The Oomph girl Ann sheridan
Posted on 04/07/2009 1:52:41 PM PDT by dynachrome
BEFORE the censors cracked down in mid-1934, Hollywood unleashed a flood of sexy, taboo-busting movies to lure audiences during the Great Depression.
Six elusive titles -- most have never been shown on TV -- turn up in "The Pre-Code Hollywood Collection," out tomorrow, which vividly shows just how far the financially struggling studios were willing to push the envelope.
Paramount especially seems to have gone out of its way to flout the Production Code Administration (PCA), whose myriad prohibitions weren't seriously enforced until Catholic groups threatened a boycott.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
ping
I believe that includes the infamous scene of Groucho Marx in the white lab coat while a woman has her feet stuck in both pockets, with the interesting bits facing him...
“Pre-code melodramas don’t come more lurid than “The Cheat,” a 1931 remake of a notorious Cecil B. DeMille silent by theater legend George Abbott. Wild child Tallulah Bankhead plays an innocent Long Island maiden who gets branded by a kimono-loving fetishist (Irving Pichel) when she fails to live up to a sexual bargain.”
According to my grandmother Tallulah Bankhead is some relation to us by one of great-grandma’s sisters who married into their family.
The Oomph girl Ann sheridan
Not guilty!
Probably guilty as sin, but no jury would ever convict. ;^)
I think she could have corrupted me. (Not that I would resist mind you)
Ah....Hollyweird.
The watchdogs finally stepped down and Hollyweird went from being the dream factory to the nightmare factory. (To paraphrase Ronaldus Magnus)
And of course, Mae West, if ya like ‘em a little more plump.
I wouldn’t say they were financially struggling. Warner Brothers openly had a lot of “edgey” adult comedies and crime dramas. They had hits. They had stars.
King Kong made millions in the Great Depression. People had money. And spent it on junk.
Just because people were poor doesn’t mean that Hollywood suffered.
And Hollywood “cleaned up” its act because it was a city of sin. The characters on screen challenged social norms. But behind the scenes, studio executives would have casting calls for midwestern gals that would end in booze fueled parties that would end in rape and murder.
Better to tone down what was ON screen to divert the attention from what those behind the scenes were doing.
And just because the majors obeyed the Hays Code, didn’t mean that movies had cleaned up. There was the original indie film market then...
Dwayne Esper, Don Sonney, Kroger Babb... these men made Adults Only films with nudity, doping, crime, murder, and even the birth of a baby.
And when the Legion of Decency went after Kroger Babb’s films, he made an exploitation film about the evils of gambling in the bingo racket.
And the films by these men came out in the 1930s and 1940s.
Unfortunately the career of acting has always attracted seriously degenerate characters who were doing things underground long before it became mainstream.
From Tallulah: A Passionate Life--The Cheat: One of Tallulah's more colorful earlier roles was that of Elsa Carlyle, a young woman who becomes involved with a man (Pichel) who always brands his mistresses with a red hot poker! Elsa is married and loses $10,000 of her husband's money while gambling. When Pichel gives her the money, she doesn't realize that he now considers her his mistress. When Elsa attempts to pay him back the money, he tries to brand her instead and she shoots him. Tallulah's reviews were good, but the film was not enough to recharge her sagging film career.
In the 1930s, the studio executives did the raping on the sets and on their boats.
The girls, if they lived, were blown off as “showgirls” (”you know the type”).
Women back then were classy. They had a smoldering sexual ember. The more they wore, the sexier they looked. Unlike the tramps today who dress like they are working the lounge or waiting for the ships to come into harbor.
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