FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD COLLECTION, VOLUME THREE - DVD review

Because the Warner Bros. studios are among the biggest and oldest (est. 1918) in Hollywood, they have an enormous catalogue of older titles. Apparently, they have found a good market for some of them in their "Forbidden Hollywood" series. Volume 3 reviewed here provides even more films WB produced before the studios began to impose censorship guidelines on themselves.

I found the following explanation of Hollywood's Production Code in Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's book, "Film History: An Introduction" (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1994, pg. 160): "Partly in an effort to avoid censorship and clean up Hollywood's image, the main studios banded together to form a trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). To head it, in early 1922 they hired Will Hays, then postmaster general under Warren Harding. Hays's strategy was to pressure the producers to eliminate the offensive content of their films and to include morals clauses in studio contracts. By 1924, the MPPDA had formulated a set of guidelines on subject matter that would render censorship laws unnecessary. These guidelines proved ineffectual, and Hays stiffened them in 1927 and 1930, finally cracking down with a strict Production Code in 1934." That Production Code would last for decades.

Warner Bros. have now collected together six more early classics made before the Production Code and boxed them in a set called, appropriately, "Forbidden Hollywood," Volume 3. The thing that ties the six films together, besides their production dates and slightly risqué content, is that director William Wellman ("A Star Is Born," "Beau Geste," "The Ox-Bow Incident") made all six. They may not be Wellman's best work, but they do tend to encapsulate an era. Volume 3 is a four-disc set, with two films per disc, the fourth disc containing a documentary on Wellman. I'll briefly mention something about five of the films and then go into more detail on a sixth one.

The first film in the collection is "Other Men's Women" (love these titles; they're all so provocative, promising a lot more than they deliver) from 1931. It stars Grant Withers, Regis Toomey, and Mary Astor and concerns a man attracted to his disabled buddy's wife. Joan Blondell and James Cagney have minor roles, and, as we might expect, they stand out.

Sharing disc one is "The Purchase Price" from 1931. It stars Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, and Lyle Talbot. It's a humorous yarn about a bootlegger's companion who becomes a farmer's mail-order bride, sort of a town-and-country picture.

On disc two we get "Frisco Jenny" from 1933, starring Ruth Chatterton, Donald Cook, and Louis Calhern. This one is a mobster soap opera set in early twentieth-century San Francisco about a new district attorney in town who decides to take down the racketeers, including mob queen Chatterton, who just happens to turn to be.... Well, I won't spoil the surprise. Also on disc two is the film I'll describe in more detail below, "Midnight Mary."

Disc three starts out with "Heroes for Sale," 1933, starring Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, and Loretta Young. This is the most politically charged of the six films, with Barthelmess playing a World War I vet who comes back to a world that presents him with every challenge imaginable. Of all the films in the set, this one is the fastest paced.

The final movie is "Wild Boys of the Road" from 1933. It stars Frankie Darro, Edwin Phillips, Dorothy Coonan, and Rochelle Hudson in a tale of Depression-era hopelessness as young people out of work must eke out a living any way they can.

The film I'd like to talk about, though, is "Midnight Mary," from 1933, with Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, Franchot Tone, Andy Devine, and Una Merkel. It's the only movie in the set produced by MGM rather than Warners, so while it might not be quite as hard-edged as some of WB's early films, it does have excellent production values. Anita Loos ("San Francisco," "The Women") wrote the story, with a screenplay by Gene Markey ("The Great Lover," "Baby Face") and Kathryn Scola ("The Glass Key," "The Constant Nymph"). Combined with Wellman's no-nonsense direction, the film moves along at a lively, no-compromising tempo. I've always liked Loretta Young (I became fascinated with her from her long-running television show of the 1950s), a beautiful and sensitive actress. Besides that, who could resist a title like "Midnight Mary"?

The story begins with a murder, the defendant, Mary Martin (Ms. Young), looking back on her life as she awaits the verdict. Mary is a young woman living a hard-knock life, a woman whose mother died when she was just a child. As a teen, the police arrested her for a theft she didn't commit, and the court sent her to a correctional home. By the time she was sixteen and on her own, she was a not-so-innocent teen running around with the wrong crowd, including mobsters. Whew!

Out of work during the Depression, she gets desperate, and within another few years she's prospering as a gangster's moll, the "property" of hoodlum Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez). Still, pre-Code or not, Hollywood needed to tell a story with an uplifting message, a lesson, so it wouldn't be proper just to leave her there doing well. Instead, Mary gets a pang of conscience and decides to go straight. Then she runs into a handsome, wealthy playboy lawyer named Tom Mannering (Franchot Tone), who changes her life. He gives her a job in his office, and they fall in love. But, no, it doesn't end there, either. That wouldn't serve the needs of a Hollywood plot. So to that end, Mary finds she cannot escape her past. She cannot get away from the old gang.

There are no overtly sexual scenes in the movie, no nudity, and no profanity, yet sexual innuendo runs rampant throughout the story. Mary's whole life seems built on her beauty, her charms, and her favors. At least, until she meets Mannering. The story gets pretty sentimental and melodramatic, too, by the time it ends, as Mary finally does the right thing through thick and thin.

Sex, violence, murder, loose morals, and wild parties are the order of the day, which are but a few of the things the later Production Code would crack down on. I mean, how many romances end in unrepentent homicide and divorce? It's one odd, but oddly appealing, little film.

Of further note, "Midnight Mary" is a prime example of Hollywood reflecting the times in which it was made. People smoke in every scene. The jury members are all male. Hoodlums are everywhere, with Prohibition and later the Great Depression encouraging the rise of organized crime. Moreover, the film industry felt it needed not only depict gangsters as realistically as possible but to put them in their place. Men refer to every young woman as "kid" or "doll," and a woman's only hope to make a place for herself in the world was to marry well or become a secretary. In a pinch, maybe a schoolteacher. You get the idea. It was certainly a different age.

Video:
All of the films in the set feature black-and-white, 1.33:1 aspect ratios. Although WB didn't restore them frame-by-frame, the video engineers probably did some touching up because the films look in pretty good shape for their three-quarters-of-a-century age. You'll find a moderate amount of natural grain in some scenes, but nothing of much concern. As for wear and tear, there are minor flecks and occasional lines here and there, hardly noticeable. B&W contrasts are of medium-to-deep strengths, with black levels showing up quite strongly in some shots. And while definition is only so-so, you won't find any blurriness or fade. So, given their vintage, all is well.

Audio:
The monaural audio tracks come up as well as we might expect in Dolby Digital 1.0. Again, the Warner engineers did a good job cleaning up any background noise, hiss and crackles, and provide us with a fairly smooth, if limited, center-channel sound.

Extras:
Each of the six movies includes its own extras. The ones on "Midnight Mary" give you an idea of what they're about. Here, we find an audio commentary by Jerry Vance and Tony Maietta, who are quite informative in a film-course kind of way, although they are pleasantly amiable, too. Next, there's an eight-minute MGM novelty short, "Goofy Movie," a Pete Smith comedy; an MGM cartoon, Bosko's Parlor Pranks," in early color; and a theatrical trailer for "Midnight Mary."

Things conclude on "Midnight Mary" with eighteen scene selections, English as the only spoken language, French subtitles, and English captions for the hearing impaired.

In addition to the three movie discs, a fourth DVD contains the documentaries "Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick" and "The Men Who Made the Movies: William A. Wellman." The first documentary, made in 1995, is ninety-four minutes long, with twenty-three scenes. Narrated by Alec Baldwin, it includes comments from screen icons Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Sidney Portier, and Robert Redford among many others. The second documentary is much like the first; it comes from earlier material, but TCM made the version we get here in 2007. It runs fifty-eight minutes and is divided into fourteen scenes. A cardboard slipcover encases the Digipak container.

Parting Thoughts:
As always, Warner Bros. have come up with an entertaining collection of early, pre-Code movies for their third volume of "Forbidden Hollywood." Any one of them might be worth the purchase price, but considering you get six of them, plus all the extras that go with them, the set seems like a good value any way you look at it.