• Hollywood Marlene Dietrich: androgynous, bisexual, anti-Nazi and obsessed with the passage of time
  • Hollywood Greta Garbo, the diva who retired at age 36 because she hated fame and preferred lovers and the good life
  • Cinema The bankruptcy of the billionaires who invented the Hollywood 'star system'

Sexual aberrations, female libido, judicial corruption, adultery, prostitution, forbidden alcohol, murder, racism, social hypocrisy, crude language, institutional corruption, lesbianism, sadomasochism... In that Sodom and Gomorrah that so well materialized the recently deceased Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon the private life of silent film stars was full of excesses in which murders,, rapes, infidelities and drunkenness were commonplace. It was captured very well in their columns by the gossip witches Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, capable of charging the career with the reputation of a luminary. As Samuel Goldwyn, owner of MGM, would say, "Louella Parsons is stronger than Samson. He needed two columns to tear down a building. Louella can do it with one."

The arrival of sound was a new way of narrating. Image and word formed a tandem as attractive as dangerous for the prevailing morality of an era devastated by the Crack of 29. The majors (Fox, Paramount, MGM Warner Bros, RKO) and minors (United Artists, Columbia, Universal) were aware that they had to stop, but they could not afford more losses due to the Great Recession. Therefore, at first they gave one of lime and another of sand.

Based on the creation of the association Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America In. (MPPDA) chaired by former Republican minister William Hays, the heads of the studios began to gestate a series of redemptive measures to get ahead of government, Catholic and other moralizing groups. With the help of the Catholic publicist Martin Quigley and the Jesuit Daniel A. Lord, the Presbyterian Hays presented in 1930 the famous Hays Code that was structured around five major themes such as sex, drugs, violence, blasphemy and alcohol.

During the first four years the rules were lax, hence the spectators enjoyed the androgyny of Marlene Dietrich dressed in a tuxedo in Morocco (1930) or Claudette Colbert pulling up her skirt where she showed her leg to stop a car in It Happened One Night (1934).

Greta Garbo in 'The Lady of Shanghai'NOTORIOUS

From 1929 to 1934 freedom of expression reached levels unimaginable even for today's currents, where the culture of cancellation reigns. That time is called pre-code. In the book Hollywood before censorship. The pre-code films (Ed. Notorious), Guillermo Balmori analyzes microscopically the films that found in the formula sex and violence the necessary ingredients to achieve blockbusters. Marlene Dietrich symbolized androgyny and, along with Greta Garbo, have been perennial lesbian myths, "but with them they were more condescending and treated better because they generated a lot of money. We must not forget that cinema is a business, although after the pre-code they qualified them as 'poison for the box office', like Katharine Hepburn or Joan Crawford, "says Balmori, who affects the paradigmatic case of Mae West, "who was the star who generated the most money but they fulminated her ipso facto because she was too direct. " Others were more skilled because they went from sinners to respectable ladies, such as Claudette Colbert or Barbara Stanwyck.

Scene from 'Vampiresas'. NOTORIOUS

Among the hundreds of films shot, one of the most distinguished at a transgenerational level is Tarzan of the Apes, the first installment of the adventures starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan. In one of the scenes you can see an empowered Jane who tells Tarzan that she is very attractive as they swim hugging and she marks her nipples in her blouse; at another point extramarital affairs are hinted at when he takes her to his lair, there is a fade in black, then they are seen laughing on zebra skins and the monkey Chita covers her eyes blushing. In another there are racist overtones when a black porter falls off a cliff and the only thing the protagonist's father asks him is about the load he was carrying.

In Mata Hari (1931), Greta Garbo is a patriotic prostitute. The film is mutilated because in its original premiere appeared the sequences in which the protagonist dances before the statue of Shiba almost naked and those in which she receives Ramón Novarro with a bed jump that leaves almost her entire body in the air. When MGM wanted to re-release it in 1934 because they had to make their star profitable, the Code was already strictly applied so it was not possible and five years later the MPPDA gave approval on the condition that the scenes of the original negative be eliminated. There are only promotional photos.

Her rival on screen, the Dietrich, played another prostitute in The Shanghai Express (1932) although that word does not appear in the film, it can only be deduced from one of her comments: "Don't you find respectable people terribly boring?" Undoubtedly, a clear mockery of puritanism. In addition, faith is used in a twisted way, there is racism because a British soldier does the impossible to save the honor of the white Dietrich while remaining impassive by that of the Chinese Anna May Wong.

Homosexuality was one of the worst taboos in such a moralistic society, but the directors took a risk. This was done with The Falcon (1931), where Otto Matieson hinted at his condition with his perfumed business cards; in Dracula (1931), Universal wanted to censor itself so that the vampire man only sucks the blood of women, but you can see Bela Lugosi biting Dwight Frye and looking at him with desire, which he did not do with women, and in It seems that it was yesterday (1933) in the scene of the party appear two women with masculine appearance that implied that they were lesbians.

Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan in a scene from Tarzan.

Pedophilia was also intuited. In Left in pledge (1934) appears the child prodigy Shirley Temple in underwear asking the mobster (Adolphe Menguo) to take it off and in another sequence the members of the band of gamblers pass to the girl from hand to hand to calculate her weight and bet on it.

John Barrymore (ballet impresario) and Luis Alberni (director of the company) star in The Idol (1931), which openly shows cocaine, although it is never named. In Kongo (1932) there is something for everyone: an effeminate cook, an explosive Portuguese thirsty for sex (Lupe Vélez), a chained monkey, slave trade and large doses of sadism.

As Balmori assures "there were interpreters who suffered a downturn in their careers and were, coincidentally or not, postponed to the B series". The most representative case is that of Warren William, a forgotten actor who represented like no one else in the cinema the roles of elegant scoundrel and politically incorrect charmer with a preference for young girls.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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