Product Description
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Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 1 (TCM Archives) (DVD)
In the early 1930s, before Hollywood began enforcing a
self-imposed Production Code, many films allowed for
extraordinary frankness, including nudity, adultery and
prostitution, featured in this restored and remastered
three-movie collection. Saucy Jean Harlow shrewdly vamps
unwitting exeuctives to get what she wants in Red-Headed Woman
(1932; Disc 1), scripted by Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes). James Whale (Frankenstein) directs Waterloo Bridge
(1931; Disc 1), starring Mae Clarke in the gritty first film
version of the accled wartime romance. Added to the National
Film Registry in 2005, Baby Face (1933; Disc 2) stars Barbara
Stanwyck as an amoral beauty who s her way to the top. This
collection boasts both the Original Theatrical Release and a
Prerelease Version, rediscovered and restored by the Library of
Congress, before censors of the day demanded the elimination of
several scenes.
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Here are three films that couldn't and wouldn't have been made
at any other time. Contrary to popular belief, the history of
Hollywood permissiveness, what filmmakers could "get away with"
on screen, is not a steadily rising graph from puritanical early
days to the party-hearty present. In the early 1930s, a national
mood of shock over the stock market c and impatience with
Prohibition licensed a relaxation of the movie industry's
self-censorship policies. Sexuality--always a driving force in
movie plots and characterizations, even when repressed--became a
more explicit presence, with costuming that sometimes pushed the
envelope for exposure of epidermis and dialogue that could be
shockingly blunt.
Baby Face (1933) was made at Warner Bros., the golden-age studio
with the grittiest style and the most street cred. The gutsy
Barbara Stanwyck stars as a young woman from a factory town who
hops a boxcar to the big city and s her way to the top--a
progress famously indexed by a camera ascending floor by floor
outside a Gotham office building as she trades up, one corporate
suitor after another. No other major-studio film was more
explicit about sex as a tool and a commodity, yetBaby Face is
curiously less sexy than any number of movies that weren't so
outspoken about it. This TCM collection features both the
theatrical-release version familiar for decades and a recently
rediscovered preview version that is markedly superior, runs five
minutes longer, and includes more sexual liaisons. It also
happily lacks an absurd final scene that got tacked onto the
release version to explain how the heroine learned to be content
with a modest lifestyle.
Red-Headed Woman (1932) is arguably the raunchiest movie Jean
Harlow made at MGM (though not as raunchy as her scenes in Howard
Hughes' 1930 Hell's Angels). Unlike Stanwyck in Baby Face--a
proletarian heroine grimly selling herself to beat capitalism and
the patriarchy at their own game--Harlow's character brazenly
relishes both the sex and the posh life it wins for her. The
lion's share of this sardonic comedy, scripted by Anita Loos and
an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald, focuses on Harlow's seduction
of her married boss (Chester Morris) and the havoc she wreaks in
his upper-crust world. Charles Boyer has a role (his first
Hollywood credit) as a French chauffeur who knows how to give
satisfaction, and the film's air of breezy ribaldry even allows
the star a casual flash of bare .
The rarest item in the collection, the 1931 Universal version of
Waterloo Bridge, has long been unseen because MGM bought the film
in order to do a 1940 remake (starring Vivien Leigh) and locked
the original away in the vault. Directed by James Whale the same
year he did Frankenstein (1931), the picture charts the romance
of a chorus-girl-turned-streetwalker (Mae Clarke) and a well-born
young soldier (Kent Douglass) on brief furlough from the trenches
during WWI. Apart from a zesty prelude in a London music hall and
two scenes on the titular bridge, the film remains yoked to its
talky theatrical source, a Robert E. Sherwood play flogging the
hoary conceit that no fallen woman, however pure of heart, could
be permitted to marry into a good family. Unlike the Hays
Code-compliant remake, the film leaves no doubt how the heroine
makes her living. --Richard T. Jameson