This text explores the four-year interval between 1930 and 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films, a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. More unbridled, salacious, and just plain bizarre than what came afterward, the films produced between 1930 and 1934 look like classical Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from another universe. The book lays bare what Hollywood under the Production Code did its best to cover up and push off the screen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded - in sum, the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled. Thomas Doherty chronicles how the freewheeling films of an unrestricted Hollywood inform the culture of America in the 1930s. Sandwiched between the subtleties of silent film and the moral sweetness of Shirley Temple, pre-Code Hollywood movies extolled the vibrant and the audacious. The traumas of the Great Depression, an increasing public taste for the sensational, the fascination with gangsters and felons, the sexual permissiveness left from the Roaring Twenties, a growing skepticism of capitalism, and the birth of a long-lived affection for such horror movie staples as Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and King Kong - all are revealed in this analysis of an anomalous period in Hollywood history.

Table of Contents:
1. On the Cusp of Classical Hollywood Cinema Patrolling the Diegesis Pre-Code Contexts 2. Breadlines and Box Office Lines: Hollywood in the Nadir of the Great Depression The Lost Millions A Synchronized Industry "Mike Fright" 3. Preachment Yarns: The Politics of Mere Entertainment Telegraphing Ideology Class Distinctions Professional Malfeasance 4. Dictators and Democrats: The Rage for Order Hankering for Supermen "The Barrymore of the Capital": The Newsreel Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt A New Deal in the Last Reel The Mad Dog of Europe 5. Vice Rewarded: The Wages of Cinematic Sin Packaging Vice Models of Immorality Figurative Literalness Queer Flashes "Women Love Dirt" Working Girls 6. Criminal Codes: Gangsters Unbound, Felons in Custody Rushing Toward Death: The Gangster Film Men Behind Bars: The Prison Film 7. Comic Timing: Cracking Wise and Wising Up Commentators on the Action Story, Screenplay, and All Dialogue by Mae West Newspaper Patter The Blue Eagle and Duck Soup (1933) 8. News on Screen: The Vividness of Mechanical Immortality Library Stock The Newsreel Ethos Covering Up the Great Depression 9. Remote Kinships: The Geography of the Expeditionary Film Points on the Compass Faking It: Phoney Expeditions and Real Deaths The Dark Continent 10. Primitive Mating Rituals: The Color Wheel of the Racial Adventure Film "He's White": Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) and Tarzan and His Mate (1934) Red Skin, Red Lips: Massacre (1934) East Mates West "The Ethiopian Trade" Nerve and Brains: Paul Robeson and The Emperor Jones (1933) Beauty and the Beast: King Kong (1933) 11. Nightmare Pictures: The Quality of Gruesomeness Rugged Individualism: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and Their Progeny The Lower Orders Rise Up: Island of Lost Souls (1933) and Freaks (1932) 12. Classical Hollywood Cinema: The World According to Joseph I. Breen "The Storm of '34" Hollywood Under the Code Post-Code Hollywood Cinema