pre-code

[astroaztec]

A little while back ariyanakylstram was musing about doing her homework for an upcoming PEERS. She mentioned several pre-code movies by name. Last year while cleaning out my father's residence I found many items of recent mass media. I took most of them to the local library, of those which remained I dispensed many at the estate sale, and I discarded some. But a very small few seemed distinctive, and I brought them home.

When I read Ari's lj post I got this really strange feeling. I checked what I had brought home. Two of the videos are 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1935 (post-code, but in the sequence of others by Busby Berkeley films which were pre-code).

Before Ari's post I had forgotten that I had these videos. I was blissfully unaware of the motion picture code beyond my dim memories of when the MPAA abandoned it and instituted the ratings system and shortly thereafter changed GP to PG. Now I sit on a new mystery that will never be solved.

These films were released before my father was 4 years old, so why would he have them? Did my grandparents relish them in the hard times of the great depression? Do they tell me something about the state of the household right around the time my father's younger brother died as an infant?

My grandfather died before my dad graduated from high school, and my surviving uncle is so much younger than my dad that he can't say anything about the 1930s. The only surviving evidence is in boxes I've brought home. I can make inferences (and I already have, to my great understanding of many things), but I'll never know the answers.

Comments

[ariyanakylstram.livejournal.com]

FYI -- many movies which were technically "post-code" still seem very "pre-code" in their stylings -- because the code wasn't being enforced, so the flouting of the code was deliberate.

...because of course, that sort of thing NEVER happens with new laws that aren't enforced right away.