Pre-Code crime films

The era of American film production from the early sound era to the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934 is denoted as Pre-Code Hollywood. The era contained violence and crime in pictures which would not be seen again until decades later. Although the Hays office had specifically recommended removing profanity, the drug trade, and prostitution from pictures, it had never officially recommended against depictions of violence in any form in the 1920s. State censor boards, however, created their own guidelines, and New York in particular developed a list of violent material which had to be removed for a picture to be shown in the state. Two main types of crime films were released during the period: the gangster picture and the prison film.

A triumvirate of gangster pictures were released in the early 1930s—Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932)—which were built on the template created by the first gangster movie, 1927's Underworld. All featured the rise and eventual fall of an organized criminal. As described by crime film scholar Jack Shadoian the maxim became, "If the films insist that one can’t win, under that given it’s how you lose that counts."Scarface was the most controversial and violent; the film took nearly a year to reach theaters due to battles with censors. Obviously based on the life of Al Capone, Scarface and others like it outraged civic leaders who felt that movies were glorifying the lifestyles of criminals.

Stirred into action by the 1930 Ohio penitentiary fire, which resulted in 300 deaths when guards refused to let inmates out of their cells, Hollywood produced movies which depicted the harsh conditions in prisons at the time. The prototype of the prison genre was 1930's The Big House. The picture features future genre staples such as solitary confinement, informers, riots, an escape, and the codes of prison life. Never box office hits, prison pictures failed to attract the female audiences they needed to achieve financial success. The chain gang films were produced in a similar response to the callous inhumanity of the chain gang system which was prevalent among states in the southern US. The 1932 film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is considered the seminal movie of the genre, and was based on the autobiography of Robert E. Burns who was himself a fugitive at the time of the picture's release.

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