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Sin In Soft Focus, Pre-Code Hollywood

(Clara Bow embodies "sin in soft focus" in a portrait by Max Munn Autrey. From Call Her Savage.)

In the spring of 1934, Hollywood faced what the Los Angeles Times called "the most serious crisis of its history." The film capital was under siege by censorship advocates who launched a boycott, demanding that the film industry enforce the Production Code it had adopted in 1930. For nearly five years, defiant producers had cited artistic freedom and flouted the Code, which forbade vulgarity, profanity, nudity, excessive violence, illegal drugs, adultery, "sex perversion," "white slavery," racial mingling, "lustful kissing," and suggestive dancing. In July 1934, the controversial films were outlawed. Today they are called "pre-Code."

Sin in Soft Focus showcases a scintillating era in film history and tells how filmmakers sidestepped the Code. The innovative Rouben Mamoulian used rhyming dialogue and musical cues to create the risqué romanticism of Myrna Loy in Love Me Tonight. The legendary Ernst Lubitsch made his camera waltz and then closed doors in its face to convey the naughty sexuality of Jeanette MacDonald in The Merry Widow. The brilliant Josef von Sternberg used lace, smoke, and soft focus to make Marlene Dietrich a glamorous prostitute in Dishonored. Following his lead, Hollywood used soft-focus filters to screen the "sinful" behavior of stars such as Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Norma Shearer.

Mark A. Vieira draws on extensive research, interviews, and correspondence in the Production Code Administration files to tell the engaging, suspenseful, and often humorous story of the struggle between Hollywood and its reformers, weaving history, politics, and film into a full-blooded narrative. Lavishly illustrated with 275 film stills, many of them rare, the book captures the stunning visual artistry of the era. Among the films highlighted are Morocco, Blonde Venus, and The Devil Is a Woman, starring the exotic Dietrich; Cecil B. DeMille's scandalous epic, The Sign of the Cross, with Claudette Colbert; tales of underworld brutality such as The Public Enemy, with James Cagney and Jean Harlow, and Scarface, with Paul Muni; Call Her Savage and Hoopla, featuring the last of Clara Bow's sizzling performances; Mae West's bawdy comedies; and racy musicals such as 42nd Street and The Gold Diggers of 1933.

The first book to feature the pre-Code films as a discrete body of work, Sin in Soft Focus serves as an essential reference guide to the genre. The original Production Code is reproduced in its entirety, along with an inventory of 100 pre-Code films, which documents key information such as studio, cost, profit/loss data, and current availability on video.

(from the dust jacket of the hard cover)