FredCDobbs

Hi, thanks for the info about the "White Slave Act". That would have made the term a significant one in the US vocabulary. I looked up some early references in the early 19th Century and that's when the term meant white slaves. There was some use of the word prostitution in some early writings, but I think the term was changed in the media and government documents late in the 19th Century. It's easier to dismiss little kids when they ask "what are white slaves" than it is when they ask "what are prostitutes". By the way, I have a 1946 book about the Hays Code, and it says that Will Hays was selected as the spokesman for the MPPDA Code because he was a rather famous national political figure, although not in an elected office, and I think it said he was hired away from being the US Postmaster General to take the MPPDA job. That purpose was to give the (false) impression to the public that Hays and the Code had something to do with "the government", which it did not. The very same trick was used when Jack Valente (a low-level national political figure) was hired as the spokesman for the MPAA when the ratings code went into effect in the 1960s.

It might have grown to mean that late in the 19th Century, but before the War it mean the slavery of white people, either orphans bought from orphanages or indentured servants. Here is a good place to find 19th Century terms: http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/moa_adv.html

For me it is a "premium channel." I started out paying about $23 to Direct TV about 8 years ago, without TCM. I had to go up to their next tier at about $33 to get TCM and Fox movie channel. Then they dropped the bottom tier and went up on my tier so I'm now paying about $48 a month to get TCM and the news channels. Fox was pulled from Direct TV a couple of months ago and they want more money for Fox now. If they pull this trick with TCM, I'm bailing out. I've got enough movies on disk now.

The key term in the adultery rule was "must not be explicitly treated". In other words, they could do it, but they shouldn't be too obvious about it. The idea was to keep the kids from finding out about and thinking such relationships were normal.

"White Slavery" was the polite media term for white prostitution back in the '30s and '40s.

That's an interesting observation about the two different Gillis'. I saw this film first as a kid and then many times later as an adult, and I find the idea that the main story teller is dead to be a very interesting approach. While the basic story was very specific to Hollywood, I think there are many people who watch it and remember the times in their lives that they were in situations that they hated but that they couldn't get out of because they were broke and needed a place to stay and free food to eat.

I don't care much for her either. I think she was a good actress, but I never liked her personality. Right off hand I can't think of other 1929 pre-codes, but there were some silent pre-codes, such as the 1928 "Our Dancing Daughers" in which Crawford took off her clothes and danced on a table in her underwear at a college dance at a hotel ballroom. I think more of the sound films were thought of as pre-codes becuse of the dialogue, such as "The Divorcee". No nudity at all, but plenty of suggestive dialogue.

I think I remember the place across from Paramount. I was in it a few times back in the late ?70s. I remember seeing some guys dressed in Western costumes in it. I figured they were making a movie at Paramount. I also think I was in the place across from Warner Brothers. That?s where I was sitting in a booth eating lunch and some studio business men were sitting in the booth behind me. I heard one of the old guys tell a story about Lana Turner on location in Hawaii (I think it was Hawaii) and she went shopping in an expensive store in the hotel, and she charged a $5,000 mink coat to her room. The studio wound up paying for it. Those little cafes and bars were just like any in any small town. Many of them weren?t fancy at all and were just diners, yet because they were near or across from studios, many actors and department heads went in them quite often, just to get away from the regular studio cafeteria every now and then. When I was a teenager in Mississippi in the mid-?50s, there was an early rock and roll singer and guitar player who would be seen at a local small-town bar-b-q place from time to time, the Choctaw Bar-B-Q house, just off Highway 49. I think he drove a pink Cadillac. In 1955 and ?56 he would be driving from either Tupelo or Memphis down to the coast for concerts. Later in ?56 we saw him on the Ed Sullivan show on TV, and we learned that his name was Elvis Presley. Another time I lived in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. There was a little colored girl growing up there, although I never met or saw her. She was just one of the hundreds of other little colored girls (that's the term we used back then). Later I learned that her name was Oprah Winfrey.

Thanks! That was 52 years ago. When I watched the show, I wondered how Harpo's family could put up with living with a clown all the time. I thought his TV and movie personality was his real one.

There was one about a bar across from a movie studio that famous actors used to visit.

Thanks. What about the old office building downtown that was built in the late 19th or early 20th Century that was hollow inside? It had what was an old type of open "mall" inside, with walkways around the big central opening. I think it was about 5 stories tall and was used in several old films.

I have a tape of Red Dust. I first saw this film in a theater in San Francisco in the 1970s. I was about to give up on watching movies because I didn't like modern ones, then some theaters in SF started showing rare old ones. I also saw Joan Crawford in "Rain" in a theater, which has now turned out to be a fairly rare film again. One theater showed "San Francisco" for a week during every anniversary of the Great Earthquake, and large numbers of us would go to see it every year.

I was thinking specifically of Joan Crawford in "Untamed", 1929. She dances in a dress then a guy dances with her and swings her around, high in the air, and she seem to not be wearing any underwear at all. You can see this by running a tape or disk slow. She either doesn't have on any underwear or she is wearing a special garment that makes it seem so. Later in the film her father tells her to stop dancing while not wearing any underwear.

Do you know the year of that Harpo Marx interview?

Ok, then it must have been some other Brando interview I heard my folks talking about. The only Murrow interview I specifically remember was Harpo Marx. Seems like I recall that Harpo was in costume and playing his regular character, while the rest of his family looked normal. Do you know if that is correct or not?

I don't remember it having a name, but I suppose it does. I think it is just separate reports. Very interesting. But there is so much in Hollywood and all of LA, places that were used in movies. I'd like to see where those cable cars go up the hill near downtown. I see them in LA noir movies. Also, the house in Double Indemnity is still in the same place somewhere in LA. I'd like to see the house that was in Sunset Boulevard. There used to be some little courts (motels) out near Santa Monica which I think were used in movies, but they might all be gone by now. My folks and I drove on old 66 to LA back in 1953, not long after we saw "Sunset Boulevard". That was the old LA I see in a lot of old movies.

On Monday of next week, Dec. 4, watch for: Waterloo Bridge, 1931 Baby Face 1933 Complicated Women (documentary) Red-Headed Woman 1932 Under Eighteen 1932

I grew up as a kid in the 1950s thinking that there were no vulgar or violent movies before about 1950, but I later learned about the pre-code films. I think it was the AMC channel that first showed a restored version of King Kong in the 1980s. Some films like King Kong, made before June of ?34, contained a little semi-nudity and violence, and those scenes were cut out for all release prints shown after June of ?34. But in the ?70s and ?80s some film experts began to track down the old missing scenes and add them back to some of the films, and the films were shown in old-movie theaters in big cities and then on TV. Another example, the ?34 Code required that the scene in Frankenstein, where the monster threw the little girl into the lake and killed her, needed to be removed because it was too violent. That missing scene was later found and added back into the film. Now it is a hobby of some people to track down ?restored? pre-code films that have had the missing scenes added back to them, and TCM shows a lot of these. One rule of the old Code was that preachers could not be the villains in movies. Thus, the famous play ?Sadie Thompson? was made as a silent in the ?20s, and again as a sound film titled ?Rain? in 1932, but it had to be pulled out of circulation in 1934 because of the Code. This film was not shown again until the 1970s and ?80s, and copies are still rare today. The film was re-made in 1953 as a purposeful attempt to break the old Code. Other films of the 1950s broke different parts of the Code, such as anti-preacher films like ?Elmer Gantry? and ?Inherit the Wind?, and films about drug addiction (?The Man With The Golden Arm?, and ?Hat Full of Rain?), and films with cursing (such as ?On the Waterfront?), and films with more and more nudity. There is an even older history of this kind of thing, in stage plays (which were mainly for adults) and adult books. The books broke the old state and city censorship codes first, then came the stage plays, then later the movies and eventually TV and radio. People could be arrested in most states in the 1860s for having vulgar books, but by the 1920s they began to be allowed in many states. Eventually some of the stage plays began to be less censored. The movies were more censored because kids were always able to attend them, whereas stage plays and books could be restricted to adults. There?s another interesting thing about this... some of the vulgar crime books of the 1920s and ?30s were made into Hollywood movies under the old Code, and quite a lot of salacious stuff was just left out of the films, such as Bogart?s affair with Mary Astor in ?The Maltese Falcon? of 1941, while the affair had been much more obvious in the pre-code 1931 version of the film, and of course in the original book. However, many men read those old books as paperbacks in the ?30s and ?40s, and they wanted to see the movie versions, so they already knew what was going on between the men and women in the films, even though the films didn?t show the explicit scenes after the Code went into effect. A few years ago the BBC made a version of ?Rebecca? which was based on the original book and it turns out that Mr. DeWinter purposely killed his wife and he and his second wife covered up the crime, and Mrs. Danvers (the mean maid) had had a lesbian relationship with the first Mrs. DeWinter. This stuff was cut out of the first movie version of 1940, and the murder was changed into an ?accident.? My personal opinion is that kids should not be allowed to see the BBC version, since it will teach young kids that it?s ok to kill one?s wife, if she is a bad woman. I think this is not a good thing to teach kids, but others might disagree with me abou that.

Movie makers found by around 1910-15 that more people would go to movies if the films contained some scenes of sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, and nudity, and many films began to contain more of that stuff, which began to outrage the parents of the nation. There were many threats of federal movie censorship such as with a bureau set up for that purpose, such as what eventually happened with the FCC and early radio and TV broadcasts. By the early 1920s, The National Board of Review was a private East Coast group that reviewed films and either gave them a seal of approval or not, but it didn?t actually censor the films. The Catholic Church also published a list of approved and non-approved films. Later a West Coast group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), began the first mild code to try to cut back on some of the more vulgar things shown in movies, and this was something of a censorship code run by the movie industry, but it wasn?t very effective. In the meantime, by the late 1920s, seven or eight states had state censorship codes that would not allow certain vulgar and violent films to be shown in those states, under state law, and there was more talk of federal legislation for a federal censorship bureau, which is something that England and other countries adopted, as government agencies inside those countries. Finally in June or July of 1934 a much more strict MPPDA code went into effect that stopped a lot of the vulgarity and violence in films. This lasted until that code began to gradually be abolished in the 1950s and ?60s. So, ?pre-code? generally means the early sound films made in 1929 through June of 1934, if they contain sex, nudity, and violence in them. That gives us about 5 years of some pretty risqu? films that were basically hidden away from June of ?34 until just recently, until they were re-discovered and revived.

What does this mean?

Didn't Brando wear a plain white T-shirt or sweat shirt? I remember my parents complaining because he didn't dress up for the interview.

What kind of guy would pick up a rough looking dame hitch hiking along the side of a highway out in the middle of nowhere?

Welcome aboard, John. We're sailing for the China Seas on the ol' Bounty. Hope you enjoy the voyage.

How about Warren William, Richard Dix, and Ricardo Cortez?

What do you think about that big youth party in "Dynamite"? And the girl buying the other girl's husband?