#Pre-Code Cinema

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 73: Assorted Performances XII

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration.

This is the last of the already prepped Performances polls left. Have more suggestions? Feel free to weigh in.

Unless there is a landslide of suggestions, we'll be going back to the 20th century and earlier soon. I do have some music polls I want to run in February, which will effect the posting schedule.

[luvinaeverdene]

The Lady Eve (1941)

Directed by Preston Sturges

[shy-girl04]

 Barbara Stanwyck 

Baby Face (1933) dir. Alfred E. Green

[canadachronicles]

Each month, I try to watch at least one Pre-Code film; a very interesting experience as these films are often more adventurous, modern and sexy than others shot in the 1950s! I saw the fantastic Greta Garbo in Mata Hari this month, but I've already got my pick for March: Coquette, starring Silent Era legend and Hollywood icon, Torontonian Mary Pickford who won an Oscar for her performance!

[pandoramsbox]

Sci-Fi Saturday: Just Imagine

Week 6:

Film(s): Just Imagine (Dir. David Butler, 1930, USA)

Viewing Format: YouTube

Date Watched: June 19, 2021

Rationale for Inclusion:

In looking into science fiction films of the 1930s, the first one I ran across that was new to me was also the first of its genre to receive an Academy Award nomination, Just Imagine (Dir. David Butler, 1930, USA). Not surprisingly if you're up on your Oscar history, this nomination came in an aesthetic category: Art Direction. Subsequently, designers Stephen Goosson and Ralph Hammeras lost to Max Rée for the Western Cimarron (Dir. Wesley Ruggles, 1931, USA). 

Other than being a piece of Academy Award trivia, including Just Imagine in our survey made sense because it was intermixed with genres we had not seen combined with sci-fi yet: comedy and the musical. The former was rarely seen combined with science fiction in the silent era, and the latter required the innovation of synchronized sound motion pictures.

Just Imagine is the first talking picture we watched, but it was not the first sound science fiction film produced. That distinction seems to belong to the 1929 adaptation of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (Dir. Lucien Hubbard, USA), which was produced as a silent film with a sound sequence and synchronized music track later added. I do not recall why we opted to skip this film in our survey: whether it was an issue of outright missing its existence and availability on DVD or through Archive.org, or intentionally skipping it because we had recently watched 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Dir. Stuart Patton, 1916, USA), which included narrative elements adapted from that novel.

At any rate, for its cross-genre whimsy and Oscar nomination, I decided Just Imagine needed to be included on our survey despite viewing access being inconvenient. Despite its historic status, no mainstream media or art house distribution service has made the film available on physical media or streaming. Various DVD-R versions circulate, and it can be found in unofficial versions on YouTube (as we watched it) or Archive.org.

Reactions:

The lack of mainstream release for Just Imagine makes sense for two reasons: due to copyright issues and only being of relative niche interest, late 1920s and early 1930s films aren't as widely available on contemporary home formats in general, and the film overall is not very good.

The main weaknesses of Just Imagine come down to its plot being a weak, rote triangulated romance, mediocre songs, and emphasis on Elmer "El" Brendel's comedy. Unlike his vaudevillian and cinematic contemporaries the Marx Brothers, Brendel's Swedish immigrant archetype has not retained his appeal or cultural relevance with later generations. However, his character's fish out of water immigrant schtick works well within the character's Rip Van Winkle inspired subplot.

The Academy wasn't wrong in nominating Just Imagine for its art direction though. The futuristic art deco city of 1980 is beautiful looking, and clearly indebted to the aesthetics of Metropolis (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1927, Germany), including video phones and personal airplanes instead of automobiles traveling between skyscrapers. The laboratory equipment that brings the fifty years dead Single O (Brendel) back to life was apparently too expensive a build for just one use because it was reused to more iconic effect the following year in Frankenstein (Dir. James Whale, 1931, USA). 

Single O's man from present day in the future storyline would be repeated in later sci-fi works, like the serial Buck Rogers (Dir. Ford Beebe and Saul A. Goodkind, 1939, USA), movie Judge Dredd (Dir. Danny Cannon, 1995, USA), and television series Futurama (1999-2003, USA). Other genre tropes that come into play throughout the film include food in pill form, people receiving number designations, marriages being bureaucratically arranged, reproduction without the sex or body horror, and a trip to a Mars populated by Martians. None of these aspects originate with Just Imagine, just cement its genre status.

For sci-fi fans, the set pieces and tropes in play make Just Imagine worth watching at least once, if only to appreciate later, better iterations of its elements. For classic film and pre-code cinema fans, it's an interesting cultural artifact for no other reason but its cast featuring Brendel, Maureen O'Sullivan, and Joyzelle, she of the infamous "naked moon dance" in The Sign of the Cross (Dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1932, USA).

[busterkeatonsociety]

This Day in Buster…April 14, 1924 “Sherlock Jr." has its U.S. opening in Boston ahead of the premiere in LA on the 26th.

[cinemaastimegoesby]

Fredric March and Gary Cooper on the Paramount lot during the filming of Design for Living (1933).

[friendlessghoul]

The Illusion in Sherlock Jr. explained in Movie Magic & Mysteries: The Making of Sherlock Jr.

[dailyworldcinema]

Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930) Dir. Josef von Sternberg

[silentdivasblog]

Lady of The Day 🌹 Faith Bacon ❤️

[fleetingprose]

Buster Keaton and Marceline Day in “The Camerman” (1928). Despite being a silent film and having no intertitles during this scene, it’s possible to read Keaton’s lips as he directs Day’s character for her tintype portrait.

[peggy-elise]

Joan Blondell and Bette Davis for Three On A Match 1932 💋

[voidblacktea]

Merrily We Go To Hell (1932)

A complex look at open relationships, marriage, and alcoholism. Dorothy Arzner broke new ground as a woman behind the camera. I watched this film for the first time last year, but it was even better on a rewatch last night.

It starts with a lot of fun and it clearly wears its pre-Code sensibilities on its sleeve for an act or two, but then the film gets serious, sad and heavy, with the charming alcoholic lead (Fredric March) making a mess of himself before the woman who loves him (Sylvia Sidney) and our very eyes. Human and real, it pulls no punches.

There was a greater diversity of human experience and experimentation during the pre-code era, even when the films weren't objectively good or deep, that was stamped out under the code and it's a shame.

[busterkeatonsociety]

This Day in Buster…May 10, 1925 The Chicago Tribune reports that Buster Keaton has come up with a new invention for consuming pasta…

[cinemaastimegoesby]

Trouble in Paradise (1932), dir. Ernst Lubitsch

[friendlessghoul]

Buster Keaton The High Sign (1921)