Old Hollywood: Day 2

Happy New Year!

2023 is going to be a big year in film.

Dune part II, Oppenheimer, and mother effin Barbie!!

Sorry, I'm excited…

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, we had a major release this week.

That being Damien Chazelle’s newest film, Babylon.

For this reason, we are going to take a step back into Old Hollywood.

I know what you're thinking, “Oh this is going to be so boring, a bunch of black-and-white pretentious bullshit”.

To that, I would say this….

You have clearly never opened an email from Please Consume. We kick pretentious in the teeth and tell him to shut the door on the way out.

These old films are more than just history.

They are fun as hell.

For the thirties, we wanted to talk about the lost art of screwball comedy.

What are screwball comedies you ask? They are sex comedies from the thirties and forties.

Okay, that’s a little reductive so let’s dive a little deeper. In 1930, postmaster general Will H. Hays introduced the Motion Picture Production Code. More commonly known as “the Hays code”, prohibiting filmmakers from depicting what the code deemed as “unsavory”.

Sex was one of the first things to go.

Filmmakers had to get creative to discuss sex, gender, and attraction on screen. Thus the screwball comedy was born. The best film of that era, in our opinion, is the Howard Hawkes classic “Bringing up Baby”.

A film about sex, adultery, pure attraction, and bones…

No seriously, Carey Grant is playing an archeologist who is trying to get a bone to impress his prudish fiance. He then meets a single and ferocious woman played by

“No. 1 crush” Kathryn Hepburn and her wild cat. It doesn’t get more on the nose than that.