As a film category, Pre-code is less familiar than Noir and more precise. Films were either made before, during, or after the Hays Code went into effect to rein in the immoral longings of Hollywood studios. Noir can be anything anyone says it is. Wait a minute. The Code was adopted in March 1930, but the films chosen by local curator Elliott Lavine for six salacious programs at the Castro Theatre were released in 1931-33. I'm sure he has an explanation. More importantly, a dozen of the 14 films will be actual films, projected from 35 mm prints. Now you know how to spend six Wednesday nights, starting Feb. 24.
Edward G. Robinson fans, of whom I am not one, will enjoy seeing the unlikeliest leading man in Two Seconds, a melodramatic misogynist's manifesto. The short, toad-faced star is not strictly speaking believable as a big muscle-bound welder working on a Manhattan skyscraper. His co-star Vivienne Osborne has the thankless task of seducing an honest, hard-working dope in order to get her blonde hands on his hard-earned dough. Playing a woman, Osborne is doomed to obscurity in this load of tripe nonetheless interesting for period details. On a double bill with Scarface, Wed., Feb. 24.
In Three on a Match, Bette Davis plays third fiddle to Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak in a long, drawn-out diatribe against narcissism in women that follows three schoolgirls as they apply themselves to the business of modern womanhood in the Great Depression. Davis' sensible character goes from business school to personal assistant without a hiccup. Blondell's tough girl goes from prison to show biz and beyond. Demonstrating that even pre-Code Hollywood had a blistering streak of intolerance for weakness, Dvorak's priggish goody-goody starts at the top and starts slipping and sliding into adultery and drugs, which gives Humphrey Bogart a chance to inject some criminality into this "women's picture." On a triple bill with Claudette Colbert's Torch Singer and, hallelujah!, Tallulah Bankhead in The Cheat, Wed., March 2.
Marlene Dietrich was never better scripted, directed, or cast than in Shanghai Express, a classy intrigue that demonstrates how to stage action almost too complex to be captured on film. No one ever celebrated the complications of train travel with the wit and insouciance of Joseph von Sternberg. This is travel as performance. Arguably the greatest excuse for the Hollywood studio system ever made. Anna May Wong goes toe-to-toe with Dietrich, and both make you feel you're failing miserably to fully live your life. On a bill with Safe in Hell, an exotic study in the perils of being a woman in a man's world, Wed., March 9.
Saving the weirdest for last: Island of Lost Souls, an adaptation of The Island of Doctor Moreau that does for H.G. Wells' masterpiece what the movie Frankenstein did for Mary Shelley's book. The evils of misapplied science are an excuse to romp around behaving brutally. Never was there a more sublime madman than Charles Laughton. Unique actor, never dull, ever projecting the power to avenge his vulnerabilities in defense of his proclivities. To make way for extensive views of the wild-eyed Panther Woman, much of Wells' erudite vision was surgically removed. Kicks off a triple bill of depravity with Fredric March's brilliant Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Todd Browning's cult classic Freaks, Wed., March 30.