Dangerous Men

One would be remiss, San Francisco Chronicle film critic LaSalle points out, in taking the sappy naivete of many of the Hollywood films of the 1930s, 40s and 50s as a faithful barometer of a more innocent time. Instead, this world of simple black and whites (both visual and moral) was forced upon the motion picture industry by a restrictive Production Code that reigned in Hollywood from 1934 to 1968, censoring ""dangerous"" ideas and characterizations from the final edits. Before the Code was imposed, ""Hollywood would specialize in heroes who were shady, crooked or outright criminal""; after it, films were stripped of the messy humanity that gave the ""pre-Codes"" their life and boiled down to unsophisticated good guy vs. bad guy plot lines. LaSalle (Complicated Women) outlines the heyday of the pre-Code era, which lasted from the advent of talkies in 1929 until mid-1934, when actors such as Jimmy Cagney, Lon Chaney and Clark Gable made their mark playing flawed, tough, yet respectable characters. These earlier movies featured ""men who reveal the truth about the difficulty of manhood in the modern age"" and, as such, helped define American masculinity for the rest of the 20th century. 16 pages b&w photos