says Horace P. Hemingway after watching the first act of the play where uncle Erza is going to start a big brawl to put an end to the immoral show.
hehehe, that line cracks me up.
Which gets me thinking. In some of the pre-code films there was the odd bit of nudity. But how was theatre pre-1934? Was theatre going through the same scrutinity that film was starting to be put through?
Yeah, it's a hoot.
Well, "Pre-Code" refers specifically to movie standards of propriety, and that's something lots of people are familiar with, thanks to TCM, IMDb, and all these other nifty places with great info about movies.
People are less familiar with Broadway, except as it is filtered through movies. The thing is, film was not the only form of entertainment that was affected by the Forces Of Good (FOGs) at that time. I guess 1933 was a watershed, since that's when the Legion of Decency was founded. It was after they started exerting pressure that the Hayes Code was developed & enforced. At the same time, they were trying to "clean up" Broadway.
I have a hunch that Repeal had something to do with it -- the FOGs lost their semblance of control over liquor, so they had to take up the slack somehow, and sex seemed to be the easiest target.
If you look at the Wikipedia entry on the Production Code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code), you'll see that almost every single specific restriction was violated in the context of either a comedic musical number in the "show" or the hypocritical actions of Ezra Ounce & family.
I love seeing noses tweaked, especially when the tweak-ees are too stupid to notice.dolceri ac dolcere
...what the history of the movies might have been like without the Legion of Decency. It was mildly racy in the pre-code era, much like the 60's. Would the 40's have been like the 70's and so on? Where would we be now?
It wasn't the public that demanded that the cinema be cleaned up. It was the "do-gooders" who were spoofed in "Dames". They are depicted as they are in porno films, as hypocrits who deny their own desires.
The past is a series of presents. The present is living history we are privileged to witness
To quote Opus the Penguin from the original Bloom County comic strip when asked (during the infamous Reagan-era anti smut crusade) what he would most like to see on TV:
"More skin on Love Boat!"
"If you don't know the answer -change the question."
There was a lot of nudity in the Broadway musicals of the 1920s and 1930s, especially the plotless "revue" such as "Ziegfeld Follies", "George White's Scandals" (George White was specifically mentioned in this film as well as that series' primary composer George Gershwin) and "Lew Leslie's Blackbirds" series. From what I've read, the rule at that time was that you could have a nude woman on stage, as long as she wasn't moving. It seems weird but that's how it was. If they were just posing nude, that was artistic. Like Picasso or Matisse I suppose. If they start dancing nude, the NYPD would shut you down in five minutes. Even at famous strip joints like Minsky's they used pasties. But nudity was so popular in reviews one series was titled "Artists and Models of 1922" and so forth.
Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'
There had to be some way for the police to tell the difference between strip shows which weren't protected as free speech and art which was protected, without becoming reviewers. :) Give our stalwart lads in blue SOME credit. They had better things to do than stand around in the back of theaters watching shows, even if some might have preferred to do that than taking the chance of getting shot up by gangsters with tommy guns. :)
It's still difficult to draw a line between the perverted and the iconoclastic, humans etc as objects for sexual purposes and humans etc as objects for artistic purposes. Tom Lehrer's song Smut is hilarious and addresses this very issue.
I've never quibbled
If it was ribald,
I would devour where others merely nibbled.
As the judge remarked the day that he
acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
"To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance."
Or one of my favorite Lehrer lines from same song, "I can tell you things about Peter Pan, or the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!
Sometimes life is like asking strangers for directions to the Susquehanna Hat Company.
No humping scene either.
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