Hollywood's Production Code and Thirties Romantic Comedy
2010; Routledge; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01439680903577268
ISSN1465-3451
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1 Chapin Hall, Attack on movies stuns Hollywood, New York Times, July 8, 1934. 2 Coast denatures hotcha, Variety, July 3, 1934. 3 Andrew Sarris, The sex comedy without sex, American Film, 3 (March 1978), 12–13. For similar accounts see Ed Sikov, Screwball: Hollywood's madcap romantic comedies (New York, 1989), and William K. Everson, Hollywood Bedlam: classic screwball comedies (New York, 1994). 4 David L. Hirst, Comedy of Manners (London, 1979), 1–2. 5 Ibid., 10. 6 Variety, September 1, 1931. 7 J. Brooks Atkinson, According to Mr. Maugham, New York Times, December 12, 1926, X3. 8 For an analysis of sentimentality in sophisticated comedy and American film in the 1920s, see Lea Jacobs, The Decline of Sentiment: American film in the 1920s (Berkeley, CA, 2008). Jacobs’ work on sentiment and sophisticated comedy has significantly informed my scholarship on classical era romantic comedy. 9 Thomas Doherty acknowledges that MPPDA members pledged to abide by the Code in 1930, but he glibly adds, ‘compliance with the Code was a verbal agreement that, as producer Samuel Goldwyn might have said, wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.’ Pre-Code Hollywood: sex, immorality, and insurrection in American cinema, 1930–1934 (New York, 1999), 2. Other scholars are also inaccurate. In Dangerous Men: pre-code Hollywood and the birth of the modern man, Mike LaSalle declares that pre-Code technically means ‘before the enforcement of the Code’ because ‘the SRC had no real power.’ (New York, 2002), 229–230. However, the submission of scripts and release prints was mandatory by late 1931. 10 Joy to Will Hays, June 17, 1932, Reunion in Vienna, Production Code Administration Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, CA (hereafter PCA Files). 11 Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: censorship and the fallen woman film, 1928–1942 (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 111. 12 Trotti to Hays, February 2, 1931, Smiling Lieutenant, PCA Files. 13 Ibid. 14 Vincent G. Hart to H. Hinnes, May 29, 1936, Smiling Lieutenant, PCA Files. 15 Ibid. 16 Jacobs, Wages of Sin, 115. 17 Joy to Robert Yost, May 28, 1930, Common Clay, PCA Files. 18 This gag is a variation of the switch image sight gag, a popular comic technique from the silent era. According to Noël Carroll, ‘In these cases, the image is given to the audience under one interpretation, which is subverted with the addition of subsequent information. The initial image is subsequently shown to be radically undermined. At first, it seems to mean one thing unequivocally in terms of its visual information, but then it means something entirely, and unexpectedly, other.’ Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge, 1996), 151. 19 Wages of Sin, 115. Jacobs demonstrates that the PCA reverted to 19th-century conventions of the fall when dealing with this group of films: ‘The trajectory of the fall provided a means of extending the moral significance of a story beyond the confines of the ending to the narrative as a whole.’ 20 Hirst, 40. Also see Michael Cordner, Playwright versus priest: Profanity and the wit of Restoration comedy, in: Deborah Payne Fisk (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (Cambridge, 2000), 209–225. 21 William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman (eds), A Handbook to Literature (8th edition) (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000), 473–474. 22 Ibid., 474. 23 Ernest Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility: a sketch of the history of English sentimental comedy and domestic tragedy, 1696–1780, Harvard Studies in English, Volume III (Gloucester, MA, 1958), 10. 24 Gerald M. Berkowitz, Sir John Vanbrugh and the End of Restoration Comedy (Amsterdam, 1981), 11–13. 25 The trades made a distinction on this basis, referring to romantic comedies with upper-class characters as manners, drawing room or sophisticated comedies, and to others as domestic comedies. 26 In general, screwball comedies of the latter half of the 1930s do not motivate screwy behavior this way. Certainly, there are scenes of comic drunkenness in screwballs—James Stewart has noteworthy drunk scenes in both Vivacious Lady (RKO, 1938) and Philadelphia Story (MGM, 1940)—but by and large, characters behave screwy because they are screwy, not because they are under the influence. For more on the distinction between sentimental and screwball comedies see my essay, Rethinking screwball comedy, in: Kylo-Patrick Hart (ed.), Film and Sexual Politics (Cambridge, 2006), 7–27. 27 Breen to Harry Cohn, February 8, 1934, It Happened One Night, PCA Files. 28 Motion Picture Herald, March 31, 1934. Variety, February 27, 1934. 29 Motion Picture Daily, February 8, 1937. Daily Variety, October 15, 1937. Variety, January 1, 1936. 30 Film classified in Catholic list, New York Times, July 8, 1934. Also see Karl M. Chworowsky, Letter to the editor, New York Times, July 15, 1934. 31 Breen to Cohn, December 10, 1934, If You Could Only Cook, PCA Files. 32 Breen to John Hammell, July 23, 1935, Hands Across the Table, PCA Files. 33 Ibid. 34 Breen to Hammell, August 16, 1935, Hands Across the Table, PCA Files. 35 The PCA also objected to the fiancée's line in this scene. Again, it seems that it was allowed to remain in the film because the audience has been repeatedly assured that Ted and Regi remain innocent. Breen to Hammell, August 24, 1935, Hands Across the Table, PCA Files. 36 State censor board reports, It Happened One Night, PCA Files. 37 Breen to Cohn, June 1, 1935, She Married Her Boss, PCA Files. 38 Joy to Breen, August 27, 1937, Wife, Doctor and Nurse, PCA Files. 39 Trotti to Hays, February 2, 1931, Smiling Lieutenant, PCA Files.
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