Ten Favorite Pre-Code Love Scenes

Well it's the end of a decade folks so all the movie blogs are bound to have a lot of lists. Since I have barely watched ten movies from this decade (if I didn't exaggerate, I would die) I will focus on stuff I'm actually watching. You know: old movies. So here's my Ten Favorite Pre-Code Love Scenes to keep you heated up on this cold winter's day.


10)Gary Cooper and Cary Grant in Uniform. And if that's not enough...submarines! Gary Cooper has many great pre-code love scenes: The scene at the end of One Sunday Afternoon where he in a matter of a few minutes saves his marriage and wins the audience's grudging affection. Not to mention scenes in Farewell to Arms where he makes you forget momentarily that the script has left Hemingway behind pages ago. But none of these scenes are really all that different from Gary Cooper love scenes after the code. A big exception is to be found in the oddball melodrama Devil and the Deep co-starring Tellulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton and a little known (at the time) actor named Cary Grant. Cooper picks Bankhead up, literally, he saves her from keeling over in the midst of a festival, and spends the night with her in an oasis. The scene lasts ten or eleven minutes following the couple as they move through crowded streets, back-alley bazaars and eventually the moonlit dessert. At one point she's trying to get rid of him and she shakes his hand to say goodbye, he keeps it and continues talking to her in a low monotone of hypnotic seduction while stroking the inside of her wrist with his forefinger. It's a completely cheeky thing which would get a mere mortal slapped, if he didn't look like Gary Cooper. Bankhead plays into it beautifully, protesting half-heartedly until it's too late. The rest of the film is campy good fun that ends in a submarine crash in which everyone gets wet (except Cary Grant, who sadly left the movie before this point, D'oh!)

9) Cheap and Vulgar. Warren William and Joan Blondell in The Goldiggers of 1933. Joan Blondell calls herself "Cheap and vulgar Carol" and Warren William replies "I love you, whatever your name is." It's really pretty awesome. See it here. More on Golddigers here.

8)Put em round me. Norma Shearer and Clark Gable in a Free Soul. This whole scene is the essence of pre-code from the costumes (Norma Shearer's loose, low cut dressing gown worn without underwear would never be permitted a few years later) to the context (the scene takes place as the couple are spending the night in Ace's hideaway.) Gable and Shearer argue. He wants to marry and she doesn't. She ends the dialog and the argument with a direct command for some lovin. "Come on. Put 'em round me." A contemporary review of the film found this couple preposterous, but now they are almost cliche--the gangster bad boy and the wild, society girl. The whole scene is linked here, and starts at about the three minute mark. More on A Free Soul can be found here.

7)The pussyfooting. Barbara Stanwyck and James Rennie discuss the ups and downs of shacking up together in Illicit. "I can't stand all this pussy-footing around," he declares to which she replies, "Don't say you don't like the pussy-footing." Stanwyck is adorable and hilarious and Rennie has stuck with me, even though this is the only movie I've ever seen him in. The combination of romance, comedy and a head-strong heroine mixed in this scene would be repeated frequently in Stanwyck's best pictures. Highlights are linked here and begins around the 55 second mark. More about Illicit can be found here.

6) Jungle love. Four Frightened People. Herbert Marshall and Claudette Colbert lose their clothes and, eventually, their inhibitions as they lose their way in the jungle. After epic quantities of flirtation, he touches her shoulder. She tells him that it feels so good when he touches her and he replies "everything I've touched for weeks now has seemed to be you." Squeeeeee! Later in the film the lovers, exchange wedding vows while tied back to back to a piece of bamboo. Marshall's character has a wife back home which adds an extra level of pre-code angst to the proceedings. More about Four Frightened People here.

5) I'm gonna let you watch me shave. In Bed of Roses (1933), Joel McCrea plays a gritty ship's captain who falls for a prostitute (Constance Bennet). The whole thing is a bit of Red Dust rip off in that respect, but it's a fun movie, with well-written dialogue and enormous chemistry between the leads in their third pairing on film. In one scene McCrea's character shaves in front of Bennett and things get pretty steamy. I happened upon this movie in the last five minutes and I was completely mesmerized by McCrea and Bennett, so much so that I made a point to seek out the whole film and others with these two actors. McCrea is ridiculously handsome in this movie. I'd been used to seeing his films from the early Forties, where he was pretty, but wow. OK, just... wow. Fan of Palm Beach Story? Watch one of his pre-code comedies with Bennett and prepare to have your mind blown.

4) They are still talking about typewriters, right? Leave it to Lubitsch to make even an old typewriter sexy. In Design for Living Frederich March and Glinda admit there feelings for one another and then move on to more important matters--talking about Tommy's old typewriter. Him: "Ya didn't keep it oiled! The keys are rusty." Her, "It still rings." He moves really close to her and she whispers, "it still rings." See the whole scene here starting at around minute 54.

3)Garbo and the furniture In Queen Christina Garbo and her real-life lover John Gilbert act out the doomed love affair between a queen dressed as a man and her Spanish lover, Antononio. They spend three days together snow bound in an inn. In one memorable scene Garbo moves around the room touching the furniture and draperies with a sensual delight. She explains to Anotonio "in the future in my memory I shall live a great deal in this room." See the whole scene here.

2) What about breakfast? In The Smiling Lieutenant, Claudette Colbert and Maurice Chevalier discuss when they will next see each other. She suggests dinner, but he says no that's too long to wait he is hungry now. Then she suggests tea and he says, knowingly, what about breakfast? As she's leaving, they kiss and the screen fades to black. In the next scene she is happily cooking him breakfast. And that, ladies and gentleman is why they call it the Lubitsch touch! See the whole thing here, from the five minute mark.

1)UNF. If you don't know what UNF is try looking it up and you might just find a scene from Red Dust there as an explanation. The rather crude acronym has come to mean"paradigm of sexiness" and that about says it all really. It's hard to pick just one scene from Red Dust. One might do a list of at least five just from that film. My favorite is the first meeting of the couple in which they mostly debate the merits of different kinds of cheese. It's almost as if the writers were trying to come up with the least sexy dialog possible, but Gable and Harlow somehow set it on fire anyway. See it here.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, duh!)

Warren William sets aside his usual wolf character to play an honest, crusty upper crust type who rolls over and begs for show girl Joan Blondell.

One of the most astonishing things about having a blog is that I'm still finding movies all the time that amaze me. Enter, The Gold Diggers of 1933. Wow. What a picture. It's funny, sexy, the songs as catchy as a virus on an airplane and the choreography is something you really have to see to quite believe. To top it off, the closing number, Remember my Forgotten Man is socially relevant and still genuinely moving 76 years after it was recorded.

The reassuringly predictable plot follows the ups and downs of a group of showgirls who've been put out of work by the Great Depression. Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon, Ruby Keeler and Ginger Rogers get cast in a Ned Spark's musical revue about the Depression"Forgotten Melody" which lacks only a bankroll to get off the ground. Miraculously fresh music, voice talent and a fat wad of cash are be found in a neighboring tenement apartment where "Boston blue blood" is masquerading as a starving composer (Dick Powell). After Powell makes his Broadway debut, the papers leak his identity and his brother (Warrren William) scoots down to Manhattan to cut off his income and try to block his engagement to showgirl, Polly Perkins (Ruby Keeler). He brings along the family lawyer Fanuel "Fanny" Peabody (Guy Kibbee) for moral support. The pair get side-tracked in the man trap that is the Polly's apartment, and after being pelted with lingerie for a few hours, they begin their own daliances with two of the three remaining "gold diggers." Farcical mix-ups, drunken misbehavior and more "fanny" jokes than I can possibly relate in one blog post ensue.

Warren William and Joan Blondell have some fun scenes that are far more about sex than romance. Even when he's playing a nice guy he comes off a bit as a bit of a wolf, though one that Blondell's Carol the "Cheap and Vulgar" showgirl is gaga over. William's comedy is made all the better by his method of playing everything entirely straight. In one scene he rants that he and Fanny have to stay in New York, because he's "this close" to figuring out what makes this Polly Perkins tick.

Powell and Keeler do the bulk of the singing and dancing but whenever Ginger Rogers is on screen, she is so completely head and shoulders above the other performers, that you wonder why director Mervyn LeRoy bother to feature Keeler to such a great degree. Keeler's singing and dancing aren't bad, but she's no Ginger. Sadly, Ginger's big number, "Sing You a Torch Song" got cut and is put in the film as a fairly weak performance by Powell at the Piano.

Now, I have a confession to make. I'd never actually watched a Busby Berkeley musical all the way through before . I had only seen clips of his human kaleidoscope numbers, which is like judging It Happened One Night from the hitchiking scene that always gets shown on TV. To think that until yesterday, I only thought of Busby Berkley in terms of his signature moves. He is so much more, a mad genius whose numbers move like stream of consciousness through one surreal sight gag to the next. Take Pettin in the Park, for example. The action begins with the principal couple and moves out to see a whole range of diverse couples from the very young to the very old, black, white, rich and poor enjoying love in the great outdoors. One couple have a baby in a baby carriage and as the camera zooms in we see that he is actually little person actor Billy Barty who jumps from the perambulator to wreak havoc on the set. It begins to rain on the couples and the women run behind a backlit scrim to change. Midway through Barty pulls the curtain up exposing them. Their new costume is a metallic body suit that acts as chastity belt much to the disappointment of the male dancers in the number. Luckily Barty provides Dick Powell with a can-opener at the end of the song. And that's just one minute in one song. Oh, to be Busby Berkeley and to be able to realize your every fever dream so completely on screen.

Bonus Eye Candy of the Day: Ginger Rogers in a money bikini!

We're in the Money is probably the best-known sequence from the movie. The film opens with this wonderfully ironic comment on the Great Depression. Just as Busby Berkeley's choreography starts to hit his stride with the surreal weirdness, in this case Ginger Rogers singing in pig latin, while the coin that covers her, um, bikini area rotates in time to the music, the Sheriff bursts in and shuts down the show due to bankruptcy.

There is something a little bit "Springtime for Hitler" about the play within the movie, "Forgotten Melody" and its difficult to tell whether Ned Sparks description of the penultimate number, in which he shouts, "The Wailing! The Wailing" is meant to be funny or serious. It's mindboggling to imagine the narrative structure of a play that could support both "Pettin in the Park" and the expressionistic masterpiece, "Remember my Forgotten Man" which features striking vignettes of women in poverty. One image of a woman holding a baby is eerily similar to Dorothea Lange's famous Migrant Mother taken in 1936. Of course, it's no more wonderful than a movie that's been as breathlessly silly as this one has up to this point that can suddenly switch gears and deliver the tone of dignity that "Remember my Forgotten Man" deserves.