To be honest, none of the films really live up to pre-Code Hollywood at its most salacious and audacious, so don't expect anything remotely as grippingly violent or frankly sexual as, say, Sign of the Cross (1932) or Tarzan and His Mate (1934). The movies here are also early talkies and occasionally quite stagy and melodramatic; adjust your movie-viewing specs accordingly.

The Divorcee (1930)
For this reviewer, the two sexiest actresses of the late-silent to early-1940s period unquestionably were Carole Lombard and Norma Shearer. Shearer isn't much remembered today and too often dismissed, mainly because of her marriage to MGM executive Irving Thalberg and presumptions of inter-studio nepotism. But Shearer, cast against type in The Divorcee, more than held her own until she retired from acting in the early-1940s, and her naturalistic way with the camera gave her an edge over many colleagues who, during the stilted and stagy post-Jazz Singer period assumed one had to speak and act like elocution teacher Kathleen Freeman in Singin' in the Rain. She's certainly better in this than co-star Chester Morris was at the time, and acts rings around Conrad Nagel.

The sins of The Divorcee, the least of the five "forbidden" films, are that Shearer's Jerry Bernard, having divorced husband Ted Martin (Chester Morris) after learning of his (apparently one-time) fling with another woman, not only jumps into bed with Ted's roguish best pal Don (Robert Montgomery, in an early role) to "balance the account," but then embarks on a wild ride of sleeping around with a long line of continental lovers and would-be suitors - all under the watchful eye of Paul (Conrad Nagel), who has loved her with painful sincerity for many years.

The movie is very much an early talkie, experimenting with a lot of off-screen sound effects: a car crashing, street noise heard through windows, the voice on the other end of a telephone line. It's also filled with high society boobs acting very foolishly, the kind of thing lower middle class audiences ate up because they could marvel at the fashions and cars and general wealth but also ultimately feel much superior to these idiots onscreen (save for Shearer) who say stupid things and are incapable of solving life's simple problems.

A Free Soul (1931)
Norma Shearer is back, sexier and even better as Jan, the loving but wayward free-spirited daughter of end-stage alcoholic attorney Stephen Ashe (Lionel Barrymore), who as the film opens successfully defends gangster Ace Wilfong (Clark Cable) against a murder rap. Johnnie Cochran must have seen this; the case against Gable falls apart when a vital piece of evidence, a hat, is ridiculed as too small for Gable's head - "If the hat don't fit, you must acquit...."

Jan falls for Ace's dangerous-living ways, eventually becoming a kept woman after breaking her engagement to respectable Brit (and polo star!) Dwight Winthrop (Leslie Howard, not nearly the twit the name and social standing suggest). She slinks around in a glorified braless silk slip while he runs an underworld empire that stretches "from opium to white slavery," though we see none of either. Her father objects to Jan's romance and she makes the following proposal: if he stops drinking, she won't see him anymore. Along with Ashe's right-hand man Eddie (James Gleason, also good) they head for the mountains, which in the film makes picturesque use of Sequoia and (possibly) Yosemite National Park.

As with The Divorcee, A Free Soul is a jumble of acting styles. Shearer is naturalistic in front of the camera most of the time, and in spite of the purple prose really throws herself into the role; during one scene near the end she actually seems to be on the verge of hysteria. Gable, one film away from his first starring role for MGM (the penultimate being Night Nurse, released later that summer and also included in this set), oozes with star power but also delivers a commanding, confident performance that's likewise savvy about how to use the camera to one's best advantage. Howard, with his training on the London and New York stage, instinctively goes for a subtler approach also.

Barrymore, on the other hand, is something else. His emoting is of a bygone era; his later supporting roles in character parts (e.g., Key Largo, in which he was excellent) fit somewhat better with his broadly theatrical style. He won an Academy Award for his performance here, but even in 1931 audiences surely must have noticed the clash of styles, between Barrymore's endless hand-gesturing and eye-rolling and Shearer's and Gable's subtler work. Sometimes there are little glimpses of authenticity - as well there should be, considering Barrymore's notorious drunk sibling John - and the film's courtroom climax, with its 14-minute multi-camera take, indulges his go-for-broke style.

The courtroom finale is, at times, unintentionally hilarious. Before Barrymore rides like the cavalry to the rescue, the client's hopeless original advocate confesses, "As attorney for the defense I have not been able to do anything....[Well,] the facts speak for themselves!" (Also appearing here is Edward LeSaint, Hollywood's perennial judge, who later oversaw trials in Reefer Madness and the Three Stooges' Disorder in the Court.)

Three on a Match (1932)
The best film in this set by far, Three on a Match has in its favor a top-drawer cast and a truly suspenseful climax with a jaw-dropping finale still shocking 75 years after it was made. Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis, and Joan Blondell star as Vivian, Ruth, and Mary, three very different classmates at school whose lives intersect, sometimes tragically, when they become adults.

Good bad-girl Mary ends up in prison and, naturally, a showgirl in burlesque. (This being a Warner Bros. picture, it also qualifies her as the most sensible of the three, coming out on top in the end.) Prim and proper Ruth is the school's valedictorian but (implied sexism) takes her no further than the legal secretary pool. The movie's focus, however, is on Dvorak's Vivian, who marries loving, genuinely kind millionaire Robert Kirkwood (Warren William, in another excellent performance) and with whom she has a cute little son, Bobby. Perversely, she's finds this quite unsatisfying, and with her indulging husband's permission, books passage for her and Bobby on an extended vacation/separation to Europe. Before she even reaches the continent, she's an alcoholic (and soon thereafter hooked on cocaine), carrying on with an abusive lover (Lyle Talbot!), and criminally neglecting her son.

Mary and Ruth eventually learn about Vivian's drug addiction and with Kirkwood plot to get Bobby to safety, but racketeers Ace (Edward Arnold, first introduced in extreme close-up plucking nose hairs) and tough guy Harve (Humphrey Bogart, yeah!) kidnap the pair instead.

Running just one hour, Three on a Match crams a lot of movie into a short amount of time and it's tough and gritty in a way the pseudo-sophisticated MGM titles just aren't. Though Bobby is almost like a tomboy Shirley Temple, he really starts to look like a unkempt, malnourished child by the end of the film, like kids police find in a run-down trailer park on an episode of Cops.

Director Mervyn Le Roy reportedly didn't get along with Davis and vice versa, so her footage is strangely minimal, but both Blondell and Dvorak especially do some of their most compelling work ever. All told, this is an impressively modern film, the kind of thing you could probably force-feed your teenage kids and people who generally don't like old movies, and they'd likely be hooked before it was over.

Female (1933)
What might have been just a gimmicky gender role reversal is a bit more than that thanks to the excellent performance of star Ruth Chatterton as a workaholic automobile magnate. The short-and-sweet (60-minute) film has plenty of first-rate talent behind it: besides credited director Michael Curtiz, both William A. Wellman and William Dieterle worked on the film substantially, in turn.

The big draw is watching Chatterton working hard and playing harder, ordering middle-manager employees (including Johnny Mack Brown) to her home to "discuss work" then seduce them - only to just as quickly dump 'em, leaving her men bewildered and annoyed. She does a great job selling the character in a very unexpected way: at the office she really behaves like the president of a big corporation, more so even than most male actors in similar roles during this period. She doesn't bark orders into telephones like something out of The Front Page; she really comes off as a quietly intense executive fully focused on her work, and its this verisimilitude more than anything else that makes Female work.

Another point of interest is the picture's set design and use, for a few exterior shots, of the famous Ennis Hollywood Hills house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (used again in such films as varied House on Haunted Hill and Ridley Scott's Black Rain) for Alison's palatial estate. The interiors and backyard pool area make no attempt to match the Wright designs, but are engagingly loopy in their own way, including most famously a pipe organ and organist towering over the main hall.

Night Nurse (Warner Bros., 1931)
Like Three on a Match, Night Nurse features a great cast of up-and-coming stars and its climax is centered around a female protagonist trying to prevent a child from being murdered. Unlike Three on a Match, Night Nurse is pretty stagy and melodramatic, though 23-year-old Barbara Stanwyck is fascinating to watch in the title role. It's not a great performance and she's hamstrung with trite dialogue, but it's also more naturalistic than one expects from the period.

She's Lora Hart, a wide-eyed innocent type determined to land a job as a trainee nurse at a big city hospital. There's not much story: she befriends bootlegger Mortie (Ben Lyon), an unusually breezy, gregarious type considering how casually he orders his enemies "taken for a ride." Lora befriends gum-smacking, street-smart nurse Miss Maloney (Joan Blondell again) and later frets over two girls in her charge that she believes are slowly being starved to death by a sinister chauffeur (Clark Gable, in an early pre-MGM role originally intended for Cagney) working in collusion with a shady physician (Ralf Harolde) to steal the girls' alcoholic mother's fortune. Unintentionally hilarious moment: the mother's indignant line to Nurse Hart, "I'm a dipsomaniac and proud of it!"

Though it's great to see Gable and Stanwyck together, and startling to see him casually sock her in the jaw, knocking her unconscious, the film itself is pretty clunky and dramatically herky-jerky. As with Female's early auto assembly-line footage, there's a fair amount of interest in watching the early scenes of Night Nurse for their (Hollywood imagined) ideas about hospital care, circa 75 years ago.

Beyond that, the film is amusing the way it finds an excuse to have Stanwyck strip to her underwear what seems like a half-dozen times.

Video & Audio

All five films look great considering their age. The Divorcee is the weakest of the batch, with its hissy soundtrack and (likely) composite sourcing. Some reels look great while others are rather grainy or show signs of damage. (It does, however, include brief exit music at the end, a bit of a surprise.) The mono audio (1.0 and 2.0 Dolby Digital), is adequate. Optional French and English subtitles are included.

Extra Features

The main supplement is a good one, a 68-minute (but spoiler-filled) documentary called Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood. The film does a fine job tracing and explaining the evolution toward what eventually became an enforced Production Code, with clips charting Hollywood's early disregard for it, sin by sin. The usual suspects - Leonard Maltin, Rudy Behlmer, Molly Haskell, Hugh Hefner and, in what must have been about the last thing he did before his death last April, Jack Valenti - are interviewed, many making fun and interesting observations. Better than the comments are clips from the films themselves, including familiar choices like Public Enemy, King Kong, and 42nd Street, but also titles this reviewer either never heard of or has wanted to see for years, like Convention City (1932) and Madame Satan (1930). There's even a clip from the cartoon Bosko's Picture Show, where the title character is heard saying, maybe, "That dirty fuck!" Its only shortcoming is that, owing to the exorbitant cost of licensing, clips are pretty much limited to Warner Bros.-owned titles, with just one odd exception I caught, the Universal-owned I'm No Angel.

Film historian/authors Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta provide informative if spotty and overly-casual commentaries for The Divorcee and Night Nurse. A few early trailers are also included.

Parting Thoughts

Except maybe for Three on a Match, none of the films in Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume Two could really be considered a classic that holds up under its own weight, but taken together as a part of a larger examination of the period, this set and its extras make for fascinating viewing. Highly Recommended.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's latest books, Japanese Cinema and The Toho Studios Story, are now available for pre-order.