#pre-code movies

[cladriteradio]

Groucho Marx was born Julius Henry Marx 135 years ago today on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He is, for us, in the show-business pantheon, perhaps the funniest man who ever lived.

[gwydionmisha]

7 lesbian-coded characters who made history in Hollywood's pre-Code era

They're lesbians, Harold!

[mogwai-movie-house]

Death Takes A Holiday (1934)

"The Grim Reaper takes the form of a Prince in an attempt to relate to humans and, along the way, also learns what it is to love."

A startlingly original film: eerie, mythic, poetic and cosmos-sized. A bit like 'A Matter Of Life And Death' (1946), if you've seen that, but more deeply mystical and philosophical, really peering beyond life and celebrating love and the nobility of human aspiration in a way that would seem too much if made today, like watching a Romantic poet from the 1800s make an Instagram video.

It was remade later on as the much more conventional sappy romance Meet Joe Black in 1998, but that was a lot more dumbed down than this and massively overlong at more than twice the length.

Being an early and somewhat stagey sound-film, Death Takes A Holiday does show its age, and will likely seem a little creaky to most, but it really works at what it sets out to do and there are stretches of Death's monologues that are on a deeper level of profundity than just about anything I can remember being heard said in a movie before. So I'm giving this an only slightly over-generous ★★★★★★★★☆☆.

[autumncottageattic]

Red Dust is a 1932 American pre-Code romantic drama film starring Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Mary Astor.

Part I

[everydayesterday]

parents: please do not bring your children!

[newyorkthegoldenage]

An Art Deco poster with bold and distinctive artwork by noted Swedish designer Eric Rohman for the Swedish release of Universal's 1929 musical “Broadway.”

Based on the successful Broadway play of the same name and directed by Hungarian bacteriologist Pal Fejos, "Broadway” was billed as the first $1,000,000 all-talking picture, shot in both silent and talking versions with technicolor sequences. Particularly notable was the director's groundbreaking use of a giant camera crane constructed specifically for the production, enabling fluid panoramic shots and stunning visuals the likes of which had not been seen before.

Released at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the film told a story of underworld gangsters and showgirls against the backdrop of a Broadway cabaret. With both silent and talking prints of the movie extant, the sound version was reconstructed by The Criterion Collection and included as a feature on the DVD/Blu-ray release of Fejos' 1928 film “Lonesome.”

Text & picture: 1st Dibs

[completeandrandomshit]

TIL: That Scarface  the 1983 movie is a remake of the Howard Hawks 1932 movie of the same name and both are base on the 1929 book “Scarface” written by Armitage Trail.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

TGIF