FredCDobbs
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Posts posted by FredCDobbs
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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
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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.
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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.
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What does this mean?
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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.
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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?
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Many white people in New Orleans in the old days had an accent that was very similar to the Brooklyn accent. I lived in New Orleans a while and this accent was most common in the "Irish Channel" district of the city, which was out along Magazine Street (up-river from downtown).
But when I was there in the '60s, the district was filled with about as many Italian families as Irish ones, so I don't know which group produced the accent. Brooklyn also has a lot of Italians and Irish, so I wondered if the accent is caused by a combination of Irish and Italians living around each other?
There is also a separate Brooklyn Jewish accent, which stays with Jewish people many decades after they leave Brooklyn.
Different accents fascinate me, and I would love to understand more about them and what causes them. I've learned that while there are some great Mexican movie actors and singers, and many beautiful girl singers, they almost never come to the US to become stars because they can never get rid of their Mexican accents, which, in English, tends to make them seem uneducated and lower class or even stupid, since there is a lot of slang and slurring of words in Mexican Spanish. The slurring of words is an art form in Mexico and they have a way to turn two or three words into one shorter word. However, when this technique is used in America, it sounds like the speaker is on the intellectual level of a hillbilly. Some Southern hillbillies like to slur their words together.
But, strangely enough, I noticed in the Central American country of Honduras that Hondurans who learn to speak English can gradually lose their Spanish accent and sound very much like Americans.
On the other hand, the small country of Cuba has a unique Spanish accent which is apparently very difficult to lose when one learns to speak English, and just about every Cuban in America can be spotted as a Cuban when he speaks English in America.
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Welcome aboard, John. We're sailing for the China Seas on the ol' Bounty. Hope you enjoy the voyage.
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How about Warren William, Richard Dix, and Ricardo Cortez?
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There are some old cylinder recording websites on the internet that have recordings of peoples voices and music from the late 19th Century.
Try:
Also, search Google using the keywords: cylinder records
Regarding anti-South feelings in the movies, see ?They Won?t Forget?, which is based roughly on the Leo Frank case. Lana Turner plays the young girl. It?s a sad movie to watch since it is so anti-South, but it?s interesting. There were actually much fewer lynchings in the South (and the whole US) in the old days than there are daily murders today. Look at the lynching statistics at the beginning or end of ?Fury? and see what I mean. Today, there are around 22,000 ? 25,000 murders in the US every year. Since everyone had guns in the old days, and everyone knew they would be lynched for certain crimes, they rarely committed the crimes. Today we?ve got the crimes and the murders, but no lynchings.
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What do you think about that big youth party in "Dynamite"? And the girl buying the other girl's husband?
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Anyway, if you like old political films, see ?Men Must Fight?, 1933, which predicts WW II, and everyone watches it on TV as New York is attacked by the Eurasian forces!
Also see ?The Man Who Reclaimed His Head?, with Claude Rains, about how European capitalists planned WW I.
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Thanks for the information!
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Yes, "The Informer" is coming up next week, which is a pretty good film. Very sad. Some other good classics too.
Everyone check out next week's schedule.
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"Red Dust" is coming up early Tuesday morning (Nov. 28th) at 4:30 Eastern time.
Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Mary Astor in a steamy Indo-China (Vietnam) jungle, up-river from Saigon. An excellent pre-code.
A "Must See" and "Must Record" for pre-code fans.
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"Enough time has passed so that these recordings are now historic and look distinctly different from television today."
Ha ha, that was back in the days when the news anchors filled the whole TV screen and they had a little graphic slide over their right or left shoulder. For a "murder" story they'd have a drawing of a hand with a gun. For a "polution" story they'd have a drawing of a bio-hazard sign.
No ticker-tape news "crawls" at the bottom of the screen. No red white and blue logo "banners" taking up 1/3 of the bottom part of the TV screen. No flashing light shows or waving flags or electronic visuals behind the anchors or in-between the news stories. I hate all the extra flashy stuff that is not needed. I missed half of the Gulf War because of the 1/3rd screen banners, since most of the war was fought at ground level at the bottom of the TV screen which was covered up by the banners. About all I saw were airplanes flying overhead.
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Above and Beyond with Robert Taylor, 1952.
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That sounds like a very good idea.
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I didn't mean to sound rude. I don't mean to be rude to anyone who lives in a big city. I just don't like big cities anymore. I liked them when I was younger and when they had less crime and fewer people. I like nice calm Andy Hardy type towns now, and nice polite people.
I thought L.A. was crowded when I left in '78, but I went back in the early '90s and I couldn't believe the vast increase in population since '78. Sunset Boulevard used to be a nice quiet and mostly empty street back in the '70s, but by the '90s it was like the 101 freeway during rush hour.
Dallas was a fairly nice little city back in '67, but by 2000 it was two or three times the '67 size and everyone was driving very fast.
In Phoenix, people drive on downtown surface streets at 55 mph. It's very difficult to pull out of a shopping mall when the street traffic is going at 55 mph.
The last time I was in New York, it was a madhouse.
I was in DC in '65 and it was a wonderful clean and peaceful city with a downtown area where people could do walking around at night. By 1991 it had turned into a giant slum with hundreds of bums sleeping and camping in downtown city parks.
By the 1990s, and more so now, downtown L.A. lookes like some of the slums of Mexico City, with people living in boxes on the streets.
The same with San Francisco today.
New Orleans is a city like the one in "Soylant Green." It was destroyed by a flood which should have been avoided, but with the present city government they didn't know what the heck to do. When I lived there in the '60s they had a good government, people who knew how to run a city, hurricane evacuation plans, lots of rescue boats and buses, emergency radio equipment, disaster command centers. For the past 20 years they've had a third-world government and now the city is destroyed.
Merida, Yucatan, in Mexico, and San Pedro Sula in Honduras, also San Jose, Costa Rica, are medium-large cities that are safer, cleaner, and filled with more polite people than I see in most American cities today. These cities are "Andy Hardy" type towns down in Latin America, and I'd rather live in them than in any American city today.
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I haven?t lived in a big city since I left L.A. in 1978. I don?t care to be in one again. I don?t like to see them or smell them or drive through them. I don?t like their traffic, or their gangs, their crimes, their sleazy dames, or their sordid joints and cheap dives where people try to drown their loneliness and despair with whiskey and dope. I don?t like movies about them or most of the trashy movies Hollywood is turning out now, which are mainly crappy re-makes of classic old films.
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I think Cinecolor was a 2-color process. It was basically orange and blue and everything in the picture was orange or blue. It worked out ok for skin tones and sky, but everything else was either orange or blue too.
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I didn't see the re-make.
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Ok, ok, I confess.... I'm watching the modern Titanic on TNT. I think it's a great movie for what it has to offer, which is a lot of good special effects, good sets, nice costumes, and other good stuff.
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Remember the 1950 movie ?D.O.A.? with Edmond O?Brien? His character was murdered with a chemical called ?luminous poison?. Although the film didn?t state it outright, this was a radioactive substance that was placed in O?Brien?s drink at a bar that killed him within about 24 hours. That gave him enough time to track down his own killer.
Well, it has finally happened in real life:
http://www.auburnpub.com/articles/2006/11/24/ap/headlines/d8ljiodo0.txt
The Health Protection Agency said the radioactive element polonium-210, which is extremely hard to detect, had been found in Litvinenko's urine.
Polonium-210 occurs naturally and is present in the environment at very low concentrations, but can represent a radiation hazard if ingested.
"Only a very, very small amount of polonium would need to be ingested to be fatal, but that depends on how pure the polonium is," said Dr. Mike Keir, a radiation protection adviser at the Royal Victoria Infirmary.
The agency's chief executive, Pat Troop, said that the high level indicated Litvinenko "would either have to have eaten it, inhaled it or taken it in through a wound."
Earlier, Home Secretary John Reid said Litvinenko's death Thursday night was "linked to the presence of a radioactive substance in his body."
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Hi. I agree with you about temperatures. Down South we spoke very slow in the summer, which lasted for about 10 months, and especially before someone invented air conditioning.