Warner Bros. Forbidden Hollywood Collections contain films that were released before the Motion Picture Production Code or Hays Code took effect on July 1, 1934 in the United States. A previous code of conduct for the film industry, introduced in 1930, was widely ignored. The original code was written by Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest and enacted in 1930. However, the code was mostly ignored because many Americans saw the rules as being backward and Victorian in the fairly liberal 1920’s and ’30’s.
Many films of the era included lots of sexual innuendo, references to homosexuality, drug use, and abortion among other things. Popular films of the day featured tough-talking, assertive women, gangsters, and prostitutes. Things began to change by the mid the mid-thirties. With America in the grip of the Depression, by 1934, theater owners saw their revenues slumping and those in the film industry were unhappy with the prospect of losing even more of their audience, particularly in heavily Catholic cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, etc. As a result, the pre-Code era effectively came to a close with the establishment of The Breen Office, whose purpose was to review scripts and finished prints in order to ensure that they adhered to the new Code. The production Code would last for decades and many of the films that were made beforehand would remain largely hidden by their respective studios.
Warner Bros has collected six more films made before the enforcement of the production code and boxed them in a set called, Forbidden Hollywood: Volume 3. All of the films were directed by William A. Wellman (A Star is Born, Beau Geste, The Oxbow Incident). While the set doesn’t contain Wellman’s best known work, the films do encapsulate the era well. Volume 3 is a four-disc set, with two films per disc, the fourth disc containing a documentary on Wellman.
Other Men’s Women (1931) has a solid premise. A railroad worker falls in love with the wife of his friend. So what we have here is a love triangle. Grant Withers plays Bill White, long time friend of Jack Kulper (Regis Toomey) and wife Lily (Mary Astor). Both men work for the railroad as engineers but Jack has seniority and is more settled than the younger Bill. The younger man enjoys a good time and is a bit of a loner. So much so, he’s forgotten his promise to marry rail-side diner waitress Marie (Joan Blondell), who’s understandably pretty angry. Jack gets Bill sobered up and invites him to spend some time with him and his wife. The threesome has a good time together.
Things change when Jack and Lily share an innocent kiss that turns both their heads. (Mary Astor exudes a sexuality that seems way ahead of the men in the picture. She’s convincing as a “happy housewife” yet conceals definite forbidden fires that are impossible to ignore.) The most emotional scene comes when the two discuss what they should do next, which only leaves them both in a state of total confusion. Inevitably, Jack and Bill have to work together on their next roundtrip and the truth comes out. A confrontation ensues, with an unfortunate result.
One interesting note: In the middle of this story, a familiar silhouette struts toward the camera down a long row of moving boxcars. It’s James Cagney in his third movie. He’s only in for a few minutes but he’s given a chance to briefly cut a rug at a dance hall. He doesn’t try to steal the scene but he manages to, anyway.
The Purchase Price (1932) is based on a play The Mud Lark by Arthur Stringer and written by Robert Lord. Nightclub singer Joan Gordon (Barbara Stanwyck) is tired of being the kept woman of married, ex-con, bootlegger Eddie Fields (Lyle Talbot) and takes off for Chicago. When the mob tracks her down again, Joan takes off for the far West in the guise of a mail-order bride for farmer Jim Gilson (George Brent). She’s turned off by Jim’s cold manner. In the bedroom, he frightens Joan by kissing her hard on the mouth and she slaps him. Convinced he’s been had, Jim avoids his new bride for weeks. Depressed wheat markets are pushing Jim into insolvency. A neighbor offers to help keep Gilson in the farming business–if Joan comes over to the neighbor’s ranch to cook meals and “take care of him”. In the middle of all this, Eddie arrives in their town and expects Joan to forget her marriage and leave with him for the big city.
Obviously, Joan is a woman hoping to find a man for love, protection and security after years of being thought of as little more than a plaything. The somewhat exaggerated backwoods conditions don’t shake Joan’s resolve but she has trouble convincing Jim she’s sincere. The two finally find their connection in the farmland, when Joan proves she doesn’t mind working the fields at his side. If you’ve seen many Barbara Stanwyck pictures, you’ll surely agree that The Purchase Price is a different type of role for her. Joan is straight-forward, honest, sincere and uncomplicated; a far cry from the femme fatale roles that would come to define her career in later years.
Frisco Jenny (1933) Jenny Sandoval (Ruth Chatterton) has grown up on the pre-1906 earthquake Barbary Coast as the daughter of corrupt casino owner Jim Sandoval (played by Robert Emmett O’Connor), who refuses to let her marry the piano player (James Murray) that’s gotten her pregnant. After both men are killed in the killed in the quake, she is left penniless and forced to raise the baby on her own. In order to make ends meet, Jenny finds herself running a prostitution ring. A dice game leads to the shooting death of a cheater (J. Carrol Naish, uncredited); Jenny helps cover for mob mouthpiece Steve Dutton (Louis Calhern) and forms a lifelong partnership. The partnership enables Jenny to pay the bills but ruins her chance to be a good mother. Her baby, Daniel, is put in the foster care of Judge Reynolds (Berton Churchill). By the time Jenny can afford to take her son back, she can’t bear the thought of tearing him away from his loving foster mother. Instead, she disappears from her son’s life and keeps a scrapbook of his accomplishments from afar.
Flash forward twenty years and Jenny is the leader of a group of brothel madams. Daniel Reynolds is now a District Attorney who vows to end their corruption. When Dan’s policies put legal heat on Steve Dutton, the crooked lawyer threatens to spill the beans about Dan’s true parentage.
Jenny isn’t the innocent victim here. Sure, she got a raw deal in life but she chooses a criminal path for herself and doesn’t expect forgiveness. The fate that Jenny accepts isn’t designed to create a handkerchief ending. Rather, the ending she faces has much more integrity than later “morality” films cleared by the censors.
Midnight Mary (1933), the sole MGM entry in the collection, the story begins with a murder, the defendant, Mary Martin (Loretta Young) looking back on her life as she awaits the verdict. The flashback gives us an idea of how she might have ended up where she is: her mother died when she was just a child, as a teen, the police arrested her for a theft she didn’t commit and the court sent her to a correctional home. By the time she was sixteen and on her own, she was a not-so-innocent teen running around with the wrong crowd, including mobsters.
Unable to find work during the Depression, she becomes the “property” of hoodlum Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez). Everything is going well for her until she gets a conscience and decides to go straight. Then she runs into a handsome, wealthy playboy lawyer named Tom Mannering (Franchot Tone), who changes her life. He gives her a job in an office and they fall in love. Unfortunately, Mary can’t escape her past. Various complications lead to Tom’s life being threatened, just as he’s ready to propose. Mary knows that she might have to go to the gas chamber, but she picks up a gun to save the innocent Tom.
Sexual innuendo runs rampant throughout the story. Mary’s whole life seems built on her beauty, her charms, and her favors. At least, until she meets Mannering; the story gets fairly sentimental and melodramatic by the time it ends, as Mary finally does the right thing.
Heroes for Sale (1933) tells the story of Tom Holmes (Richard Barthelmess), a WWI soldier shot and captured by the Germans. Tom is given morphine to help ease his pain, which results in an addiction. When Tom is repatriated, he’s reunited with the soldier who thought he died and took credit for his heroic action.
The law doesn’t allow doctors to treat Tom’s condition and the stigma from society over his addiction, leads to a stint in a prison farm. When released, Tom goes to work in a laundry. He ends up marrying a wonderful woman named Ruth (Loretta Young) and they have a son. Tom initially deflects the communist ranting of an immigrant German (Robert Barrat). Later the two get rich off an invention that automates the laundry; the communist becomes a fervent capitalist, declaring that money is all, now that he has a lot of it. The laundry’s new owners use the invention to lay off 75% of the work force. Tom unfortunately tries to stop the angry mob of workers when they face off with the police and disaster ensues.
Heroes for Sale is well suited to the muscular filmmaking style of William Wellman. The director reportedly used real hoboes in the hobo scenes and real laundry workers in the laundry scenes and said he never shot a scene more than twice. Heroes for Sale is a film about hanging in there until something good comes along.
Wild Boys of the Road (1933) is probably the best known film in the set. Here, Wellman tries to present a vivid portrait of one of the major social problems of the Depression-era. Unemployed, homeless youths were, by the early 1930s, drifting across the country by the thousands. Forming into loosely-netted gangs, they would hop trains and hobo from city to city in search of jobs and their next meal.
Young teens Eddie Smith and Tommy Gordon (Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips) are best friends with no money, which gets them ejected from a high school dance. Tommy has no father; his mother ekes out a living by taking in borders. She is saddled with debt and threatened regularly with eviction. Eddie Smith has loving parents. His father (Grant Mitchell) seems to be one of the rare locals with a job at a concrete factory. Eddie is rather insouciant and even plans to help his pal Tommy. However, when Eddie returns from the dance, he finds his father has lost his job. The bank soon threatens to take the family home. Eddie sells his rickety car (he throws an anchor out to serve as a parking brake), gives the money to his father, and with Tommy catches a freight train in hopes of finding work. They meet Sally (Dorothy Coonan), a girl passing as a boy who’s going to an aunt in Chicago. The aunt (Minna Gombell) turns out to be running a brothel and the kids barely escape a police raid.
On the railroad, the boys are beaten and terrorized by by railroad deputies. One young girl is raped by a railroad brakeman (Ward Bond). The boys band together in an effort to fight back. They form a squatters camp in a town until fireman with high pressure hoses force them out. Eddie, Tom and Grace finally make it to the city, only to run into criminals eager to get them to join their enterprise.
Wild Boys of the Road is a surprisingly strong and realistic portrait of Depression-era life. Every scene is stark, gray and filled with a sense of dread. Wellman is to be commended for not pulling any punches–he stages a traumatic scene where a boy is run over by a train. The picture of Tom and Eddie’s hometown is a grim version of an Andy Hardy movie–the boys must steal gasoline to drive their girlfriend’s home and Eddie’s dad takes on the look of a broken man when he realizes that his chances of supporting his family are next to none. Sterling Holloway is effective as one of the kids on the run. Wellman wisely concentrates on shots of kids hopping freight cars and performing risking their lives to find the next dollar.
As always, Warner Bros. have come up with an entertaining collection of early, pre-Code movies for their third volume of Forbidden Hollywood. This set is a must have for any film student or any serious film collector.
All of the films in the set feature black-and-white, 1.33:1 aspect ratios. Although Warner Bros. didn’t restore them frame-by-frame, the video engineers probably did some touching up because the films look in pretty good shape for their three-quarters-of-a-century age. You’ll find a moderate amount of natural grain in some scenes but nothing that affects the viewing experience. There are minor flecks and occasional lines here and there, hardly noticeable. B&W contrasts are of medium-to-deep strengths, with black levels showing up quite strongly in some shots. And while definition is only so-so, you won’t find any blurriness or fade. So, given their vintage, it’s all good.
The monaural audio tracks come up as well as we might expect in Dolby Digital 1.0. Again, the Warner engineers did a good job cleaning up any background noise, hiss and crackles, and provide us with a fairly smooth, center-channel sound.
The extras for The Forbidden Hollywood Collection: Volume 3 are impressive. Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta provide a commentary for Midnight Mary. John Gallagher does the honors for Heroes for Sale and William Wellman Jr. and Frank Thompson have recorded a track for Wild Boys of the Road.
Each feature disc carries original trailers and a selection of short subjects. Three S. Van Dine Detective Mystery two-reelers are included, from a series starring Donald Meek and John Hamilton (Perry White on the TV Superman show). Several cartoons are on the discs, including a two-color Technicolor Bosko cartoon; Rochelle Hudson of Wild Boys of the Road provided the voice for Bosko’s animated girl friend! A Pete Smith short is included as well.
A fourth DVD contains the documentaries Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick and The Men Who Made the Movies: William A. Wellman. The first documentary, made in 1995, is ninety-four minutes long, with twenty-three scenes. Narrated by Alec Baldwin, it includes comments from screen icons Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Sidney Portier, and Robert Redford among many others. The second documentary is much like the first; it comes from earlier material, but TCM made the version we get here in 2007. It runs fifty-eight minutes and is divided into fourteen scenes. The whole DVD is worth watching.
