About

'When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better.'
Mae West as Tira in I'm No Angel 1933

Hollywood's transition from silent to sound cinema in the early 1930s delivered some of the most risqué films seen onscreen until those of the late 1960s. 'Forbidden Hollywood' celebrates this unique period of creative freedom which ended with the reinstatement of traditional moral values through the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934.

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and the Depression which followed, struggling Hollywood studios sought to attract audiences by creating films that pushed the boundaries of social acceptability. With a gleeful mix of realism and glamour, these films tackled issues of sexuality and crime, social criticisms and a growing mistrust of authority. Strong women dominated the screen, scorning the prevailing Victorian-era ideals of passivity and purity, while stories about the police and gangsters were ripped straight from newspaper headlines during the Prohibition era.

By 1934, conservative groups — who had railed for years against what they saw as Hollywood's attack on traditional family values — succeeded in making the film studios adhere to the Production Code's censorship guidelines, a move that would affect audiences until 1968, when the code was abandoned in favour of a rating system.

QAGOMA thanks George Eastman House, Rochester; Library of Congress, Washington; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, for providing film prints for this program. Program curated by Amanda Slack-Smith, Australian Cinémathèque.

List of Works

• Little Caesar 1931 | Director: Mervyn LeRoy
• The Public Enemy 1931 | Director: William A Wellman
• Possessed 1931 | Director: Clarence Brown
• Shanghai Express 1932 | Director: Josef von Sternberg
• The Beast of the City 1932 | Director: Charles Brabin
• Scarface 1932 | Directors: Howard Hawks, Richard Rosson
• Red-Headed Woman 1932 | Director: Jack Conway
• Jewel Robbery 1932 | Director: William Dieterle
• Blonde Venus 1932 | Director: Josef von Sternberg
• Trouble in Paradise 1932 | Director: Ernst Lubitsch
• Red Dust 1932 | Director: Victor Fleming
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang 1932 | Director: Mervyn LeRoy
• Call Her Savage 1932 | Director: John Francis Dillon
• The Bitter Tea of General Yen 1933 | Director: Frank R Capra
• She Done Him Wrong 1933 | Director: Lowell Sherman
• 42nd Street 1933 | Director: Lloyd Bacon
• Christopher Strong 1933 | Director: Dorothy Arzner
• Gold Diggers of 1933 1933 | Director: Mervyn LeRoy
• Baby Face 1933 | Director: Alfred E Green
• I'm No Angel 1933 | Director: Wesley Ruggles
• Female 1933 | Directors: Michael Curtiz, William A Wellman
• Design for Living 1933 | Director: Ernst Lubitsch