Before I did this deep dive over the past year, my stereotype was that Hollywood's pre-Code talkie era (which lasted from roughly the transition to sound in the late 1920s to the beginning of centralized content censorship in 1934) was full of fun trash. That’s not exactly untrue — but there's much more to it than that.
First, in this era there’s a fascinating sense that everything is in flux. Hollywood’s idea of “what a movie should be” has not yet been strictly defined or set to prescribed parameters. There are few polished “perfectly crafted” masterpieces in this era but a whole lot of deeply interesting films.
Second is morality: a greater range of topics, themes, and outcomes were possible…
Before I did this deep dive over the past year, my stereotype was that Hollywood's pre-Code talkie era (which lasted from roughly the transition to sound in the late 1920s to the beginning of centralized content censorship in 1934) was full of fun trash. That’s not exactly untrue — but there's much more to it than that.
First, in this era there’s a fascinating sense that everything is in flux. Hollywood’s idea of “what a movie should be” has not yet been strictly defined or set to prescribed parameters. There are few polished “perfectly crafted” masterpieces in this era but a whole lot of deeply interesting films.
Second is morality: a greater range of topics, themes, and outcomes were possible before the Code descended. This applied to sex and violence but also to politics in a particularly tumultuous and fascinating period, the early Depression years. There are very few films on this list where a “good guy” faces off against a “bad guy,” and there’s a whole lot of interest in the evils of systems rather than individual villains. When the main characters do bad things, they don't always end the film ruefully seeing the error of their ways.
Third is that the era is dominated by actresses, because they were permitted to play independent, complex, and interesting characters rather than just love interests, wives, or mothers. Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Harlow, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Joan Blondell established incredibly charismatic screen personas playing powerful or savvy roles.
Fourth is that, while there are some incredible artsy auteur directors at work (Sternberg, Lubitsch, Mamoulian), the studios themselves are interesting in that this period for all having very distinct identities (MGM for glitzy stars, Paramount for auteurs, Warner for social pictures and gangsters, Universal for horror, Columbia for Capra, RKO for King Kong) and often strong personalities overseeing many films at once (Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck).
Obviously, there are some things that aren't so nice about this era. The transition to sound came at a cost to visual inventiveness. The best that you'll get on race is a kind of vague sympathy or benign condescension, and you never know when head-in-your-hands cringe racism might pop up. Way too many films include the line "I'm free, white, and 21!" But for those who met those criteria, it was indeed one of the freest — and one of the most fascinating — eras of Hollywood's history.
(Though rigid enforcement of the Code kicked off in July 1934, a few films on this list, including #1, are from a few months after that — it seems to me they're still spiritually pre-Code in what they get away with. The Scarlet Empress's opening montage is wild!)
