Pre-Code's Sex Slant, Carole Landis ('sex-loaded'), Homefront's Lemo Stars

‘I like restraint,” Mae West once said, “if it doesn’t go too far.” It went a long way during the so-called Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system, from 1934 to 1968. During those years, there were exact limits on what could be shown on screen, as specified in the Hollywood Production Code. The period came to an end in 1968 when something like the present ratings system came into effect, partly in response to a new generation of films full of nudity, obscenity and bloodshed that scarified the bourgeois, films such as 1966’s Blow Up and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It had begun four years after the formal end of silent cinema in 1930.

So what happened between 1930 and 1934? A rich, 21-film season at BFI Southbank in London next month provides an answer, mapping the turbulent, fascinating period of studio history known as ‘Pre-Code Hollywood’. Familiar stars appear in these often dazzling early talkies – James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis and Clark Gable among them – but the films aren’t standard Hollywood fare. As James Bell says in the season programme, it was ‘a naughtier, rougher-edged and more shocking cinema than anything audiences would see again until the 1960s’. It treated with arresting frankness, and often visual inventiveness, subjects as delicate – or as crude – as lust, violence, drugs, alcohol, adultery, bestiality, rape and homosexuality. Gangsters shot or lied their way to the top in a desperate Depression-era world; but women could be just as hard-bitten.

A film like Jack Conway’s Red-Headed Woman (1932), starring the usually blonde Jean Harlow as Red, a promiscuous predator sleeping her way up the financial food chain to millionaires, is based on the premise that men can’t resist her body. The hero’s estranged wife accuses Red right out: “You caught him with sex!” This isn’t the kind of line we would hear film characters deliver much post-1934. Red later crows, ‘I’m the happiest girl in the world. I’m in love and I’m going to get married!’ She’s in love with a handsome chauffeur – and is marrying his aged millionaire boss. Yet, to suggest that this was a film revelling in a world before censorship would be wrong. In March 1930 the studios had already pledged to observe a new, elaborate Production Code associated with Will Hays, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

Not all the ‘sex slant’ was so serious. The German director Ernst Lubitsch constantly flirted with the transgressive – in for instance the still-unsettling ménage à trois of Design for Living (1933). Musicals could also raise an erotic frisson – like the delightful girls-on-the-make entertainment Gold Diggers of 1933 by Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley, with songs such as ‘Pettin’ in the Park’ (‘Come on, maybe this is wrong, / But, gee, what of it? / We just love it.’) After all, the subtleties of coded suggestion in Hollywood’s Golden Age have enriched the cinematic heritage just as much as the startling achievements of this heady era. Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Carole Landis - Ping Girl at Roach Studios (1939–1940): With dubious logic, Roach created the slogan, “The Ping Girl: She Makes You Purr.” But for those in the know, ping had a less respectable meaning. Although the word does not appear in standard slang dictionaries, an Internet dictionary defines it as an exclamation accompanying an erection, as in, “I saw her, and ping.” One can well understand why Carole, presumably aware of this usage, would have found the title unacceptable. At the same time, the fact that Roach was able to use the term in publicity suggests that its slang meaning was not widely known among the general public, who were expected to be duped by the motor-oil red herring.

The awkwardness of the episode, which would be writ large in the uneasiness of Carole’s entire film career, is one more demonstration that the kind of overt sexual appeal that had flourished in the days
of first Clara Bow and then Jean Harlow (who never needed a slogan to project it) was no longer possible. The 1930s image of the desirable woman had been divided between the ethereal sexuality incarnated by Greta Garbo and a pointedly sluttish style typified by Harlow and raised to the level of caricature by Mae West (who, we should not forget, turned forty in 1933). In contrast, 1950s sexuality, reflecting the budding postwar youth culture, would cater less to adult desires than to adolescent wet dreams. The sexuality of the 1940s was more restrained, less explicit.

Especially after the war, actresses such as Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth evolved a sexiness that was suggestive rather than direct. In Gilda (1946), under the direction of Charles Vidor, Hayworth inaugurated a new art of playing seductively to the camera—the implicit eye of the spectator—that in the following decade Marilyn Monroe would perfect and Jayne Mansfield parody.

Despite Carole’s penchant for low-cut gowns, modesty was an important trait of her character; she loved to tell jokes, but according to at least one credible witness, these were never off-color, nor was she known to use foul language—in contrast to her notoriously salty-tongued namesake, Carole Lombard.

I Wake Up Screaming, Carole’s second turn as Betty Grable’s sister, was not a film Carole claimed to have particularly enjoyed making, yet it is the most biographically significant motion picture of her career. Vicki, Carole’s character in I Wake Up Screaming, was almost certainly the inspiration for Jerome Charyn’s obsessively counterfactual portrait of Carole in Movieland (1989): “almost pathological coldness... frozen beauty... coolness that was outside any art.”

Although the Landis:Grable::beautiful:pretty paradigm had been marked in Moon over Miami, it was incidental to the substance of Carole’s role, merely a way of justifying and mitigating her presence on screen. I Wake Up Screaming does something different, and rather daring: it foregrounds Carole’s beauty not simply as an empirical reality of the fictional world but as a transcendental difference reflected in the formal structure of the narrative. Carole was uniformly praised for her performance, as “properly hard and brittle.”

On the final pre-shooting script of I Wake Up Screaming in the Fox archives at the University of Southern California, one of Darryl Zanuck’s thick-penciled notes describes the still uncast character of Vicki Lynn as “sex-loaded.” Whatever the truth about Zanuck’s 4 p.m. trysts, it could not have escaped him that no one on the Fox lot fit that description better than Carole. But a woman whose sex appeal is so excessive that she must be expelled from the film before it begins is not compatible with very many movie plots. In Carole’s Fox career, I Wake Up Screaming was in the nature of an exorcism. In the script conferences, various names had been suggested for both roles: Rita Hayworth or Gene Tierney as Jill, Lucille Ball as Vicki. Zanuck’s choice of Carole for this “sex-loaded” role had been an afterthought. -"Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl" (2008) by Eric Gans

Ginger Szabo (Tammy Lauren) has just told Jeff (Kyle Chandler) that they would like her to sing a love song on the next "Lemo Tomato Juice Hour". -Jeff: At this rate, you'll be bigger than Betty Grable! -Ginger: You think so?

Review: ‘Homefront the Traveling Lemo All-Stars’: It is the fall of 1946. The nation is just getting used to the idea that nylon stockings are plentiful and has rediscovered that there is actually an organization called the Republican party. Meanwhile, in a farcical turn away from their usually serious and oftentimes traumatic post-war adjustments, the denizens of “Homefront” Ohio are enduring the joys and sorrows of America’s rush to embrace the free enterprise system.

The laughs are few in this hit-and-miss episode centered around Cleveland Indians baseballer Jeff Metcalf’s (Kyle Chandler) ill-fated journey as a member of “The Traveling Lemo All-Stars,” but the series still deserves high marks for its well-defined characterizations and rich attention to detail. All Metcalf wants to do is earn enough postseason money to keep the payments going on his car until spring training; but his reluctant participation as a member of the Lemo Tomato Juice all-star baseball team turns into the barnstorming-tour-from-hell. Kyle Chandler and Tammy Lauren are totally likeable as the on-again-off-again lovers... Source: variety.com


Ginger Szabo and Jeff Metcalf talk about their plans for a honeymoon. (from "Can't Say No" -'Homefront' episode). Jeff tries to cheer Ginger up after the screen test (from "Szabo's Travels"). Ginger is sitting at the bar looking very glum; Eddie (comes up behind Ginger): -For whatever it's worth, you reminded me of Carole Lombard. -Ginger (excited): Really?

Carole Landis was born on New Year's Day in 1919 in Fairchild, Wisconsin, as Frances Lillian Mary Ridste. Some time after her arrival in San Francisco, Frances tells us she chose her stage name. Carole was her “favorite name,” clearly borrowed from Carole Lombard, the first Hollywood star to spell her name that way, although Carole herself “never gave this story credence.”

Frances was surely aware that, like herself, her chosen namesake, née Jane Alice Peters, was born in the Midwest (in Fort Wayne, Indiana), the child of a broken home, had come to California as a girl, and had dropped out of high school to pursue an entertainment career; above all, Frances, whose best acting would be in comedy, must have admired Lombard’s mastery of the screwball genre. Carole explained the choice of “Landis” as one of two hundred names she found in the San Francisco telephone directory; some writers claim that she made her selection on seeing the name of baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in a newspaper. -"Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl" (2008) by Eric Gans