From The Wizard of Oz to Top Hat – why the 1930s is my favourite film decade

The 1930s were the making of Hollywood. When the decade began, films were monochrome, still sometimes silent (the majority had sound only from 1929), and largely uncensored. By the end, some were in glorious Technicolor, most had sound, and all were obliged to conform to a strict code of wholesomeness: a transformation embodied on screen in The Wizard of Oz.

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When assessing those years, the word “iconic” is liable to be overused. There were iconic war films (All Quiet on the Western Front), comedies (Modern Times, Duck Soup), westerns (Stagecoach), romances (It Happened One Night), political dramas (Mr Smith Goes to Washington), monster movies (King Kong), animations (Snow White), adventure films (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Tarzan the Ape-Man), epics (Gone With the Wind), fantasies (The Wizard of Oz), and films that stand alone (Freaks). Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made their finest musical, the wickedly funny Top Hat. Garbo talked in Anna Christie, laughed in Ninotchka, and kissed another woman in Queen Christina. In Blonde Venus, Marlene Dietrich dressed as a gorilla, then stripped down to an incredibly racist costume to a sing an incredibly racist song to Cary Grant. Shirley Temple made tooth-achingly sweet movies whose tremendous appeal in their time is, to modern viewers, obscure. Horror films set the mould. Our enduring images of Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula arguably owe more to their 1930s screen portrayals by Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi than to their creators, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker.

It was all too much for American conservatives, whose outrage led to the Hays Code being enforced from mid-1934. The guidelines decreed that movies would no longer be allowed to show any sympathy with crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin. Under its many provisions, there would be no nudity, no “sex perversion” (homosexuality or cross-dressing), no miscegenation, no drugs, no booze unless it was essential to the plot, no profanity, no “indecent” dancing, no “white slavery”, and no scenes of childbirth, even if in silhouette. The code remained in place, raining on everyone’s parades, until 1968.

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Pre-code films reveal a 1930s full of people drinking, swearing and having sex, just like all the other decades in history. One of the movies that prompted the implementation of the code was Baby Face (1933), a scandalous “sex film” in which former child prostitute Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) falls under the influence of a Nietzschean cobbler (“Use men to get the things you want!”). She escapes to New York with her African American collaborator, Chico (Theresa Harris). At one point, Lily seduces a married man in a lavatory; at another, a pre-stardom John Wayne. As the men get richer, Lily and Chico’s furs get plusher. Lily is a remarkably strong female lead, and Chico, though poorly served by the screenplay, is at least shown to have her friendship and respect. What upset the supposed guardians of morality was not just sex and violence – though there was plenty of both – but women and people of colour not knowing their place, and LGBTQ people wanting a place at all.

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Film-makers pushed against the rules. In Bringing Up Baby, made under the code in 1938, Cary Grant marches around in Katharine Hepburn’s marabou-trimmed dressing gown, bellowing: “I just went gay all of a sudden!” The censors let it through because they did not understand what was then relatively cryptic slang, though Grant and Hepburn surely did. The most famous line in Gone With the Wind was altered from “My dear, I don’t give a damn” in the book, to Clark Gable’s oddly emphasised “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” on screen, to distract censors from the profanity. Even so, producer David O Selznick had to fight for it. Thanks to him, the code was altered to allow the words “hell” and “damn” to be spoken, though only if they were in a historical context or a quotation from a literary work.

To appreciate the 1930s in world cinema would require a much longer piece. Outside the US, this was the decade of Fritz Lang’s M, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, and the birth of Bombay talkies. Yet the 1930s will forever signal the beginning of Hollywood’s golden age: dragging audiences out of the Depression and into a whirl of glamour and fantasy before the next big war could hit.