“In the morning a cocktail, in the afternoon a man, in the evening Veronal.” Such is the routine of bored Viennese frau Kay Francis, who finds that neither the trinkets her rich husband buys her nor the affairs she has with young diplomats satisfy her craving for excitement. Then she meets gentleman jewel thief William Powell, who robs jewelry stores with impeccable finesse. Instead of bopping inconvenient witnesses over the head, he gives them marijuana cigarettes and they float off into giggly oblivion. He pockets the heroine’s ring, breaks into her house and kidnaps her—a courtship in crime.

Jewel Robbery bears obvious comparison to Trouble in Paradise, which also stars Kay Francis and equates seduction with sophisticated burglary. Both films delicately blend the more risqué innuendo inherent in this equation with an intoxicating depiction of romance as a duel of wits and skill, a match in both senses of the word. With her long, willowy body, sleek cap of black hair and droopy, twilight eyes, Kay Francis was art deco in the flesh. As the “wobber” who steals her heart, Powell is so perfectly, so ardently debonair that he makes charm into something not superficial but oddly vital. Gallantry is the film’s moral imperative—as when Francis realizes Powell has seen her undressing, and he assures her with a graceful bow, “You were everything I anticipated.”

This weightless enchantment extends even to sartorial matters. The latter part of the film might be re-titled, The Mystery of the Gravity-Defying Negligee, or, What’s Holding Up Kay Francis’s Dress?

by Imogen Sara Smith

At the demand of censors, Baby Face was altered before its release—though trying to clean up this story is like trying to sweep up the sand on a beach. The original, uncensored version adds a few sordid moments, but more importantly strips away clumsily inserted moralizing to reveal pure, unrelenting disillusionment. Baby Face has all the kick, the shocking laughs, and the underlying bleakness that define pre-Code. Barbara Stanwyck stars as Lily Powers, who languishes in a dreary steel town where her father pimps her to his speakeasy customers, until she takes the Nietzschean advice of a German cobbler and decides to exploit the men who have exploited her.

When twenty-three-year-old Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan came to Manhattan from Waco, Texas in 1907, she headed straight for Greenwich Village, where self-created larger-than-life characters like her belonged in those days. Her first residence was a two-dollar-a-week room at 72 Washington Square South. The Village remained her home base for the rest of her life, though for the first decade she didn’t exactly settle down there. She toured with vaudeville troupes as a singer and dancer, and made her first silent film, The Wildcat, in 1917. She specialized in playing cowgirls in Westerns, doing her own stunts, appearing in some three dozen silent films. She’d later tell the press it had been three hundred, having learned early that when dealing with the gossip writers an entertaining fib always trumps a mundane truth. After she came back to the Village for good in 1920 and became rich and successful, she moved to a duplex at 17 West Eighth Street, filling it with antiques and bric-a-brac and bringing her parents to come live with her there. Decades later it would house the famous Eighth Street Bookshop. She installed the chorus girls from her club nearby, and parked her limos in a Village garage.

The decade-long party called Prohibition was on, and Texas was more than ready to play the hostess. Brassy, ballsy, wise-cracking and fun-loving, a kind of smaller-scale Mae West, with whom she was friends, from 1922 on she was the mistress of ceremonies at several Times Square speakeasies, including the high-toned Beaux Arts Cafe and the King Cole room at the Knickerbocker Hotel, where the party-goers included Rudy Valentino, John Barrymore, Vanderbilts and Whitneys. She then hooked up with Larry Fay, a gangster from Hell’s Kitchen who, like many hoodlums in New York, saw acres of diamonds in the city’s exploding speakeasy and nightclub scene. As the emcee at his speakeasy the El Fay Club on West Forty-Fifth Street, Guinan was as much a draw as the chorus girls who kick-lined behind her. Wall Streeters, Ivy Leaguers, movie stars current (Tom Nix) and future (George Raft, still a Times Square taxi dancer), Mayor Jimmy Walker, gangsters, judges, visiting senators and tourists filled the joint with whoopee. Columnists Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan mined the place for its rich mother lode of gossip. Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon stole snappy lines from Guinan’s patter. Her “Hello, sucker!” greeting and “Give the little girls a big hand” became catch-phrases of the dry decade. George S. Kaufman used her nickname for visiting businessmen from the heartland, “butter-and-egg men,” as the title of his 1925 Broadway hit.

The authorities couldn’t leave a speakeasy as universally famous as El Fay alone, and it was often raided, landing Guinan and the “little girls” in jail. But Fay, who was raking in around seven hundred thousand dollars a year – more than eight million in today’s dollars – knew all the palms to grease, and Texas and her gals always walked the next morning. When El Fay was finally padlocked for good, Fay and Guinan immediately opened the Texas Guinan Club nearby. It was periodically raided as well. The newshounds hanging around the grand Police Headquarters building downtown elbowed and shoved to get shots of Guinan, who by now was a very rich woman, stepping out of a paddy wagon in furs and diamonds, followed by her girls in their skimpy stage outfits.

Robert Chambers published The King in Yellow in 1895, with some elements of SF, more of horror and fantasy, and a literate style that could pound most of his contemporaries into the ground.

A collection of two batches of loosely connected short stories, it is one of the most puzzling books ever produced. Though he went on to write best-selling historical romances (which I haven't read and, judging from most comments, wouldn't want to), Chambers apparently never again produced anything close to its quality. Despite making money at fiction and writing extensively on hunting, he remains an enigma.

Tough yet ebullient, James Cagney distilled the essential tone of pre-Code: cynical and pessimistic, yet charged with energy and high spirits. You don’t know whether he’s about to shoot somebody or break into a tap dance, smack a woman or crow “Huh-nee!” at her. In Blonde Crazy he takes full-advantage of the anarchic, free-wheeling mood; he’s uncontrollable and in full control, going from crafty schemer to world-class chump, slick operator to heartbroken lover. He’s ideally paired with Joan Blondell, who not only stands up to him with ease (bring a score-card to keep track of how many times she slaps him), but brings out an unexpectedly tender side of his cocky, wound-up persona. As they sit together in a night-club, he sums up the zeitgeist, telling her, “The age of chivalry is over. This, honey, is the age of chiselry.”

He starts as a lecherous, booze-peddling bellboy who dreams of better things; he keeps a scrapbook of successful rackets and sets out to fleece his fellow citizens. Blonde Crazy is all about what it means to be a chiseler, and what it means to be a sucker. It depicts a world in which everyone is working an angle, and anyone stupid or trusting enough to be conned deserves to lose his money.  Life is a continuous game of one-upmanship, a contest to see who can laugh last. At the heart of this giddy, riotous film a sliver of melancholy is embedded. Cagney and Blondell are two people so wary and skeptical, so wised-up, that they can’t embrace each other. Under the cover of fizzy comedy, Blonde Crazy makes the case that the cornerstone of American society is the confidence trick.

by Imogen Sara Smith

In Werner Herzog’s 2009 film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, a mentally unbalanced young man (Michael Shannon) plays a recording of an old spiritual, “I Was Born to Preach the Gospel,” for his girlfriend and tells her, “This is the voice of God.” Hearing the song, it’s easy to believe. As stripped down as it is, merely a voice accompanied by simple, repetitive instrumentation, it has an understated strength, an undeniable conviction.. The voice does not shout or holler or whoop, it merely flows. There’s something almost otherworldly about it.

“Well, you go your way and we’ll go the way of all Flesh…”

Mervyn LeRoy’s Heat Lightning (1934) charts people going in different directions but in the end, they’re all just snakes eating their own tails. It is an extraordinary relocation of a motley crew of Warner Bros character actors from their natural urban habitat to the California desert, and the first lead role for the most sardonic Golddigger of 1933, Aline MacMahon, who was subsequently relegated to noble matrons and doormats. Here she’s a little bit of both and a whole lot more, a surprisingly nuanced representation of a world-weary woman’s desperation and repression, defenses and weaknesses. A former Tulsa cabaret moll who woke up in cold sweats, so repulsed was she by the rotten egg she loved, Olga has relocated her kid sister Myra (Ann Dvorak) to a nearly uninhabitable place of last resort. Even in the local movie theater, the shrine to escapism, it’s 115 degrees. “They don’t ask questions in desert towns,” she asserts at her roadside stop twenty six miles outside town, and seems content to make an honest living helping poor saps along their way before never seeing them again. She wears a handkerchief across her head like a nun’s wimple and no makeup, a dislike of “mixed company” stamped across her countenance – bitterness masquerading as a healthy reset of priorities – and an invitation to many an insinuation that she’s “barely a dame.”

But dewy Myra has grown restless with life as an unglorified welcome mat. She slings beer to visitors who recoil from the glare, and then drive away somewhere, anywhere else. She’s being courted by a snakehipped badboy from town whose appeal Olga likens to “the same thrill you get outta seeing a rat run across the bedroom floor.” Myra imperceptibly presumes her older sister’s been a wet blanket in coveralls her whole life and sees no wisdom or experience in her admonitions that it’s better to feel devastated now rather than later – after you’ve been used, abused, and deemed yesterday’s news. The inevitable scene in which her poolhall lizard dumps her back at the rest stop after having his way with her is gently, poignantly bleak: so obvious is his disenchantment after blowing the virginal safe, and so palpable her desperation as she lays a last ditch smacker on him.

Big-eyed good girls wouldn’t be able to kiss that way for much longer, nor would the bad girls for that matter. Heat Lightning is brimming with raw reminders of what we lost with the induction of the Code, and fittingly resided on the Legion of Decency’s first list of banned films, published in Motion Picture Daily on May 14, 1934. “A baboon and a couple of tomatoes,” swing by to flirt with a few fellow travelers and waddle frantically to the outhouse (it may be the only early celluloid depiction of dames in tight jodhpurs attending to the call of nature). They’re hitching a ride to Hollywood with an old-timer who can’t keep his hands to himself, even as he lectures them on the dangers of two pretty gals thumbpushing on the wild road. “It’s your turn to sit in the front with that thigh-pincher, I’ll take to the back seat and nurse my wounds.” But it is hard to believe these gimme girls expect Tinseltown to prove any gentler.

To level the playing field in this battle of the sexes, two dizzy representatives of the very idle rich show up in the always welcome form of Ruth Donnelly and Glenda Farrell – or Tinkle and Feathers in this round. Frank McHugh, as their comfoozled chauffeur, gets to watch someone else tip the bottle for once: when the beer proves too slow-going, the ladies attempt to get high off aspirin soaked in Coca-Cola. Life is tough for former golddiggers with too much dough, and nary a speakeasy in sight. It’s one of those female dynamics where each finds solace in the others’ shortcomings and drinks their way into ignorance of the fact that such flaws are entirely shared. Occasionally they remember their race to seduce their tail-dragging (and married) driver, who’s got his own worries that he’ll turn pansy if he has to unpack and repack fancy lingerie much longer.

“The Academy” hired thirty girls and they were supposed to fill the role of dancing instructors, but this was merely a pretext, and the lure of the place was that it furnished young women who could be danced with and spoken to without the formality of an introduction.

The price of each dance was twelve cents, out of which the girls received five, and the dances were limited to one and a half minutes and continued without a pause until the closing hour. On a thriving night it was possible for the girls to dance at least a hundred and twenty times, and their weekly earnings, supplemented by a variety of tips, amounted to fairly neat sums. They danced like painted, flexible, unemotional dolls, and held weariness at arm’s length with the tropical indifference of youth, although afterward as they straggled from the hall the penalty became evident in their dragging, gaudily slippered feet and the rounded complaint of their shoulders. They made no pretense of instructing the men who could not dance, but simply walked with them around the floor, in a halting or scampering fashion, with a look of pouting martyrdom on their faces.

by Maxwell Bodenheim (an excerpt from Crazy Man)

Malvina Reynolds was probably the only singer/songwriter/protestor/grandmother of the ‘60s. She was most popular for “Little Boxes,” a digging satire of suburban living and entrapment.

You might expect a woman in her 60s (born in 1900, she aged perfectly with the century), standing up for left-wing values, to have mellowed into a Buddhist mindset. Ha! Leave that to youngsters like Timothy Leary.

Malvina came on like a musical freight train, with slamming commentary that spared no targets. Not only are her little boxes “all made out of ticky tacky
and they all look just the same,” but

“… the children go to summer camp

And then to the university,

Where they are put in boxes

And they come out all the same.”

The daughter of a Jewish socialist tailor and wife of a labor organizer, she had been putting together protest and children’s songs for a couple of decades before she dug into the hardcore politicization of the '60s. If you look into her composing output (http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/MALVINA/songmenu.htm has tons of her lyrics), her range, depth and sheer volume can remind you of Woody Guthrie.

I don’t know her children’s songs, so I’m talking about her protest work. Her voice wasn’t strong but it was deliberate, dedicated and tough. Her lyrics weren’t catchy in the pop sense—they charged ahead and often ran around the corner before you could catch up. They held your attention by being unlikely, loopily funny and often based on a weirdly sprung meter.

Today, many of them might seem puzzling because they were fixed so firmly to the subject that inspired them. “The Judge Said,” one of her most powerful blasts, is based on a specific case in Wisconsin where a judge blamed a rape victim for being part of a permissive generation. Malvina was attaching her song to a (successful!) petition to recall the judge. It’s  excellent but hard to expand into a general statement.

On the other hand, “Boraxo,” extolling a cleaning agent that can obliterate the worst of social crimes, though based on a comment by Ronald Reagan when he was California governor, still resonates as an overall response to police brutality:

I recently reread, out loud with my wife, The Collected Tales of A.E. Coppard. Going back to a book I admired as a teen or twentite, I nearly always wish I hadn’t. All the faults and omissions that I missed in my youthful enthusiasm now rear up and bark.

Not so with Coppard. Still revered in his native England, pretty much ignored in the U.S., Coppard, I’m coming to see, was not just a good short-story writer or even a great one, but perhaps the best ever in the English language.

His range is astonishing – he tackles any emotion, theme, tone, class, narrative structure, psychological outlook, genre with equal facility, grace and skewed understanding. Love, hate, betrayal, work, leisure, simple pub tales, densely claustrophobic lives, fantasy – nothing stops him. He beams and sniggers at his characters from the authorial highlands, then suddenly turns them free to run mad through the countryside.

Despite no formal schooling past the age of nine and no published books before the age of forty, he arrived on the English literary scene in the early 1920s complete and fully accomplished, with his first collection, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me. Most of the tales in my over-500 page collection from the 1950s – each chosen by the author – date from the ‘20s, and each is a gem.