Pre-1934 Hollywood talkies were full of sex, violence, fascist sentiments and horror

I’m not an expert on early talkies. Like most people, I tend to find them wordy, over-acted, slow and static. The only ones most viewers are aware of these days tend to be classic Warner Brothers’ gangster films and Busby Berkley musicals, which, in their different ways, hint at what was happening elsewhere in filmland at the time – movies like Little Caesar, Public Enemy and Scarface really are surprisingly violent, while Berkley’s musicals contain disquieting quantities of outrageous campness and sleazy sexual innuendo.

Most film fans are also aware of Todd Browning’s 1932 horror film Freaks,  a gruesome circus-set revenge tale featuring deformed carnival side-show perfomers. It is so revolting that – despite having been a horror-story writer - I’ve never been able to get more than ten minutes into it (it destroyed the director’s career).

I’d always imagined that these films represented some sort of high (or low) point when it came to Hollywood’s depiction of the seedier aspects of life in the era before the so-called Hays Code began to be stringently implemented in mid-1934, when a campaign organised by the Catholic Church finally convinced the American movie industry that it would be in its best interests to clean up its act (the Code had been in place for several years, but film-makers had simply ignored it).

A fascinating article on the British Film Institute website (available here) had me searching YouTube for those films it mentioned which I’d never seen. Crikey! The opening scene of 1933’s Murders in the Zoo is an absolute jaw-dropper (or jaw-lifter, depending how you look at it) – honestly, don’t watch this if you're of a sensitive disposition: it's truly horrible!

Such onscreen unpleasantness wouldn’t be seen again in an American film from a mainstream studio until the 1970s. As for the 1932 adaptation of H.G. Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau, it was so pant-wettingly nasty that it was banned in Britain until 1958:

Another area the Code sought to control was political propaganda. MGM’s Gabriel Over the White House (1933) is the tale of a weak, ineffectual president struggling to come up with answers to (among other problems) the Great Depression and gangsterism. He has a dream in which he is visited by an angel, who sets him on the right track by suggesting he starts acting like a dictator. Here’s how The State subsequently tackles the problem of organised crime:

This was apparently one of several films in praise of dictatorship released during this period. To underline Hollywood’s contempt for democracy, here’s a section from Columbia Pictures’ hagiographic 1933 documentary Mussolini Speaks:

Socialism – whether national or international – was evidently as popular in Hollywood 80 years' ago as it is today.  Warner Brothers, in particular, seems to have churned out leftist propaganda to such an extent that it made a star of the stage actor Walter William, who was typecast as the unacceptable face of capitalism – he was the shyster lawyer, the rapacious financier, the crooked politician, the greedy property tycoon. For this, he was rewarded with a highly successful, if relatively brief, career as a superstar, which later earned him the title “King of Pre-Code”.  His career waned rapidly after 1934, but not before film industry lefties had used him to firmly entrench the image of the evil capitalist exploiter in an American psyche already bruised by the Crash and the mass unemployment that followed it. Warren’s work is poorly represented on YouTube, but here’s an interview with the author of a recent biography of the now forgotten actor:

The cynical contempt for government institutions and free markets which unerpins the famous gangster movies seems to have reached some sort of climax with Wild Boys of the Road (1933), which deals with the problem of an estimated 250,000 rootless kids roaming the country during the Depression. This typically understated trailer gives us a flavour of the film:

As for sex, the screen seemed to be full of go-getting, gold-digging trollops, ravingly swish homosexuals, and butch lesbians. All such depictions were outlawed by the Code, and film-makers were suddenly forced to find more subtle ways of getting their point across.

I wonder what would have happened to America – and the film industry itself -  had movies been allowed to continue in the same direction. It could be that the enthronement of Roosevelt - a Big Government leftist - in the White House would have in any case dampened the audience's willingness to sit through communistic lectures, no matter how racy. But it's interesting to speculate about the possible effects on the Great American Public of a steady diet of films depicting - without disapproval - sexual licentiousness and what I suppose we now have to call "alternative lifestyles". Perhaps we'd simply have reached where we are today a lot sooner.