I really need to go back and watch more pre-Hays code movies, because the modernity of their attitudes and subject matter are so jarring. This is from Parachute Jumper (1933, which makes it 90 years old holy fuck) with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Frank McHugh as out-of-work former Marine pilots who get caught up in a narcotics smuggling ring. First of all, it’s jarring because there are scenes where they’re walking around with packages of heroin - after the code came in you could barely mention drugs, let alone show them on screen.
Then in the first scene above they’re trading the one good suit they own so Fairbanks can go look for jobs, and Fairbanks affects a lisp, gives McHugh a very camp slap on the arm and says “listen dearie, if you’d sew up your own panties every once in a while we could hunt jobs together!” Which I get it, doesn’t sound all that great (casual homophobia yay!) but what you have to understand was that any queer references were heavily coded and invisible to most movie viewers after the code came in; for the next nearly thirty years, any direct mention of queerness was virtually erased from the screen.
And yes, in that last scene McHugh gives the guy who refuses to give him a ride the actual finger. I have never seen that in a movie made before the Sixties.
It’s stunning when you realize that without the Code, we could have had so much more than the sanitized, infantilized entertainment that most people experienced at the theatres from the early Thirties to the early Sixties.
