ABOUT THE BOOK

Pre-Code films are delighting modern audiences with a beguiling blend of the cynical and the sentimental. "Pre-Code" describes films made between March 1930, when Hollywood adopted the Production Code, and July 1934, when it was enforced. Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood presents the pre-Code films as a complete body of work, describes the fight between producers and censors, and provides the first reference source for the genre.

Sin in Soft Focus covers the five years in which producers, beset by the Great Depression, flouted the Code that prohibited illegal drugs, excessive violence, "white slavery," profanity, "sex perversion," miscegenation, suggestive dancing, and "lustful kissing." Stars such as Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich created an image of woman that was powerful, self-determining, and sexual. Each year brought more daring films -- and more outcries from women's clubs, reformers, and churches. When the Catholic Church backed a combative censor named Joseph Breen, the Production Code was reconstituted as the Production Code Administration and ruthlessly enforced. But five years of lively pre-Code films survive.

Sin in Soft Focus is the first book to study these controversial films as a single body of work, detailing the disputes that accompanied their creation, and isolating the ten films most responsible for the Code. It is also the first book to impart this information in narrative form, moving month by month through this exciting period, using the correspondence of figures such as William Randolph Hearst, Irving Thalberg, and Will Hays. Their voices are amplified by images from their films. Most of the book's 275 photographs are previously unpublished, many of them explain the moral outrage of censorship advocates, and all of them attest to the visual artistry of Hollywood.

Finally, this is the first book to provide a complete reference to the pre-Code canon. It has the definitive version of the Production Code as well as an appendix of 100 selected pre-Code films, with data such as profit-and-loss and current availability. Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood showcases the dreamlike world of the pre-Code film, complete with arrant horns and lambent haloes.

 

Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood
by Mark A. Vieira
Published by Harry N. Abrams
October 28, 1999
ISBN 0810944758
Price $39.95

A portrait of Clara Bow made by Hal Phyfe to publicize John Francis Dillon's Call Her Savage.