his work on stage, but the over the top style of acting which alternates with a very subtle
style of tempered rage, fits perfectly on stage as well as with the pace of this screwball comedy,
directed by Howard Hawks. Harvey G Cohen, in his book Who’s in the Money? notes:
the dialogue is not only delivered at a rapid pace, but the characters overlap the end of one speech with the beginning
of the next, appearing to interrupt each other as in an ad-libbed encounter. […] The driving ambition and deviousness
visible in John Barrymore’s verbally florid portrayal of stage ‘genius’ Oscar Jaffe give the proceedings a continuing air
of barely controlled dementia, with his shrieks of hyperbolae and invectives matched and sometimes bested by Carole
Lombard’s near hysterical and sharp-tongued retorts – in the role of temperamental star Lilly Garland, an unwilling and
often frantic Trilby to his megalomaniacal, Manhattan Svengali. 58
Carole Lombard plays former lingerie model and aspiring actress Mildred Plotka, who becomes the
muse of unhinged theatre producer Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) and has her name changed to Lilly
57
Jewell, Richard B., The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929-1945, Blackwell Pub., Malden, MA, 2007, p 230.
58
Cohen, Harvey G., Who's in the Money?: the Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood's New Deal, Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh, 2018, p 32
42
Garland. It is a screaming duet, where both main characters hurl elaborate and sophisticated insults
at each other until reconciliation is imminent.
Molly Haskell also notes that “equality pervaded the scripts of the thirties (there were a huge number
of women screenwriters), the dialogue, the casting, and, in fact, whole genres—the musical, the
screwball comedy, the romantic melodrama” 59 which is why we are not surprised when in a comedy
such as Twentieth Century, the level of agency, eccentricity and downright insanity is always on an
even keel between Lily Garland (formerly known as Mildred Plotka) and her Svengali type Oscar
Jaffe. Despite bowing down to his stronger will (or being taken in by his machinations), Lily shows
great agency throughout, succeeding in making a name for herself without Oscar Jaffe’s support.
Moreover, it is he who needs her help when his theatre business is in trouble. Their screwball
dynamic represents what drives them forward and they both understand that they are happiest when
they fight and bicker with each other, their love for each other being intertwined with the love for
the theatre, the latter winning in the end.
Unlike the melodrama genre, which focused more on the plight of the main female character and
her obstacles, the comedy genre brings about the sophistication of the female heroine, who is seen
enjoying her independence, not suffering because of it (A Free Soul). The melodrama, or the ‘sex
drama’ of the early 1930s (The Easiest Way, Faithless, Strangers May Kiss, A Free Soul,
Inspiration, Baby Face), which would later develop into the melodrama of the late 1930s and early
1940s, focuses on more on breaking the societal rules regarding sex and women’s sexual conducts
in society and on the judgement and punishment of women for straying from the straight and narrow.
Most of these films astutely offer realistic social commentaries with regards to the double standards
that women faced, but they present these issues through a psychoanalytical approach, focusing on
presenting the female character as a surrogate mother to the male. The sex comedies of the early
1930s (The Greeks Had a Word for Them, She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, Red Headed
Woman) have the tendency to disregard the sexual constraints, rules and regulations. They laugh at
the psychoanalytical subtexts, conceding that the issues between the sexes may never be resolved,
but that there are power dynamics in the society now that are worth fighting over. The sex comedies
are more about money, power dynamic and social position than about passion or love, taking for
granted the latter’s place in the life of the modern woman.
59
43
Conclusion
There are a great many fascinating things about the golden age of Pre-Code and this research has
only managed to scratch the surface. Its main point of focus was to identify the feminist angle in
only a select few films of the era. As I have stated in the introduction, the films of this era which
had women as the central characters succeeded, perhaps without intending to, to open up new
horizons for the women of the 1930s in a time when hope was scarce and when virtue, or the idea
of virtue as postulated by institutions such as the Catholic Legion of Decency, didn’t pay. The Pre-
Code era was a time in Hollywood when a new technology had just arrived – sound – and when the
possibilities of an already popular medium were expanded even more, transforming both art and
entertainment. This affected the regular film goers, who expected a true-to-form representation on
screen as well as seeing fairy-tale stories that reflected the hopes and dreams of a majority of
Americans who were plunged into the depths of the Great Depression. To reflect this, I’ve used
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s film theory of cinema as mirror and analysed carefully
chosen scenes from A Free Soul and Baby Face.
The film theory most utilised by feminist scholars and one which I’ve also made use of was
psychoanalysis, the foundation on which most feminist film theories are based. In this research I
have used examples from Blonde Venus, Female and Red Dust to exemplify the readings of Laura
Mulvey, Christian Metz, Ann E Kaplan, Jeannine Basinger and Molly Haskell. Moreover, I have
dedicated separate sections to spectatorship and cinema as entertainment to women to highlight the
importance of multi-faceted and interdisciplinary analyses of Pre-Code cinema.
We have touched on the “women’s pictures” denomination, but what my research aimed to show
was that this was not a genre in itself. Instead, I have looked at and analysed comedies, identifying
comedy subgenres like the screwball, using The Smiling Lieutenant and Design for Living as case
studies, also casting a light on the auteurism theory as represented by Ernst Lubitsch and his work.
We have looked at the corporate studio system which was started and flourished in the 1920s. This
was a well-oiled machine in which actors and actresses were regarded as bankable assets and treated
as such. Each of the big studios had their own collection of female stars and they all had their specific
niche, as has been well documented. Since studios regarded their stars as products, I felt it was
important to highlight the marketing and advertising methods they used in order to promote the
films in which these stars appeared by looking at some of the slogans and marketing material in
films like Gold Diggers of 1933 and Three on a Match. For this I have carefully scanned digital
versions of 1930s film magazines dedicated to women like Photoplay and Movie Mirror. This has
44
helped understand the emerging importance of advertising and consumerism in people’s lives,
which would reach its peak in the 1950s and 1960s.
The female stars of the early 1930s were too many to mention. They were indeed stars in the true
sense of the word, having a number of box office success films, appearing on the cover of the most
popular magazines of the day, being used as role models for countless of young impressionable
girls, as fashion icons for many a housewife and, perhaps the most important of all, as examples of
successful stories that the American Dream was alive and well. It was more than that. It was being
exported and broadcast onto the rest of the world. The Hollywood women of the Pre-Code were
both trendsetters and pioneers in fashion, love and life. There was little room in this research to
focus on all of them. Fay Wray, Ann Harding, Helen Twelvetrees, Constance Bennett, Marion
Davies, Clara Bow, Mae Clarke, Una Merkel, Myrna Loy, Dorothy Mckaill, they all left an indelible
mark on the cinema of the early 1930s. Most of these women’s careers didn’t make it into the
Production Code era, just as many of their predecessors’ careers didn’t make it into the ‘talkie era’.
Such is the way in which Hollywood operates. However, the stories they were all able to tell, the
experiences they shared with the public would resound over the ages. The Pre-Code era goes to
show that if it hadn’t been for the fear of the few, and the few who yielded power, over the natural
progression of women in society, women’s fight for social equality might not have reached a plateau
in the late 1940s and 1950s.
It is true that the films of the late 1930s and 1940s continued to a certain extent, and in a much more
covert and stylised way, the work started by the feminists of Hollywood in 1930. The sub-genre
“women’s pictures” found its epitome during the second World War. Actresses like Bette Davis,
Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, although having started during the Pre-
Code, found their stride with roles in films like The Letter, Little Foxes, Jezebel (Bette Davis),
Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Woman of the Year (Katharine Hepburn), Ball
of Fire, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity (Barbara Stanwyck), Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford). The
conversation about the feminist undertones in the aforementioned films will require more extensive
research, perhaps continuing on the work done by scholars like Pam Cook, Kirstin Thomson, Janet
Staiger, Mary Ann Doane, Jeanine Basinger, Annette Kuhn, Molly Haskell and others.
However, since much has already been written about the most successful films of the most
successful stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, what this research on the four short years of Pre-
Code has highlighted was that there is still much work to be unearthed and many more screen
goddesses waiting in the wings for their deserved accolades.
45
It appears that every period in Hollywood submitted under careful scrutiny is revealing a time in
which women were exploited to the benefit of men, at least to a certain degree, and Pre-Code is no
exception. We have seen brave takes on brave stories about women, told by innovative filmmakers
supported by forward-thinking producers. However, to the detriment of the star power there was the
studio power, which overrode the power of the individual actress, often reducing her career to little
more than a footnote in the annals of film history. The few films we have submitted under scrutiny
and the stars at their helm were only a handful in a sea of productions which could have represented
a major wave in the history of cinema. Alas, this was an insulated era in Hollywood history and not
a revolutionary movement like the French New Wave, which shook the French film system to its
very core, dismantled it and built a new modern cinema in its stead. Films about powerful women
are still not the norm today and we’ve only seen them take centre stage in the last few years 60. For
example, film historians behind the website Women and Hollywood have collected a lot of
information that points to unfortunate statistics 61 in the film industry, which are heavily skewed
against women. Some improvements are showing, but the natural progress that writers of the 1930s
and 1940s expected and hoped for was much delayed.
The age of the femme fatale would follow that of the sexually liberated modern woman. On this,
Molly Haskell observes:
With the increasing restrictiveness of the Production Code and the rise of sentimentality, those romantic comedies that
did get by were smothered in coyness and prudery. Only violent melodramas could preserve a feeling for the low-down
language of sex, disguised, as it was, in plot conventions of mystery and betrayal. The guilt for sexual initiative, and
faithlessness, was projected onto woman; she became the aggressor by male design and in male terms, and as seen by
the male in highly subjective narratives, often recounted in the first person and using interior monologue, by which she
was deprived of her point of view. 62
If the Pre-Code heroine was allowed to enjoy her life, make her own choices and direct her own
destiny, the woman during the Production Code, particularly the femme fatale, had agency only in
order to manipulate the man, drive him to perdition. Her power was a dangerous tool, her agency
would always end up in tragedy. These examples of representation of women on screen were
perhaps never more stylised and glamourised than during the Golden Age of Hollywood. The
spontaneity of the Pre-Code era, with its party-loving girls gave way to the much more rigid look of
the late 1930s and 1940s, in which those women who try to rise above their station and dare to
dream bigger than husband and family, are punished. The “women’s pictures” that were made after
60
Schaffstall, Katherine, Percentage of Films Featuring Female Protagonists Increased in 2019: Study,
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/, Hollywood Reporter 01/08/2020 (accessed 17/03/2020)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/40-percent-films-featured-female-protagonists-2019-1268047
61
Silverstein, Melissa, Women and Hollywood, https://womenandhollywood.com/resources/statistics/2019-statistics/
62
46
the enforcement of the Production Code, differed in style and content, but they continued to be made
in great number and project women’s stories onto the big screen in higher number than at any other
time in history.
47
Bibliography
Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960, Wesleyan
University Press, Hanover, 1995
Black, Gregory D., Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics and the Movies, Cambridge
Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1994
Cohen, Harvey G., Who's in the Money?: The Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood's New
Deal, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2018
Doane, Mary Ann, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, New
York, 1991
Doherty, Thomas Patrick, Pre-code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American
Cinema, 1930-1934, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999
Dooley, Roger, From Scarface to Scarlett: American Films in the 1930s, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, New York, 1981
Dyer, Richard, Stars, New ed., BFI Publ., London, 1998
Ellenberger, Allan R., Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel, The University Press
of Kentucky, Lexington, 2018
Elsaesser, Thomas & Hagener, Malte, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, 2nd
edition, Routledge, New York, 2015
Eyman, Scott, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
2000
Haskell, Molly, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Third edition
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016
Jacobs, Lea, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1997
Jewell, Richard B., The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929-1945, Blackwell Pub., Malden,
MA, 2007
Kaplan, E. Ann (red.), Feminism and Film, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2000
Kennedy, Matthew, Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson,
2014
48
Kuhn, Annette, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1982
Lant, Antonia & Periz, Ingrid (red.), Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writings on the First Fifty Years of
Cinema, Verso, London, 2006
LaSalle, Mick, Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, 1. ed., St. Martin's
Press, New York, 2000
Mulvey, Laura, Fetishism and Curiosity, British Film Institute, London, 1996
Mulvey, Laura Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen Vol 16, no 3 (1975)
Paul, William, Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983
Pribram, E. Deidre (red.), Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, Verso, London, 1988
Rice, Christina, Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel, The University Press of Kentucky,
Lexington, KY, 2013
Rose, Gillian, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th
edition, Sage, London, 2016
Shindler, Colin, Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society 1929-1939, Routledge,
London, 1996
Vieira, Mark A., Forbidden Hollywood: the Pre-Code Era (1930-1934) : When sin Ruled the
Movies, First edition., Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette
Book Group, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, 2019
49
Webliography
Be Kind Rewind, Custodio, Isabel Youtube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNiolZNLiJplmCCzqk9-czQ/featured (accessed
14/04/2020)
Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections http://digitalcollections.oscars.org/ (accessed

01/04/2020)
The Online Books Page, Photoplay Archives

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=photoplay (accessed 14/04/2020)
Silverstein, Melissa, Women and Hollywood, https://womenandhollywood.com (accessed

01/04/2020)
50
Filmography
Original title: A Free Soul
Production Company: MGM
Director: Clarence Brown
Year of release: 1931
Original title: Baby Face
Production Company: Warner Bros
Director: Alfred E Green
Original title: Blonde Venus
Production Company: Paramount
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Original title: Design for Living
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Original title: Female
Director: Michael Curtiz
51
Original title: Queen Christina
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Original title: Red Dust
Director: Victor Fleming
Original title: Red Headed Woman
Director: Jack Conway
Original title: The Divorcee
Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Original title: The Smiling Lieutenant
Original title: Three on a Match
52
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Original title: Trouble in Paradise
Original title: Twentieth Century
Production Company: Columbia
Director: Howard Hawks
53
Appendix
Don’ts and Be Carefuls:
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, "The Don'ts and Be Carefuls" (1927)
Resolved, That those things which are included in the following list shall not appear in pictures
produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated:
1. Pointed profanity-by either title or lip-this includes the words "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Christ"
(unless they be used reverently in connection with proper religious ceremonies), "hell," " damn,"
"Gawd," and every other profane and vulgar expression however it may be spelled;
2. Any licentious or suggestive nudity-in fact or in silhouette; and any lecherous or licentious
notice thereof by other characters in the picture;
3. The illegal traffic in drugs;
4. Any inference of sex perversion;
5. White slavery;
6. Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races);
7. Sex hygiene and venereal diseases;
8. Scenes of actual childbirth-in fact or in silhouette;
9. Children's sex organs;
10. Ridicule of the clergy;
11. Willful offense to any nation, race o rcreed;
And be it further resolved, That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following
subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good
taste may be emphasized:
1. The use of the flag;

2. International relations (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country's religion,
history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry);
3. Arson;
4. The use of firearms;
5. Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc. (having in mind
the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron);
6. Brutality and possible gruesomeness;
7. Technique of committing murder by whatever method;
8. Methods of smuggling;
54
9. Third-degree methods;
10. Actual hangings or electrocutions as legal punishment for crime;
11. Sympathy for criminals;
12. Attitude toward public characters and institutions;
13. Sedition;
14. Apparent cruelty to children and animals;
15. Branding of people or animals;
16. The sale of women, or of a woman selling her virtue;
17. Rape or attempted rape;
18. First-night scenes;
19. Man and woman in bed together;
20. Deliberate seduction of girls;
21. The institution of marriage;
22. Surgical operations;
23. The use of drugs;
24. Titles or scenes having to do with law enforcement or law-enforcing officers;
25. Excessive or lustful kissing, particularly when one character or the other is a "heavy."
55
Motion Picture Production Code of 1930:
56
57
58
59
Audience reviews from Photoplay magazine (1931):
Figure 1.1 Audience reviews from Photoplay mag
60
Figure 2.2 A Free Soul poster
61
Figure 3 Thou Shalt Not, a 1940 photo satirically mocking the vices censored by the Hays Code
62
Figure 4 Audience review from Photoplay Magazine
63
Figure 5 Publicity stills for Gold Diggers of 1933
64
Figure 6 Publicity stills for Gold Diggers of 1933
65
Figure 7 Publicity still for Three on a Match
66
Figure 8 Letter from James Wingate to William Hays
67

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Lund University Daniela Vilu

Centre for Languages and Literature FIMT08, FIMT08, Spring 2020

Feminism, Sex Politics

Purpose and aim ........................................................................................................................ 4

Research question ...................................................................................................................... 4

Previous scholarship .................................................................................................................. 6

Cinema as entertainment for women.............................................................................................. 8

Marketing and Advertising .......................................................................................................... 33

Purpose and aim

In his paper, Hollywood Censored, Gregory D Black observes:

Cinema as entertainment for women

Marketing and Advertising

Dyer, Richard, Stars, New ed., BFI Publ., London, 1998

Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections http://digitalcollections.oscars.org/ (accessed

The Online Books Page, Photoplay Archives

Silverstein, Melissa, Women and Hollywood, https://womenandhollywood.com (accessed

Production Company: MGM

Director: Clarence Brown

Year of release: 1931

Original title: Baby Face

Production Company: Warner Bros

Director: Alfred E Green

Year of release: 1933

Original title: Blonde Venus

Production Company: Paramount

Director: Josef von Sternberg

Year of release: 1932

Original title: Design for Living

Production Company: Paramount

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Year of release: 1933

Original title: Female

Production Company: Warner Bros

Director: Michael Curtiz

Year of release: 1933

Production Company: MGM

Director: Rouben Mamoulian

Year of release: 1933

Original title: Red Dust

Production Company: MGM

Director: Victor Fleming

Year of release: 1932

Original title: Red Headed Woman

Production Company: MGM

Director: Jack Conway

Year of release: 1932

Original title: The Divorcee

Production Company: MGM

Director: Robert Z. Leonard

Year of release: 1930

Original title: The Smiling Lieutenant

Production Company: Paramount

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Year of release: 1932

Original title: Three on a Match

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Year of release: 1932

Original title: Trouble in Paradise

Production Company: Paramount

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Year of release: 1932

Original title: Twentieth Century

Production Company: Columbia