#Jeannette Marshall

[jeannette-marshall-optioneerjm]

Let’s talk about Threads

www.threads.net/@optioneerjm I’m still reading through requests to connect on THREADS full disclosure. What has struck me is how sticking to #optioneerjm has served me well. When @SusanHubbard nudged me to Twitter into the collective arms of community… easily recognized after 12 years on social media. Thanks all!

[sporadiceagleheart]

Today's joy with Rachel Joy Scott Friday edits is for missing kids I hope soon they be found and Brought back home safe and sound Madeleine McCann, Inga Gehricke, Summer Wells, Haleigh Cummings, Morgan Nick, Ben Needham, Timmothy Pitzen, Baby Lisa Irwin, Baby Sabrina Aisenberg, Kayla Berg, Mary Boyle, Jennifer Joyce Kesse, Amy Lynn Bradley, Asha Jaquilla Degree, Brian Randall Shaffer, Brandon Swanson, Lars Joachim Mittank, Maura Murray, Kyron Richard Horman, Rebecca Coriam, Evelyn Grace Hartley, Frederick Valentich, Lauren Spierer, Marjorie West, Margaret Ellen Fox, Joshua Guimond, LeeAnna Warner, Tara Leigh Calico, Cherrie Ann Mahan, Nyleen Kay Marshall, Phoenix Coldon, Laureen Ann Rahn, Johnny Gosch, Sara Anne Wood, Rebecca Reusch, BRANDON LEE WADE, Katrice Lee, Adele Marie Wells, William Tyrrell, Rene Hasee, Jane Beaumont, Dennise Jeannette "Denny" Sullivan, Ember Skye Graham, Tricia J. Kellett, Donnis Marie "Pinky" Redman, Renee Aitken, Dulce Maria Alavez, Jonathan Allen, Victoria Allen, Mylette Josephine Anderson, Erica Nicole Baker, Ava Grace Baldwin, Amber Renee Barker, Brittney Ann Beers, Tammy Lynn Belanger, Alessia Vera Schepp, Livia Clara Schepp, Ilene Rebecca Scott, Mary Lou Sena, Natasha Marie Shanes, Kathleen Ann "Kathy" Shea, Crystal Ann Tymich, Anna[1] Christian Waters, Holly Ann Hughes, Ashley LaShay Jones, Sofia Lucerno Juarez, Amber Jean Swartz-Garcia, Brooklinn Felyxia Miller, Marjorie Christina "Christy" Luna , Lorie Lynn Lewis, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Lauren Maria Pico Jackson, Hattie Yvonne Jackson, Janice Kathryn Pockett, Alice Pereira, Sabine Morgenroth, Daniela Moreno, April Ann Cooper, Catherine Barbara "Cathy" Davidson, Mary Rachel Bryan, Hazel X. Bracamontes, Melissa Lee Brannen, Edna "Bette Jean" Masters, Shaina Ashly Kirkpatrick,

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 3.4 (after 1900)

1901 – McKinley inaugurated president for second time; Theodore Roosevelt is vice president. 1908 – The Collinwood school fire, Collinwood near Cleveland, Ohio, kills 174 people. 1909 – U.S. President William Taft used what became known as a Saxbe fix, a mechanism to avoid the restriction of the U.S. Constitution's Ineligibility Clause, to appoint Philander C. Knox as U.S. Secretary of State. 1913 – First Balkan War: The Greek army engages the Turks at Bizani, resulting in victory two days later. 1913 – The United States Department of Labor is formed. 1917 – Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first female member of the United States House of Representatives. 1933 – Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes the 32nd President of the United States. He was the last president to be inaugurated on March 4. 1933 – Frances Perkins becomes United States Secretary of Labor, the first female member of the United States Cabinet. 1933 – The Parliament of Austria is suspended because of a quibble over procedure – Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss initiates an authoritarian rule by decree. 1941 – World War II: The United Kingdom launches Operation Claymore on the Lofoten Islands; the first large scale British Commando raid. 1943 – World War II: The Battle of the Bismarck Sea in the south-west Pacific comes to an end. 1943 – World War II: The Battle of Fardykambos, one of the first major battles between the Greek Resistance and the occupying Royal Italian Army, begins. It ends on 6 March with the surrender of an entire Italian battalion and the liberation of the town of Grevena. 1944 – World War II: After the success of Big Week, the USAAF begins a daylight bombing campaign of Berlin. 1946 – Field Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim, the 6th president of Finland, resigns from his position for health reasons. 1955 – An order to protect the endangered Saimaa ringed seal (Pusa hispida saimensis) is legalized. 1957 – The S&P 500 stock market index is introduced, replacing the S&P 90. 1960 – The French freighter La Coubre explodes in Havana, Cuba, killing 100. 1962 – A Caledonian Airways Douglas DC-7 crashes shortly after takeoff from Cameroon, killing 111 – the worst crash of a DC-7. 1966 – A Canadian Pacific Air Lines DC-8-43 explodes on landing at Tokyo International Airport, killing 64 people. 1966 – In an interview in the London Evening Standard, The Beatles' John Lennon declares that the band is "more popular than Jesus now". 1970 – French submarine Eurydice explodes underwater, resulting in the loss of the entire 57-man crew. 1976 – The Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention is formally dissolved in Northern Ireland resulting in direct rule of Northern Ireland from London by the British parliament. 1977 – The 1977 Vrancea earthquake in eastern and southern Europe kills more than 1,500, mostly in Bucharest, Romania. 1980 – Nationalist leader Robert Mugabe wins a sweeping election victory to become Zimbabwe's first black prime minister. 1985 – The Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for HIV infection, used since then for screening all blood donations in the United States. 1986 – The Soviet Vega 1 begins returning images of Halley's Comet and the first images of its nucleus. 1990 – American basketball player Hank Gathers dies after collapsing during the semifinals of a West Coast Conference tournament game. 1990 – Lennox Sebe, President for life of the South African Bantustan of Ciskei, is ousted from power in a bloodless military coup led by Brigadier Oupa Gqozo. 1994 – Space Shuttle program: the Space Shuttle Columbia is launched on STS-62. 1996 – A derailed train in Weyauwega, Wisconsin (USA) causes the emergency evacuation of 2,300 people for 16 days. 1998 – Gay rights: Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc.: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that federal laws banning on-the-job sexual harassment also apply when both parties are the same sex. 2001 – BBC bombing: A massive car bomb explodes in front of the BBC Television Centre in London, seriously injuring one person; the attack was attributed to the Real IRA.

[piperslovebot]

That 90s Show characters/ocs bdays in my verse

January

- Jared Forman (Jan 1, ‘22)

- Alex Flargunbargun (Jan 7, ‘58)

- Aria Chingkwake (Jan 12, ‘42)

- Jonah Shaland-Mitchell (Jan 12, ‘99)

-Buddy Morgan (Jan 12, ‘60)

-Gregory James (Jan 12, ‘60)

- Betsy Kelso (Jan 15, ‘79)

- Alexis Doilybug (Jan 17, ‘56)

- Paula Mitchell (Jan 17, ‘56)

- Devon Hunter (Jan 17, ‘19)

- Carolyn Rockwell (Jan 19, ‘30)

- Jordan Chingkwake (Jan 24, ‘65)

- Julio Martinez (Jan 28, ‘39)

- Kimmy Mendoza-Martinez (Jan 28, ‘39)

- Kim Raymond (Jan 30, ‘59)

- Lydia Martelli (Jan 30, ‘79)

February

- Marty Forman (Feb 1, ‘34)

- Gwen Runck (Feb 10, ‘80)

- Chris Kelso (Feb 12, ‘62)

- Jay Kelso (Feb 12, ‘80)

-Oak Kelso (Feb 12, ‘81)

- Quinn Martinez-Doilybug (Feb 12, ‘82)

- Erin Martinez-Doilybug (Feb 12, ‘82)

- Donna Pinciotti (Feb 13, ‘60)

- Celia Stearwater-Kelso (Feb 15, ‘62)

- Charlie Richardson (Feb 21, ‘60)

- Elaine Miller (Feb 29, '56)

- Eliza Kelso (Feb 30, ‘25)

March

- Marilyn Flargunbargun (March 10, 1935)

- Kristie Forman (March 10, 1979)

- Lulu Mitchell (March 11, ‘96)

- Ridge Pinciotti (March 12, 1979)

- Lisa Mitchell (March 12, 1960)

-Darnell Smith (March 12, ‘77)

- Leah Chingkwake (March 13, 1949)

- Mitch Pinciotti (March 15, 1979)

- Maddie Joy (March 17, 1981)

-Ian Harris (March 20, 1980)

- Lola Reed (March 23, ‘63)

- Lia Martelli (March 25, '64)

- Kat Hyde (March 25, ‘96)

- Reggie Hyde (March 25, ‘96)

-Joe Joy (March 25, ‘76)

-Josie Takada-Marshall (March 28, 2013)

-Suzy Simpson (March 29, ‘57)

- Sam Garcia-Velasco (March 30, ‘65)

- Jake Mitchell (March 30, ‘56)

-Emiko Takada (March 30, ‘63)

April

- Ozzie Takada (Apr 3, ‘80)

- Margie Kelso (Apr 9, ‘99)

- Lizzie Kelso (Apr 9, ‘99)

- Anne-Marie Kelso (Apr 9, ‘99)

- Tina Pinciotti (Apr 13, ‘62)

- Jacques Benoit (Apr 13, ‘79)

- Louis Jean-Paul Josephine (Apr 13, ‘79)

-Sophia Kamiśka (Apr 15, ‘79)

- William Barnett (Apr 16, ‘32)

- Nate Runck (Apr 18, ‘79)

-Samantha Marlon (Apr 27, '57)

May

- Trevor Canton (May 3, ‘78)

- Becky Rockwell (May 4, ‘50)

- Brooke Rockwell (May 4, ‘50)

- Elaina Kelso (May 11, ‘73)

- John Kelso (May 12, ‘28)

- Rose Guzman-Queimada (May 12, ‘96)

-Michael Bosko Rossi (May 12, ‘80)

- Brian Bloomberg (May 15, ‘55)

- Sherri Runck (May 15, ‘55)

- Teresa Megan (May 17, ‘79)

-Leonard Smalls (May 26, '55)

- Dale Reed (May 30, ‘62)

- Linda Chen (May 30, ‘65)

June

- Nikki Velasco (Jun 5, ‘80)

- Alex Kelso (Jun 7, ‘74)

- Jeannette Valentine (Jun 7, ‘62)

- June Miller (Jun 12, ‘39)

- Gia Mitchell (Jun 12, ‘65)

- Mitch Miller (Jun 12, ‘60)

- Bernard Mitchell (Jun 12, ‘54)

- Etienne Marshall (Jun 12, ‘80)

-Marco Contreras (Jun 12, '95)

- Zia Chingkwake (Jun 13, ‘95)

- Gina Mitchell (Jun 14, ‘35)

- Chloe Müller (Jun 15, ‘80)

-Owen Nicholas (Jun 20, ‘80)

- Rhonda Tate (Jun 26, ‘59)

- Clara Shaland (Jun 28, ‘57)

- Eva Chingkwake (Jun 30, ‘60)

July

-Joanne Stupak (Jul 2, ‘40)

- Darla Doilybug (Jul 3, ‘32)

- Paul Doilybug (Jul 3, ‘54)

- Mira Chingkwake (Jul 3, '45)

- Kate Stephford (Jul 12, ‘58)

- Tom Garcia (Jul 12, ‘65)

- Angie Barnett (Jul 12 ‘56)

- Gabby Muñoz (Jul 12, '57)

- Bob Pinciotti (Jul 14, ‘39)

- Laurie Forman (Jul 15, ‘58)

- Leia Forman (Jul 19, ‘80)

-Jess Nightly (Jul 22, ‘81)

- Leo Chingkwake (Jul 29, ‘19)

- Jordan Mitchell (Jul 30, ‘35)

August

- Fez (Aug 4, ‘59)

- Aliana Guzman-Queimada (Aug 7, ‘55)

- Mikayla Patel (Aug 12, ‘80)

- Jared Kwan (Aug 12, ‘78)

- Ryland Barnes (Aug 13, ‘78)

- Serena Marotti (Aug 15, ‘78)

-Annette Berkardt-Miller (Aug 18, ‘58)

- Michael Kelso (Aug 28, ‘59)

September

- Sharon Adams (Sep 12, ‘80)

- June Guzman-Queimada (Sep 13, ‘99)

- Jonas Hernandez (Sep 15, ‘78)

- Jackie Burkhart (Sep 24, ‘60)

- Priya Shanti (Sep 30, ‘78)

- Kelly Shaland (Sep 30, ‘78)

October

- Dana Chingkwake (Oct 12, ‘78)

- Kira Kwan (Oct 12, ‘98)

-Paula Sigurdson (Oct 13, ‘33)

- Kitty Forman (Oct 13, ‘33)

- Dave Wilde (Oct 13, ‘61)

-Darline Joy (Oct 13, '78)

- Eleanor Moore (Oct 15, ‘79)

- Amaya Callesti (Oct 23, ‘77)

- Jo Mitchell (Oct 29, ‘79)

- Steve Jordan (Oct 31, ‘78)

November

- Joe Rockwell (Nov 1, ‘28)

- Casey Kelso (Nov 10, ‘56)

- Liv Rodriguez (Nov 12, ‘55)

- Maya Rodriguez (Nov 12, ‘55)

- John Bartlow (Nov 12, ‘78)

- Alisha Callesti (Nov 12, ‘78)

- Connor II Runck (Nov 12, 2010)

- Jordan Runck (Nov 12, 2010)

- Sammy Runck (Nov 12, 2010)

- Jazzy Runck (Nov 12, 2010)

- Steven Hyde (Nov 28, ‘59)

December

- Midge Pinciotti (Dec 3, ‘30)

- Red Forman (Dec 7, ‘27)

- Marion Marotti (Dec 9, ‘58)

- Joan Marotti (Dec 9, ‘64)

- Loni Paris (Dec 12, '62)

- Layla Kelso (Dec 13, ‘78)

- Paige Hart (Dec 13, ‘61)

- Eric Forman (Dec 14, ‘59)

- Valerie Pinciotti (Dec 19, ‘57)

- Delilah Reed (Dec 19, ‘79)

- Sarah Mitchell (Dec 21, ‘80)

- Charles Timothy-Cruz (Dec 24, '44)

- Julie Kumar-Monét (Dec 25, ‘79)

- Fenton (Dec 27, '47)

-Edna Hyde (Dec 30, ‘29)

[simthorium]

Being unemployed meant Noah had a bunch of time on his hands, and he used it the way any Romance Sim would; meeting girls. While the apartment building was small, there were a ton of units and Noah loved introducing himself to his neighbors of the female variety.

“Oooh,” said Jeannette in 4B. “I love a man who’s beard doesn’t connect to his hairline.”  “It’s a new trend I’m starting,” Noah said proudly.

“Ew!” said Sarah in 3F. “Not on your LIFE, creep!” “Creep?” Noah said. “All I said was you have a bangin’ body! It was a compliment!” “Get out of my apartment!”

Noah wasn’t the only one having luck in the romance department. A redhead named Marshall had caught the eye of Rumi as soon as they’d moved in. She didn’t have much luck with guys and was nervous to approach him, but after a lot of coaching from her brother, she figured she might as well go for it.

“So, what do you say?” Rumi asked. “Wanna go on a date to that new museum?” “I’d love to,” Marshall said sheepishly. “I’d go on a date with you anywhere.” “That’s sweet,” Rumi said, giggling like a schoolgirl. “Maybe after the museum we can think of a few more places to go for future dates?” “Deal,” Marshall said, holding her hand.

[lboogie1906]

Congressman Louis Stokes (February 23, 1925 – August 18, 2015) was an attorney, civil rights pioneer, and politician. He served 15 terms in the House of Representatives – representing the east side of Cleveland – and was the first African American congressman elected in the state of Ohio. He was one of the Cold War-era chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee, headed the Congressional Black Caucus, and was the first African American on the House Appropriations Committee.

He was born in Cleveland, the son of Louise and Charles Stokes. He and his brother, politician Carl B. Stokes, lived in one of the first federally funded housing projects, the Outhwaite Homes. He attended Central High School and served in the Army (1943-46). After attending Western Reserve University and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law on the G.I. Bill, he began practicing law in Cleveland in 1953. He argued the “stop and frisk” case of Terry v. Ohio before the SCOTUS in 1968. Later in 1968, he was elected to the House. He shifted to the newly created 11th District, covering much of the same area following a 1992 redistricting.

He married Jeannette “Jay” Stokes and they had four children. His daughter, Angela, is a former Cleveland Municipal Court judge who served (1995-2015), while another, Lori, is the Co-anchor of The 5 O’clock News and The 10 O’clock News and Anchor of The 6 O’clock News and former Co-anchor of Good Day New York WNYW Fox 5. His son, Chuck, is a journalist with WXYZ-TV in Detroit. His brother, Carl B. Stokes, was the first African American mayor of a large American city. He was a cousin of funk and R&B musician Rick James.

He was a Prince Hall Freemason and a member of the Cleveland Alumni chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #kappaalphapsi

[carldgreene]

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[bradyoil]

Sweetwood Creative CCO and Creativity In Captivity Podcast Host Pat Hazel.

Showtime declared Pat Hazell one of the five funniest people in America. His 25 years of experience as a writer, producer and director have made him a go-to guy for new American theater. Pat is one of the original writers for NBC’s Seinfeld, a Tonight Show veteran, a critically acclaimed playwright and a contributing commentator to National Public Radio. He is recognized for his genuinely funny Americana humor and his salute to nostalgia.

His podcast "Creatvity In Captivity" he interviews the top creative people on the planet, from every discipline. (I'm on Season 4, episode 15, btw.)

Pat's new show "Permanent Record" opens in Marshall, Texas at Memorial Hall. Click here and make the trip, Texans!

As the Chief Creative Officer of Sweetwood Creative, he is responsible for the national tours of five original productions: Bunk Bed Brothers, Nashville Backstage, The Wonder Bread Years, My Funny Valentine and A Kodachrome Christmas. Pat is currently collaborating on a musical adaptation of his original play Grounded For Life. However, his greatest accomplishment is being the father of two of the brightest shining stars in the universe, Tucker and Keaton.

  EVENTS & COURSES

My next Commercial Directing Bootcamp is April 22nd, 2023 in Los Angeles is SOLD OUT. Emaill me to be on the waistlist. Check out my Masterclass or Commercial Directing Shadow online courses. (Note this link to the Shadow course is the one I mention in the show.) All my courses come with a free 1:1 mentorship call with yours truly. Taking the Shadow course is the only way to win a chance to shadow me on a real shoot! DM for details.

  So excited for our Second Annual Filmmaker Retreat in Joshua Tree. Join us Sept. 28th to Oct. 1st in the desert for a transformational experience. "Define Your Voice is our theme and you'll emerge knowing what you want and how better to achieve it.

  How To Pitch Ad Agencies and Director’s Treatments Unmasked are now bundled together with a free filmmaker consultation call, just like my other courses. Serious about making spots? The Commercial Director Mega Bundle for serious one-on-one mentoring and career growth.

  Amazon Prime!! Jeannette Godoy’s hilarious romcom “Diamond In The Rough” streams on the Amazon Prime! Please support my wife filmmaker Jeannette Godoy’s romcom debut. It’s “Mean Girls” meets “Happy Gilmore” and crowds love it. Here’s the trailer.

  Thanks,

  Jordan 

  This episode is 85 minutes.

  My cult classic mockumentary, “Dill Scallion” is online so I’m giving 100% of the money to St. Jude Children’s Hospital. I’ve decided to donate the LIFETIME earnings every December, so the the donation will grow and grow. Thank you.

  Respect The Process podcast is brought to you by True Gentleman Industries, Inc. in partnership with Brady Oil Entertainment, Inc. 

Check out this episode!

[daymansbingerecapsandrankings]

(Originally written on October 8, 2020)

🎵Bang, Bang Bangedy Bang

I said a Bang Bang Bangedy Bang🎵

My How I Met Your Mother Thoughts

I just spent the last nine seasons in New York with the gang that spends all their time in MacLaren’s Pub. SELF FIVE! I have to say, this binge of How I Met Your Mother brought me so much happiness. I started watching this show for the first time back in high school, and I ended up watching the last six seasons as they aired. I remember loving this group of characters, and now I am reminded why. There’s so much chemistry between the five, and it makes for one of my favorite Comedies/Sitcoms of all time. If you’ve read any of my previous Show Thoughts, then you know I’ve been watching several over the course of this lovely Pandemic That Will Just Keep Going. After this rewatch, I’ve decided HIMYM is my third favorite Comedy/Sitcom, right after Boy Meets World and Scrubs.

Now, I know that the Finale is infamous. It’s in the Mount Rushmore of Terrible Endings, and people end up getting a sour taste in their mouth when they bring up the show. Well, it’s been some years. There’s been time to reflect and look back. And, while I’m not in favor of the Finale, I also don’t hate it anymore with the passion of a thousand suns. I just loved watching and growing with the gang, seeing them experience their highs and their lows, their triumphs and their failures. It just hits harder as an adult, like most of these shows assuredly do, and I cherish so many of these episodes and moments.

And now, my rankings for the seasons!

Seasons Rankings

1. Season One

2. Season Four

3. Season Two

4. Season Six

5. Season Eight

6. Season Five

7. Season Three

8. Season Seven

9. Season Nine

My rankings for the girlfriends, purely on how much I like them as a character

The Girlfriends Rankings

1. Robin

2. Tracy

3. Victoria

4. Zoey

5. Stella

6. Jeannette

And now, a ranking of my favorite episodes. From 1-50, these are the ones that stand out above the rest. I consider every single one of these enjoyable.

Favorite Episodes

1. Slap Bet (S2E9)

2. Come On (S1E22)

3. The Limo (S1E11)

4. The Best Burger in New York (S4E2)

5. Ten Sessions (S3E13)

6. The Pineapple Incident (S1E10)

7. Bachelor Party (S2E19)

8. Game Night (S1E15)

9. Oh, Honey (S6E15)

10. Glitter (S6E9)

11. The Duel (S1E8)

12. The Pilot (S1E1)

13. Arriverdverci, Fierro (S2E17)

14. The Over-Correction (S8E10)

15. How Your Mother Met Me (S916)

16. Intervention (S4E4)

17. The Magician’s Code, Part II (S7E24)

18. The Autumn of Break-Ups (S8E5)

19. The Ducky Tie (S7E3)

20. The Best Man (S7E1)

21. The Leap (S4E24)

22. Blitzgiving (S6E10)

23. Three Days of Snow (S4E13)

24. The Scorpion & The Toad (S2E2)

25. Bass Player Wanted (S9E13)

26. The Final Page, Part 2 (S8E12)

27. Duel Citizenship (S5E5)

28. Happily Ever After (S4E6)

29. Farhampton (S8E1)

30. Bro Mitzvah (S8E22)

31. Robin 101 (S5E3)

32. The Magician’s Code, Part I (S7E23)

33. Last Words (S6E14)

34. The Playbook (S5E8)

35. The Time Travelers (S8E20)

36. Splitsville (S8E6)

37. Subway Wars (S6E4)

38. Showdown (S2E20)

39. Drumroll, Please (S1E13)

40. Front Porch (S4E17)

41. Twin Bed (S5E21)

42. Who Wants to be a Godparent? (S8E4)

43. Girls vs. Suits (S5E12)

44. Something Borrowed (S2E21)

45. As Fast As She Can (S4E23)

46. The Wedding Bride (S5E23)

47. The Bracket (S3E14)

48. The Sexless Innkeeper (S5E4)

49. Third Wheel (S3E3)

50. Spoiler Alert (S3E8)

And now, just some thoughts on the show and on the gang!

Ted - I know people don’t like Ted. I don’t actually like Ted all that much. And yet, I found myself rooting for Ted just like I did the first go around. He’s not the worst person in the world, and I would be scared to see half of the decisions we’ve made in the dating game stringed together into a TV show. I know people wouldn’t like me very much for those decisions. Then again, I also don’t get super crazy about details about buildings, I don’t pronounce encyclopedia that way, and he tends to stick his foot in his mouth with this White Man confidence that I just don’t have. With all that being said, I still find Ted being a great friend, a man who is just trying to find the love of his life, and someone who really drives this story with great tales and narration (Bob Saget is the Sixth Man of the Show for just always bringing it). I think Ted does stupid things and he pretty much admits it after the fact. He learns, sometimes, and also doesn’t much like most of us. When he finally found the Mother, when he finally found Tracy, I cared. I cared so much, and I still do. Even though they just shit on her character and don’t give us enough time with her, I almost wonder if that’s a metaphor for the fact that you won’t always have enough time with your loved ones.

Robin - Let’s go to the mall! Yeah! Robin Sparkles is a Canadian Treasure, and so is Robin Scherbatsky. She is one of the best things about this show, and I love her so. Played by Cobie Smulders who I need to see in more stuff, Robin is who we all wanted Ted to maybe be with first. Then we go through all the loops of the HIMYM roller coaster, and a lot of us still wanted them to be together. I was one of them. Yet, she was more than just a romantic plot line for Ted. She was a part of the group who we got to see join it and evolve into a member of their family organically. Robin is fun, loud, full of fun quirks that we get to learn over the course of the series. I was heartbroken when we found out she can’t have children. I was loving the back and forth between her and Barney (the first time), and kind of mad at Barney about being such a crazy ass prankster the second time. Robin shows us just how amazing some gun loving, hockey obsessed Canadian news anchor can be, and how much she cares for her friends.

Lily - Justice Aldrin ends up being one of my favorite characters, even if that gets some curious looks. Yeah, she left Marshall for a summer. Yeah, she had some hesitancy with the marriage and everything. That happens. Lily was also always there for her friends, even if she ends up going a little overboard. She wants Ted to find happiness, and does whatever she can to help. She is there to listen to Robin at all times, and her and Marshall are easily one of the best relationships in TV I’ve ever witnessed. Then we have Lily and Barney which is honestly super underrated. Barney trusts Lily, even though she can’t keep a secret, with all of his emotional problems. Lily is who thought Barney could change before anyone else, and I love seeing their friendship grow from eye rolls to eye tears.

Barney - Oh, Barney. He honestly brings so much annoyance and fun to the show. He’s the friend of the gang who everyone tolerates. He’s the one in the gang who everyone ends up loving just as much as everyone else. Barney shows such a terrible face to the world, sleeping with over 250 women and lying to most of them. He has all these rules that aren’t very ethical. He gives us most of the Misogynism in this show, which is definitely prevalent and makes the show not as strong as it was in the first watch. Still, we get to see Barney grow into someone who wants real love and a happy life. Sure, they show us that his marriage to Robin only lasts three years, but at least they tried. Barney just couldn’t make it work, and that’s honestly who Barney really is. A person who just enjoys sleeping with different people. I was very warmed to see the baby reveal and that Barney becoming a dad was what would change him more than anything. Barney is an underrated friend, and his importance to the gang is legendary.

Marshall - I. Love. Big Fudge. He’s just so fun, caring, goofy, loyal, and everything that I aspire to be in life. For some reason, when watching the show the first time, I related to Ted the most. I was definitely a bit more selfish then. But now, I see that I am a Marshall. He wants to do good in the world, and it drives him so much. He only loves Lily, and his loyalty to their relationship is just Goals. He is also the most fun to watch having a crisis. He gets the big eyes and covers his mouth and just gets obviously super uncomfortable. Some of my favorite moments of the show are also Marshall’s talks with Ted about his feelings for Robin. Any one-on-ones with Marshall and someone else are probably my favorite moments. And yes, I will always root for him over those damn machines!

Last Thoughts:

Sure, the writing wasn’t as sharp or as witty in the later seasons, but I loved the story lines and seeing the gang just live.

Tracy was an amazing character as The Mother, and I truly wonder what could have been if they had given us two full seasons of story with her instead of any episodes of Jeannette.

I really can’t believe Ted told his kids all those stories. A fun premise for a show, but really, not very realistic telling them all that jazz.

Ranjit and Carl are such fun recurring characters that I always enjoyed seeing every time they popped up.

Out of all the recurring jokes and gags, which there are many (y’all said Community has so many, but HIMYM really swings for it), I love the Major/General salute joke. Idk if I just didn’t care for it the first time around or forgot about it, but I just love how silly it is and how they kept it through to the very last episode.

Watching the gang sit at their table in MacLaren’s just hanging out will always make me smile.

[algebraicvarietyshow]

The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of Ansel Adams, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Muhammad Ali, Luis Walter Alvarez, Susan B. Anthony, Hannah Arendt, Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, Crispus Attucks, John James Audubon, Lauren Bacall, Clara Barton, Todd Beamer, Alexander Graham Bell, Roy Benavidez, Ingrid Bergman, Irving Berlin, Humphrey Bogart, Daniel Boone, Norman Borlaug, William Bradford, Herb Brooks, Kobe Bryant, William F. Buckley, Jr., Sitting Bull, Frank Capra, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Carroll, John Carroll, George Washington Carver, Johnny Cash, Joshua Chamberlain, Whittaker Chambers, Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, Ray Charles, Julia Child, Gordon Chung-Hoon, William Clark, Henry Clay, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Roberto Clemente, Grover Cleveland, Red Cloud, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Nat King Cole, Samuel Colt, Christopher Columbus, Calvin Coolidge, James Fenimore Cooper, Davy Crockett, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., Miles Davis, Dorothy Day, Joseph H. De Castro, Emily Dickinson, Walt Disney, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Jimmy Doolittle, Desmond Doss, Frederick Douglass, Herbert Henry Dow, Katharine Drexel, Peter Drucker, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Jonathan Edwards, Albert Einstein, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duke Ellington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Medgar Evers, David Farragut, the Marquis de La Fayette, Mary Fields, Henry Ford, George Fox, Aretha Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Milton Friedman, Robert Frost, Gabby Gabreski, Bernardo de Gálvez, Lou Gehrig, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Cass Gilbert, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Glenn, Barry Goldwater, Samuel Gompers, Alexander Goode, Carl Gorman, Billy Graham, Ulysses S. Grant, Nellie Gray, Nathanael Greene, Woody Guthrie, Nathan Hale, William Frederick “Bull” Halsey, Jr., Alexander Hamilton, Ira Hayes, Hans Christian Heg, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Henry, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billie Holiday, Bob Hope, Johns Hopkins, Grace Hopper, Sam Houston, Whitney Houston, Julia Ward Howe, Edwin Hubble, Daniel Inouye, Andrew Jackson, Robert H. Jackson, Mary Jackson, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Steve Jobs, Katherine Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Chief Joseph, Elia Kazan, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Francis Scott Key, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr., Russell Kirk, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Knox, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Harper Lee, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, Meriwether Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, Vince Lombardi, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Clare Boothe Luce, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, George Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, William Mayo, Christa McAuliffe, William McKinley, Louise McManus, Herman Melville, Thomas Merton, George P. Mitchell, Maria Mitchell, William “Billy” Mitchell, Samuel Morse, Lucretia Mott, John Muir, Audie Murphy, Edward Murrow, John Neumann, Annie Oakley, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, George S. Patton, Jr., Charles Willson Peale, William Penn, Oliver Hazard Perry, John J. Pershing, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Poling, John Russell Pope, Elvis Presley, Jeannette Rankin, Ronald Reagan, Walter Reed, William Rehnquist, Paul Revere, Henry Hobson Richardson, Hyman Rickover, Sally Ride, Matthew Ridgway, Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Caesar Rodney, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Betsy Ross, Babe Ruth, Sacagawea, Jonas Salk, John Singer Sargent, Antonin Scalia, Norman Schwarzkopf, Junípero Serra, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Robert Gould Shaw, Fulton Sheen, Alan Shepard, Frank Sinatra, Margaret Chase Smith, Bessie Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jimmy Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilbert Stuart, Anne Sullivan, William Howard Taft, Maria Tallchief, Maxwell Taylor, Tecumseh, Kateri Tekakwitha, Shirley Temple, Nikola Tesla, Jefferson Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Jim Thorpe, Augustus Tolton, Alex Trebek, Harry S. Truman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Vaughan, C. T. Vivian, John von Neumann, Thomas Ustick Walter, Sam Walton, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, John Washington, John Wayne, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Roger Williams, John Winthrop, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright, Alvin C. York, Cy Young, and Lorenzo de Zavala.”

donald trump ki kicsodája az amerikai történelemben

[jeannette-marshall-optioneerjm]

Why sharing matters

youtu.be/mCisqVQHPgA

[classicblkbeauties]

Ja’Net Dubois Dies at 74 From Natural Causes. 

This is her appreciation post, details of her life and maybe something you didn’t know about her. Enjoy! Rest in paradise Queen. 

Jeannette Dubois  known professionally as Ja'Net DuBois for her portrayal of Willona Woods, the neighborhood gossip maven and a friend of the Evans family on the sitcom Good Times, which originally aired from 1974 to 1979. DuBois additionally co–wrote and sang the theme song "Movin' on Up" for The Jeffersons, which originally aired from 1975 until 1985. Ja’Net also played the grandmother on the popular hit show The Wayans Bro. She also did voice over on The PJs as “Mrs. Florence Avery” and so many other shows and movies like “ I'm Gonna Git You Sucka ”. 

She won and image award for Good Times as well as two Primetime Emmys for voice over for The PJs.  Plus she was nominated for and NAACP Image Award for Touch By And Angel. In 1995, DuBois won a CableACE award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the Lifetime movie “Other Women's Children”. In 2000, DuBois served as Grand Marshal for the North Amityville Community Parade and Festival Day in Amityville, New York.

Ja’Net had 4 children one who passed in 1987 due to cancer, she also was married to Sajit Gupta. She was romantically linked with Actor Brock Peters famously known from the movie To Kill A Mockingbird. DuBois recorded a album Again, Ja'Net DuBois, on her Peanuts and Caviar label, in 1983. DuBois appeared in former Good Times co-star Janet Jackson's 1987 "Control" music video as her mother. In 1992, she co-starred with Clifton Davis in “And I Still Rise”, a play written and directed by Maya Angelou.  During the 1980s, DuBois operated the Ja'net DuBois Academy of Theater Arts and Sciences, a performing-arts school for teenagers in Long Island, New York. In 1992, DuBois, Danny Glover and Ayuko Babu co-founded the Pan African Film & Arts Festival in Los Angeles. DuBois died on February 17, 2020, of natural causes at her Glendale, California, home. 

Our condolences goes out to her family, prayers for fans, friends and family she will truly be missed.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 6.13

313 – The decisions of the Edict of Milan, signed by Constantine the Great and co-emperor Valerius Licinius, granting religious freedom throughout the Roman Empire, are published in Nicomedia. 1325 – Ibn Battuta begins his travels, leaving his home in Tangiers to travel to Mecca (gone 24 years). 1381 – In England, the Peasants' Revolt, led by Wat Tyler, comes to a head, as rebels set fire to the Savoy Palace. 1514 – Henry Grace à Dieu, at over 1,000 tons the largest warship in the world at this time, built at the new Woolwich Dockyard in England, is dedicated. 1525 – Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns. 1625 – King Charles I of England marries Catholic princess Henrietta Maria of France and Navarre, at Canterbury. 1740 – Georgia provincial governor James Oglethorpe begins an unsuccessful attempt to take Spanish Florida during the Siege of St. Augustine. 1774 – Rhode Island becomes the first of Britain's North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves. 1777 – American Revolutionary War: Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette lands near Charleston, South Carolina, in order to help the Continental Congress to train its army. 1805 – Lewis and Clark Expedition: Scouting ahead of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four companions sight the Great Falls of the Missouri River. 1855 – Twentieth opera of Giuseppe Verdi, Les vêpres siciliennes ("The Sicilian Vespers"), is premiered in Paris. 1881 – The USS Jeannette is crushed in an Arctic Ocean ice pack. 1886 – A fire devastates much of Vancouver, British Columbia. 1893 – Grover Cleveland notices a rough spot in his mouth and on July 1 undergoes secret, successful surgery to remove a large, cancerous portion of his jaw; the operation was not revealed to the public until 1917, nine years after the president's death. 1895 – Émile Levassor wins the world's first real automobile race. Levassor completed the 732-mile course, from Paris to Bordeaux and back, in just under 49 hours, at a then-impressive speed of about fifteen miles per hour (24 km/h). 1898 – Yukon Territory is formed, with Dawson chosen as its capital. 1917 – World War I: The deadliest German air raid on London of the war is carried out by Gotha G.IV bombers and results in 162 deaths, including 46 children, and 432 injuries. 1927 – Aviator Charles Lindbergh receives a ticker tape parade up 5th Avenue in New York City. 1944 – World War II: The Battle of Villers-Bocage: German tank ace Michael Wittmann ambushes elements of the British 7th Armoured Division, destroying up to fourteen tanks, fifteen personnel carriers and two anti-tank guns in a Tiger I tank. 1944 – World War II: German combat elements, reinforced by the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division, launch a counterattack on American forces near Carentan. 1944 – World War II: Germany launches the first V1 Flying Bomb attack on England. Only four of the eleven bombs strike their targets. 1952 – Catalina affair: A Swedish Douglas DC-3 is shot down by a Soviet MiG-15 fighter. 1966 – The United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their Fifth Amendment rights before questioning them (colloquially known as "Mirandizing"). 1967 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominates Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. 1971 – Vietnam War: The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers. 1973 – In a game versus the Philadelphia Phillies at Veterans Stadium, Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Ron Cey and Bill Russell play together as an infield for the first time, going on to set the record of staying together for 8+1⁄2 years. 1977 – Convicted Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray is recaptured after escaping from prison three days before. 1977 – The Uphaar Cinema Fire took place at Green Park, Delhi, resulting in the deaths of 59 people and seriously injured 103 others. 1981 – At the Trooping the Colour ceremony in London, a teenager, Marcus Sarjeant, fires six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II. 1982 – Fahd becomes King of Saudi Arabia upon the death of his brother, Khalid. 1982 – Battles of Tumbledown and Wireless Ridge, during the Falklands War. 1983 – Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune. 1990 – First day of the June 1990 Mineriad in Romania. At least 240 strikers and students are arrested or killed in the chaos ensuing from the first post-Ceaușescu elections. 1994 – A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, blames recklessness by Exxon and Captain Joseph Hazelwood for the Exxon Valdez disaster, allowing victims of the oil spill to seek $15 billion in damages. 1996 – The Montana Freemen surrender after an 81-day standoff with FBI agents. 1996 – Garuda Indonesia flight 865 crashes during takeoff from Fukuoka Airport, killing three people and injuring 170. 1997 – A jury sentences Timothy McVeigh to death for his part in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. 1999 – BMW win 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans. 2000 – President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea meets Kim Jong-il, leader of North Korea, for the beginning of the first ever inter-Korea summit, in the northern capital of Pyongyang. 2000 – Italy pardons Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981. 2002 – The United States withdraws from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. 2005 – The jury acquits pop singer Michael Jackson of his charges for allegedly sexually molesting a child in 1993. 2007 – The Al Askari Mosque is bombed for a second time. 2010 – A capsule of the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa, containing particles of the asteroid 25143 Itokawa, returns to Earth by landing in the Australian Outback. 2012 – A series of bombings across Iraq, including Baghdad, Hillah and Kirkuk, kills at least 93 people and wounds over 300 others. 2015 – A man opens fire at policemen outside the police headquarters in Dallas, Texas, while a bag containing a pipe bomb is also found. He was later shot dead by police. 2018 – Volkswagen is fined one billion euros over the emissions scandal. 2021 – A gas explosion in Zhangwan district of Shiyan city, in Hubei province of China kills at least 12 people and wounds over 138 others.

[chiseler]

Sinner’s Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code

Once upon a time, Hollywood movies showed us Spencer Tracy skinny-dipping with Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck ducking into the ladies’ room with her boss in exchange for a promotion, and chorus girls warbling hosannas to marijuana.1 This, of course, was pre-Code: shorthand for the era of Hollywood movie-making between the advent of sound in 1929 and the ascendance of Hays Office censorship in 1934. The term is in fact a misnomer. The Production Code was written and officially adopted in 1930, but for the next four years, like Prohibition, it was flouted with near impunity. A look at a representative film of the time provides ample evidence of the Code’s impotence. Take Night Nurse (Wellman, 1931), starring Barbara Stanwyck: a fast, tough, sleazy and thoroughly enjoyable tale of a nurse who uncovers a plot to murder the children in her care for their trust funds.

The Code proclaimed that Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot. Stanwyck and her roommate, played by Joan Blondell, often speak their lines while casually changing their clothes in front of the camera. An intern who walks in on Stanwyck in her scanties assures her, “You can’t show me a thing. I just came from the delivery room.” The Code said, The use of liquor in American life…shall not be shown. The mother of Stanwyck’s charges, who is never seen in any other state than blotto, boasts, “I’m a dipshomaniac—and I like it!” Stanwyck befriends an amiable bootlegger when she treats his bullet-wound and agrees not to report it, contrary to law. In gratitude, he sends her a bottle of rye. “But you’re not allowed to drink,” a square nurse objects. “No,” Blondell cracks, “But it’s swell for cleaning teeth.”  Adultery and profanity are both proscribed by the Code. The dipsomaniac is plainly carrying on a tawdry affair with her chauffeur, Nick (Clark Gable), and at one point Stanwyck, disgusted to find her passed out while her children are on the brink of death, rebukes her with, “You mother.” The Code said, Methods of crimes should not be explicitly presented. When sent out to get milk for the sick children, the amiable bootlegger breaks into a grocery store. As for Revenge in modern times shall not be shown, the movie ends with the bootlegger arranging for Nick to be “taken for a ride.” Did I forget to mention that Apparent cruelty to children or animals, the central trope of the plot, is also forbidden by the Code? Or that Gable socks Stanwyck on the jaw, or that Stanwyck gets her job by flashing her ankles at a doctor?

Code? What Code?

The appeal of pre-Code movies lies not in sex, violence or vulgarity (there’s more than enough of those in the infinitely more explicit cinema of the last forty years) but in their attitude, which conveyed the pessimism and irreverence of their time. Radical cultural changes in the wake of World War I, the farce of Prohibition, the 1929 stock-market crash and the Great Depression combined to create a pervasive disillusionment and loss of respect for authority and traditional values. With rapid changes in fashion and technology, violent upheavals in economic and political conditions, society was wide open, hectically elated in the twenties, confused and frightened in the thirties. For a few years the lack of rigorous censorship allowed movies to channel the mood of the country and to capture society warts and all. They depicted adultery, divorce, rape, prostitution and homosexuality; bluntly portrayed alcoholism and drug addiction, glorified gangsters, con artists and fallen women. With a distinctive blend of cynicism and exuberance, they offered escapist entertainment but also bitter and sometimes radical visions of a society on the verge of breakdown. Oscar Levant famously quipped that he he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin; Hollywood too was grown up before it was innocent.

The Con Man as Comic Hero: Blonde Crazy

During the silent era, censorship of films was piecemeal. Not only states but individual towns had boards of censors who screened movies and ordered cuts of shots or scenes they considered too racy. Projectionists simply snipped out the offending material, a practice that accounts in part for the incompleteness many surviving films from the twenties.2 In the early twenties, Hollywood was hit with a string of off-screen scandals, culminating in the trial of comedian Roscoe Arbuckle on charges of rape and manslaughter. The movie moguls, terrified that bad press would scare away audiences, invited Will Hays to become the guardian and public face of Hollywood’s morals. Hays, a Presbyterian elder and former postmaster general, became director of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. He was an ideal choice to project a more wholesome image of Hollywood, but as a censor he proved ineffectual, and movies continued to be attacked for their evil influence on the country’s moral fiber.

Silent movies contained many elements that would not be seen during the Code era, including nudity, drug use and comic vulgarity. But the absence of sound gave film a degree of unreality that lent itself to fantasies like Valentino as an Arab sheik and Douglas Fairbanks riding a flying carpet, as well as to timeless moral fables like Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans, whose characters are called simply The Man and His Wife. From Mary Pickford as a spunky urchin to Harold Lloyd as a college freshman, actors frequently played much younger and more naive than they were in real life. Even the flapper films of Clara Bow and Joan Crawford, which purported to expose the shocking mores of modern youth, presented their heroines as pure though misunderstood. With the change to talkies, the silent era’s swashbuckling heroes, Great Lovers, ringleted sweethearts and carefree flappers suddenly seemed antiquated. Sound punctured fantasy and brought movies down to earth and up to date: never again would they soar to the heights of romance they had reached in silence.

The coming of sound involved a complete reinvention of movies, amounting to the development of a new medium. The fluid spectacles of the silent screen gave way to small-scale films confined by the technical limitations of early sound recording technology to interiors and studio sets. The bulk of films from 1929 and ’30 are clunky and static, with stilted dialogue and acting. When talkies hit their stride in the early thirties it was with urban settings that could be recreated on studio backlots and zingy vernacular dialogue delivered at machine-gun pace by Brooklyn-bred voices. As the old screen gods faded, snappy young urbanites like James Cagney and Joan Blondell entranced audiences with their unaffected style and wised-up attitude.3 This new earthiness brought the censorship issue to a crisis; everyone agreed that movies were going “from bad to voice.” In 1930, still hoping to render external censorship unnecessary through self-regulation, the studio moguls officially adopted the Production Code, written largely by a Jesuit priest named Daniel Lord (hence it should, aptly, be known as the Lord’s Code rather than the Hays Code.) But this effort coincided with the onset of the Depression, when the movie studios were struggling like other businesses. Desperate to lure audiences back to theaters they defied the Code to create daringly risqué entertainment, treating the list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” as a list of “Do’s.”

The kick in pre-Code movies comes from the awareness shared by the actors and filmmakers that they are pushing the limits, getting away with something.  Since today’s films must work so hard to raise an eyebrow, they can never recapture the harmless fizz of Maurice Chevalier taking Jeannette MacDonald’s measurements in Love Me Tonight, or Jean Harlow slipping a portrait of her boss into her garter in Red-Headed Woman, or Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise picking each other’s pockets over the course of a romantic meal. (“I trust I may keep your garter?”)

There was a Code, after all, and movies were never completely uncensored. Because they couldn’t get away with explicitness or profanity, pre-Code movies specialized in innuendo. A line that would register with sophisticated adults but fly over the heads of children or more naïve viewers was considered ideal; it would protect the innocent while enticing the experienced. In The Half-naked Truth, a scheming promoter played by Lee Tracy checks into a fancy hotel with a Mexican carnival dancer he is passing off as a Turkish princess. Also with them is rotund Eugene Pallette, wearing a turban. The hotel clerk looks at the register Tracy has filled out and does a double take at Pallette. “Oh, they have them in all Turkish harems,” Tracy says, adding confidentially, “He’s very sensitive about it.” The joke is carried through the movie without a word being spoken that could bring a blush to the most prudish cheek. Pre-Code wasn’t always this artful—there’s nothing subtle about Dick Powell singing “I’m Young and Healthy” in a tunnel of chorus girls’ legs, or Tarzan and Jane romping around the jungle in loin cloths—but in general the naughtiness was low-key, not flaunted but there to be discovered by the alert viewer.

Movies offered vacations from reality in sleek art deco style: gleaming penthouses with twinkling views of Manhattan, shimmering bias-cut evening gowns and shiny top hats, buoyant jazz scores and intoxicated gaiety. Beyond mere escapism, there’s a loopy, zany, surreal streak in pre-Code that flourishes in the early Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields films, in Busby Berkeley musicals with their kaleidoscopes of semi-nude chorines and in the cartoons of the Fleischer Brothers, where Cab Calloway lends his voice to a ghostly dancing walrus singing “The St. James Infirmary Blues.” There’s a dizzy feeling, as if the whole of society, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot, had an empty stomach and it went to their heads.

Maybe it was the effect of hearing so often that prosperity was just around the corner while the country sank deeper and deeper into despair. Demented optimism was parodied—or endorsed; it’s hard to tell—in a bizarre cartoon short from Columbia Studios called Prosperity Blues. A world of wretched, baggy-eyed, trembling sufferers, of cobweb-infested banks and pitiful apple-peddlers, is transformed into a fascistic spectacle of crazed cheerfulness as the hero, to the tune of “Happy Days Are Here Again” slaps disembodied grins on people’s faces with the command “Smile, darn ya, smile!”

“The age of chivalry is over,” James Cagney declares in Blonde Crazy (Del Ruth, 1931). “This, honey, is the age of chiselry.” Tough yet ebullient, Cagney personifies the essential pre-Code flavor of hard-boiled high spirits, sarcastically knowing and gleefully amoral, but not sour or misanthropic. Like nightclub owner Texas Guinan who greeted her customers with a hearty, “Hello, suckers!” the con artist hero of Blonde Crazy seems high on his own cynicism. Or maybe punch-drunk: you need a score card to keep track of how many times Joan Blondell slaps him, and he keeps coming back for more.

The films of Hollywood’s classical period are tight, smooth, polished. The scripts, dialogue, acting, lighting and art direction all gleam with controlled craftsmanship. Blonde Crazy, by contrast, skates on the verge of chaos: the actors seem to be winging it, cutting loose, seeing how far they can go. Cagney revels in this freedom, indulging in outrageous vocal mannerisms, flaunting his virtuosic control of his body as he darts and weaves through the role like a boxer in the ring, going from crafty schemer to world-class chump, wise-cracking operator to heart-broken lover. The anarchic, free-wheeling atmosphere of pre-Code, mined with slapstick and doubles entendres, often leaves modern audiences incredulous. Did I really hear that? Did they really mean...?

Like Night Nurse, Blonde Crazy methodically defies the Code. Undressing scenes? Cagney walks in on Blondell in the tub and appreciatively examines her underwear, doing a little shimmy with her panties, playfully holding her bra over his eyes like a pair of goggles. Liquor in American life? In an early scene Cagney, a bell-hop in an anything-goes hotel, peddles bootleg booze to a traveling salesman (Guy Kibbee). Adultery? Cagney and Blondell’s first con involves setting up the same salesman: caught “parking” with Blondell and a bottle of hooch, he offers a hefty bribe to the “cop” who’s actually their accomplice. Methods of crimes? The depiction of the movie’s confidence tricks, including a daringly simple ploy by which Cagney lifts a diamond bracelet from a jewelry store, is so detailed the viewer could easily copy them. Revenge in modern times? The movie lovingly details the means by which Blondell succeeds in fleecing a fellow con man who previously fleeced Cagney.

One scene is set in an elegant hotel lobby where men discuss the races while women share their plans to blackmail men with love letters. Every single person here is on the make. “Everyone has larceny in his heart,” Bert (Cagney) explains to Ann (Blondell) when he asks her to join him in the rackets. She’s reluctant, but only because she’s afraid of getting caught and sent to jail. Still, as the movie’s only hint of a conscience, she objects to out-and-out thievery and feistily protects her virtue. Bert keeps making passes at her and she keeps slapping his face, without harming their affectionate partnership. But the pair’s toughness keeps them from admitting the depths of their feelings. “I’ve wanted you ever since I saw you,” he tells her earnestly, then shrugs dismissively, “But if I can’t have you I’ll have someone else.” Still, by the time Ann tells him she’s marrying another man, your heart bleeds for Bert, the chiseler with the wandering eye. The other man is Joe Reynolds (Ray Milland) who chivalrously takes a cinder out of her eye and sends her a book of Browning (the poet, not the automatic, as Philip Marlowe would say.) She tells Bert that she’s going to marry Reynolds because he and his family know “a better way to live.” They care for “music and art and that kind of thing.” Of course he turns out to be the biggest louse of all, stealing from his firm and exploiting Bert’s devotion to Ann to make him the patsy. Bert winds up in jail and shot full of holes, but at least Ann finally admits her love and promises to wait for him.

Joan Blondell was the best love interest Cagney ever had. More than able to stand up to him, she brings out an unexpectedly tender and sexy side of his cocky, wound-up persona. With her wide-eyed, appetizing looks, Blondell has a warm, open front but an inner reserve and caution. Like her fellow Brooklynite Barbara Stanwyck, she was born wised-up. Cagney too, for all his extroverted energy, has a core that is aloof, introverted, nervously intense. It is touching to see these two wary, skeptical souls embrace each other so openly. They have good reason to be wary; only suckers trust anyone in the world of Blonde Crazy. Con artists con fellow con artists, and “respectable” citizens lack basic decency. Near the end of the movie, another con man tries to interest Bert in a ploy that involves tricking the relatives of the recently deceased into paying for good luck charms that the dead supposedly ordered just before “kicking off.” Anyone stupid or trusting enough to be conned deserves to lose his money. Life is a continuous game of one-upmanship, a contest to see who can laugh last.

In Guys and Dolls, Sky Masterson explains that among his people, “to be marked as a chump is like losing your citizenship.” During the early thirties, audiences who felt like victims of an economic swindle reveled in the exploits of sharpies, shysters, smart guys who know all the angles and who outwit hypocritical representatives of wealth, authority, respectability. Cagney played more con men than gangsters: in Jimmy the Gent, as “the greatest chiseler since Michelangelo,” he asserts, “There’s only two kinds of guys in business, the ones that get caught and the ones that don’t get caught.” But for all his street smarts, Cagney has moments of child-like naivité. “The consummate urban provincial,” as Andrew Sarris called him, Cagney is irrepressible rather than unflappable. His driving energy, self-mocking humor, hot temper and sentimental streak expressed the pre-Code mood—fast-paced, excitable, hustling for a buck—as Bogart’s world-weary postwar cool expressed the mood of noir.

Later in the thirties, Frank Capra would glorify his own version of the sucker: in his films Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart embody the soul of America as innocent, optimistic, easily fooled. Smart cookies like Stanwyck and Jean Arthur would crumble in the face of such purity, renouncing their hardened attitude and determination to get ahead by any means necessary. Even pre-Code movies often bow, sometimes wistfully and sometimes perfunctorily, towards the old-fashioned virtues. Chivalry makes a come-back in the final scene of Blonde Crazy, one of the few genuinely romantic moments in Cagney’s career as he gazes up at Blondell with shining, worshipful eyes. Bert has demonstrated that love can turn a crooked guy into a knight in shining armor. But he’s got a prison stretch ahead of him, and then—what? Will he go straight, get a job? It’s hard to feel any great confidence in his future, since the lasting impression left by the film is that the cornerstone of American society is the confidence trick.

“The End of America”: Heroes for Sale

The pre-Code years corresponded to the nadir of the Great Depression, when disgust with Herbert Hoover’s government deepened the country’s black mood, when the homeless called their shanty-towns “Hoovervilles” and the newspapers they wrapped themselves in “Hoover blankets.” Law-abiding citizens made folk heroes out of bank robbers like Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, while hoboes sang of a utopia where “all the cops have wooden legs” and “the railroad bulls are blind.” The “bulls” were notorious for beating the hoboes they caught, shooting at them or forcing them to jump from speeding trains; even young teenagers weren’t spared. Being broke, jobless and homeless was treated not as a misfortune but as a crime. In the South, many towns used transients as slave labor: arrested on freight trains or in rail yards, they were put to work on chain gangs, and when their sentences were up, put back on the trains they’d been arrested for riding and told to get out of town. Communities posted signs, “Jobless men keep going—we can’t take care of our own.” Some towns denied medical care to travelers who fell ill or were injured, simply dumping them outside the city limits. Before the 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, many people felt the country was drifting towards anarchy or revolution.

Not all movies of the time were escapist fantasies; many pre-Code films were “ripped from the headlines.” Warner Brothers even confronted the Depression in a musical, Golddiggers of 1933. The opening number, “We’re In the Money,” is pure wish-fulfillment, as chorus girls wearing only strategically placed gold coins crow that “Old Man Depression” is through and that, “We never see a headline about a breadline today.” This giddy fantasy shatters when it is revealed to be a rehearsal for a show that has to close down because the producers can’t pay rent for the theater. Soon the chorus girls are staying in bed all day (three to a bed) because they have nothing to eat. The plot invites us to enjoy watching Joan Blondell earn money the easy way again, squeezing it out of a man who is rich, self-righteous and not very bright. Golddiggers is fluff, but it concludes with a musical number that makes a powerful if disconcerting stab at social realism.

This is social realism à la Busby Berkeley, so Blondell dons a black satin dress and stands under a lamppost, suggesting that unless the government helps jobless men their wives will be reduced to peddling themselves in the street. “Remember my forgotten man,” she sings, “You put a rifle in his hand / You sent him far away / You shouted hip hooray / But look at him today…”4 The song is taken up by a black woman sitting in an open window, surrounded by other women posed to look like F.S.A. portraits: a gaunt and worried farm wife, a starved and empty-eyed grandmother. Meanwhile endless lines of men are seen marching off to war, stumbling through the muddy trenches, then shuffling along in breadlines. This was torn from some very fresh headlines: in the summer of 1932 thousands of World War I veterans, known as the Bonus Army, had camped out on the Mall in Washington, D.C., asking the government to pay them the financial bonuses they were promised for their war service in advance, since many of them were unemployed and destitute. The army under Gen. Douglas MacArthur violently dispersed the men and their families, inspiring outrage. In this frivolous Hollywood musical, Blondell confronts a policeman who is rousting a bum out of a doorway, pointing to the military medal pinned to the inside of the man’s shabby lapel. Her eyes burn with pure hatred for the cop.

In these desperate times, both socialism and fascism were touted as viable alternatives to America’s problems. Several Hollywood movies offered glowing visions of benevolent totalitarianism: in Gabriel Over the White House, produced by William Randolph Hearst in 1932, Walter Huston plays a president who seizes dictatorial powers for the good of the country and proceeds to get rid of gangsters by trying them in military courts without constitutional protections. (Sound familiar?) In The Mayor of Hell, the boys in an ethnically diverse and racially integrated reform school are offered the chance to run the place as a children’s democracy, and when a tyrannical director tries to destroy this system, they try him in a kangaroo court complete with flaming torches.

The government’s helplessness or callousness in the face of economic crisis was not the only source of disenchantment with authority. The prohibition of alcohol, enacted in 1920, turned the vast majority of Americans into criminals, law enforcement into hypocrites, and bootlegging gangsters into society’s pets. Meanwhile, in the late 1920s the lingering wounds of the Great War, initially suppressed by a generation desperate to forget, resurfaced as people began to take stock of what they now viewed as a ghastly waste of life. Pacifism was widely embraced; in 1933 the hallowed Oxford University Student Union debated and passed the statement, “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its king and country.” Movies like All Quiet on the Western Front and The Last Flight expressed horror at the costs and pointlessness of the war, while others called attention to the plight of veterans struggling to survive in the country for which they had fought.

Heroes for Sale (Wellman, 1933) is one of the bleakest films to come out of Hollywood during the studio era. What the confidence trick is in Blonde Crazy, gross injustice is in Heroes for Sale: the basic building block of American society. Richard Barthelmess plays the American everyman as Job, afflicted not by mere bad luck but by unfairness, misunderstanding and the heartlessness of the powerful. In the teens and twenties, Barthelmess had played pure-hearted farm boys in silent melodramas like Way Down East and Tol’able David; he stood for integrity, trustworthiness and boyish optimism. By 1933, his fresh handsome face looked tired and worn, prematurely defeated even at the start of the movie, when he supposed to be just 25. The story begins in the trenches during the War, and the first thing we see is an officer issuing a command for a raid intended to gain prestige by capturing a German officer. When a subordinate objects that the plan will amount to suicide, he snaps, “Suicide or not, it’s orders,” and tells the other officer to take nine or ten men, because “that’s all I can afford to lose.” This kind of callous abuse of power will recur throughout the film, until the penultimate scene in which armed policemen drive homeless men from their shelter into the rain, ignoring the plea that they are not bums but veterans.

Tom Holmes (Barthelmess) is one of the nine or ten expendables chosen for the mission, and when his superior officer turns yellow and refuses to leave the shell-hole where they are hiding, he single-handedly knocks out a machine-gun nest and captures a German officer, only to be wounded and left for dead on his way back. His own officer, Roger, takes credit for the escapade and wins the Distinguished Service Cross, while Tom is taken to a German hospital where he is treated humanely but given morphine to ease the pain of shell-fragments in his spinal column, starting him on the road to addiction. Back home, he winds up working in the bank owned by Roger’s father, who self-righteously fires him when he learns of his drug problem. Roger is a weak, nervous, sweaty-palmed villain; he feels bad about stealing Tom’s glory and allowing him to suffer unfairly, just not bad enough to do anything about it.

For a while things look up for Tom. In Chicago he falls in with a friendly father and daughter who run a café, gets a good job at a laundry, and marries a beautiful young woman (Loretta Young). But as soon as he reaches higher he is shot down. He agrees to help promote a friend’s invention to mechanize the laundry, but when his benevolent boss dies, the new owners use the machine as an excuse to fire all their workers. The workers blame Tom and start a riot, in which his wife is accidentally killed. As if that weren’t enough, he is blamed for leading the riot he was trying to stop and sentenced to five years hard labor. When he gets out, he’s still marked as a “Red” and driven out of town by government agents. By now the country is in the grip of the Depression, and he joins the army of hoboes riding the rails. Achieving secular sainthood, Tom gives away the fortune he earned from the laundry machine to fund a soup kitchen. And when he finally encounters Roger again, also on the bum after serving jail time for embezzling, Tom counters Roger’s pessimism (“The country can’t go on this way. This is the end of America”) with a pat speech about how the country isn’t licked and will rise again, just like Roosevelt said in his inaugural speech. Angry and anguished throughout much of the film, by the end he has slipped into a kind of haloed masochism. Despite his clichéd words, what he embodies is not can-do optimism but the kind of enlightened detachment that comes from having nothing more to lose.

“The only thing that matters is money. Without it you are garbage. With it you are a king.” These words are spoken by Max, the German inventor who makes Tom rich and indirectly ruins his life. Max is a ludicrous stereotype, starting out as a ranting communist and abruptly turning into a greedy plutocrat (when someone points out that he used to hate capitalists he responds, “Of course—because I had no money then!”) In its one idyllic interlude, the film shows a workplace where capital and labor cooperate in smiling harmony and the boss is even willing to use mechanization to give employees more leisure and easier jobs without cutting the workforce or lowering salaries. This utopian fantasy, along with the café whose owners give to the poor even as they struggle to survive, suggest that the only solution to the country’s problems is selfless generosity. Unfortunately, the movie also implies that heartlessness and blinkered malice are far more common.

Heroes for Sale is not a lucid analysis of economic problems, and despite a gritty atmosphere it lacks the objectivity of neo-realism. At once bitter and sentimental, it portrays the whole of American society as a “you-must-pay-the-rent-I-can’t-pay-the-rent” melodrama, with villains as vile and heroes as pure as those in a D.W. Griffith tale of wronged innocence. Many pre-Code movies invite the viewer to identify with and root for people who cheat to get ahead: gangsters, con artists, gold-diggers. Heroes for Sale instead asks us to identify with an innocent and virtuous but hapless and often helpless hero. If people fantasized about being one of Cagney’s confident, cynical operators—predators rather than prey—they saw themselves as Tom Holmes: down on their luck, taking one hit after another, but struggling on and clinging to hope.

Wellman’s next film was Wild Boys of the Road, his famous portrait of teenage hoboes, which grinds through hardship and injustice only to veer into shining idealism in the last five minutes. Two middle-class high-school boys turn into ragged panhandlers, one a cripple, the other stooping occasionally to petty theft. A crowd of vagrants bands together to attack and kill a brakeman who has raped a teenage girl, and to fight off the “bulls” who try to put them off a freight train. It’s easy to imagine audiences cheering as the young bums pelt the cops with eggs and fruit, and booing when the cops use fire hoses to drive them from the shanty-town they have built in disused sewer pipes. The hobo community is painted as loyal, diverse and supportive (blacks and girls are treated as equals), but no one is having any fun. They’re not wild, just bone-weary. The protagonists wind up in New York, living in a garbage dump, and one is tricked into taking part in an attempted robbery. But when they are hauled before a judge, instead of coldly meting out injustice like the judge in Heroes for Sale, the kindly man lectures the youths on how things are going to be better now, they will get a fresh chance, as the camera pans up to the National Reconstruction Administration poster above his head (“We Do Our Part”). The ending looks like a cop-out now, but audiences of the time probably cheered it too.

The pre-Code era was vanquished not only by stricter censorship but by the mood swing following Roosevelt’s inauguration, when the desperate country embraced the promise of a “new deal for the American people.” Pictures of FDR went up next to icons of Jesus; at the end of Footlight Parade, another Warner Brothers musical, solders marching in formation create an American flag, the president’s face, and the NRA eagle. Roosevelt campaigned to the tune of “Happy Days are Here Again,” and one of his first actions in office was to repeal Prohibition. The New Deal failed to end the Depression but it did stop the free-fall of the country’s spirits, ending the sense that the people had been abandoned by their leaders. Hollywood diligently promoted the new tone of wholesome optimism, strictly punishing vice and rewarding virtue. But can you regain innocence once you’ve lost it?

The Age of Experience: Baby Face

Pre-Code movies finally went too far. The last straw may have been the lesbian “dance of the naked moon” in The Sign of the Cross, Miriam Hopkins getting raped in a barn in The Story of Temple Drake, or Mae West just being Mae West. America was divided then as now, and the backlash that ushered in the Code crackdown was driven in part by heartland resentment of movies pitched at sophisticated urban audiences. 5 Outraged by the increasingly salacious tone of Hollywood, in 1934 the Catholic Church formed the Legion of Decency and ordered its congregations to boycott the movies it condemned. In fact, box office receipts rose for movies that were banned by the Legion, but Hollywood’s producers panicked at the prospect of shrinking audiences; of being attacked as foreign corrupters of America’s youth, since most were Jewish immigrants; and of federal government intervention. They capitulated. After 1934, the studios could no longer flout the Production Code Administration and its viciously anti-Semitic head, Joe Breen; unless movies earned its seal of approval they would be blackballed. For a few years filmmakers fought hard against the Code6, but as ticket sales rose with the easing of the Depression, they settled into acceptance of its strictures. For the next twenty years married couples would sleep in twin beds and no couple would kiss for longer than three seconds. The most damaging aspect of the Code was not that it limited what could be shown, but that it forced movies to uphold conservative values, to show respect for authority and religion, and to present a simple dichotomy of good and evil, virtue and sin. The censors did not want controversial subjects like abortion, prostitution or racial tensions discussed from any angle, no matter how morally serious. Hollywood managed to produce great movies under the Code’s restrictions, but sometimes its stifling effect gave them a sterile, airless, homogenized quality.

Some of the pre-Code spirit survived in screwball comedy, a genre created by the Code—the sexes must battle lest they wind up in bed. Even at the height of the Code, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder consistently subverted its precepts, probably because their dialogue was too clever or just too audaciously dirty for the censors to decipher. After World War II the hard-boiled, wised-up attitude went underground, flourishing in film noir, but what became of the pre-Code sensibility after the end of the noir cycle? Our own time may be rife with irony and black comedy, but sneaky innuendo can’t thrive without restrictions, and all-pervasive, indiscriminate irony becomes shallow and facile. The gritty, sassy tone of pre-Code flourished precisely because it still had the power to shock.

The proponents of censorship cited the overwhelming power and mass appeal of movies, which made them particularly dangerous to the young. And after all movies were not art, so they couldn’t claim first-amendment protection as books or plays might: one journalist wrote in 1934 that no “classic” movie had been created yet. Hollywood’s producers were all too ready to agree, viewing their creations only as commercial products. Even pre-Code films weren’t safe from retroactive censorship. Those that were re-released during the Code years or the early years of television had bits cut out: Myrna Loy trilling “Mimi” in a sheer nightgown in Love Me Tonight, Edward Woods tussling in bed with Joan Blondell in Public Enemy. Ironically, films that were considered too thoroughly offensive to be salvaged remained intact. In 2004 a complete, uncensored print of Baby Face, perhaps the crown jewel of pre-Code, was discovered at the Library of Congress. Baby Face (Green, 1933) was so sordid that it was rejected outright by state censorship boards and heavily altered before being released, but a copy of the original camera negative showed the film as only censors had ever seen it.

Sold-out crowds packed New York’s Film Forum on a snowy Monday in January 2005 to be the first audience ever to watch Barbara Stanwyck smash a beer bottle over the head of a man molesting her, then lie down in the straw with a brakeman in return for a free ride on a freight train; to hear a sinister German cobbler quote Nietszche to Stanwyck and advise her to stamp out all emotion and use her power over men to get the things she wants. A New York Times piece on the rediscovered print stated that “you couldn’t make this film today.” Baby Face’s heroine, Lily Powers, is sexy and heartless, with a hidden, wounded fury built up during a lifetime of mistreatment. Accompanied by a growling rendition of “The St. Louis Blues,” she climbs a ladder of weak and venal men from a dreary steel-town speakeasy to the inevitable Manhattan penthouse. With her all the way is the only person she really cares for, her black maid and best friend, played by the beautiful Teresa Harris. Baby Face has all the kick, the style, the shocking laughs and underlying bleakness that exemplify pre-Code.

During the Depression, with so many men unable to support families, women became responsible for their own and their children’s survival as they had rarely been before. Many pre-Code movies focus on the predicament of women looking for ways to support themselves outside of marriage. While the flappers of the 1920s were young girls sowing their wild oats, the women of pre-Code are looking for security, and they aren’t too scrupulous about how they get it. They are neither virtuous helpmeets nor destructive vamps; they are adults who have faced some cold, hard facts. Actresses like Constance Bennett and Miriam Hopkins played a new kind of woman who was hardened, experienced, far from spotless, but who instead of paying for her sins usually triumphed in the end.

World War I shattered the traditional manly and womanly ideals of the nineteenth century; World War II brought back the celebration of the he-man and the homemaker. Between the wars there was a blurring and mingling of the sexes. Women bobbed their hair, smoked and drove cars; men got manicures, sang falsetto and danced the Charleston. A novelty song of the time complained: “Masculine women, feminine men / Which is the rooster, which is the hen? / It’s hard to tell ‘em apart these days.” Homosexuality was an object of sniggering fascination, and caricatures of effeminate men and butch women show up regularly in pre-Code movies. In Ladies They Talk About, a new inmate in a women’s prison is warned about a hefty cigar-smoking lady in a monocle: “Watch out for her, she likes to wrestle.” In Wonder Bar, a fey young man cuts in on a dancing couple and dances off—with the man. “Boys will be boys!” Al Jolson comments with a swishy gesture.

In the Victorian era, Europe and America embraced the ideal of woman as untouched by experience, the “angel of the house.” One of the arguments against granting women the vote or allowing them to enter universities and the work-place was that if they left the domestic sphere they would lose their purity and moral authority. The working women of thirties Hollywood triumphantly backed this argument: they are hard-nosed, pragmatic, independent. The “double standard” for pre- and extra-marital sex was a common theme in films of the early thirties: why shouldn’t women act like men? The feisty yet vulnerable pre-Code woman was more compromised than the fast-talking dame of later screwball comedies, who usually worked as a reporter or secretary and relished her self-sufficiency. One aspect of pre-Code movies that might actually shock contemporary audiences is the ubiquitous equation of sex and money. It’s taken for granted that women will sell themselves for furs, jewels and apartments, as “kept women” or free-lance party girls. This reflects the Depression too, a time when—so the movies warned—the scarcity of honest jobs might tempt girls to take “the easiest way.” Men, meanwhile, might turn to crime, bootlegging, gangs: selling their souls for flashy suits, cars and women. Unlike their female counterparts, the fallen men always pay, dying in the gutter or going to the chair. Women who break commandments—even a hard-bitten ex-felon like Constance Bennett in Bed of Roses—can be redeemed through the love of an honest man, in this case the poor but hunky Joel McCrea.

The thirties were a golden age for women in Hollywood movies, the only decade when they were regularly allowed to be smart, competent, funny and sexy all at once, and seldom required to be tamed or put in their place by men (Female is a dispiriting exception.) Throughout the decade, women continued to embody the toughness and cynicism of the Depression years in romantic comedies, where they were habitually both more dazzling and more down-to-earth than their male counterparts. The experienced woman paired with a naïve, virginal man is partly a comic reversal of a more traditional trope, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. But while these women take economic advantage of their male prey, they are also seduced by male innocence. They yearn for what they themselves have lost.

The uncensored version of Baby Face makes it clear that Lily was forced into prostitution by her own father when she was fourteen. Hence the cruel irony of the title: while she poses as girlishly helpless (“Nothing like this has ever happened to me,” she pleads when she’s caught in the restroom with her boss) she has been, as the cliché goes, robbed of innocence. This is the festering wound behind her hard, defiant poise. No one could play the part better than Stanwyck, with her devastating ability to face the facts; her sudden lashing rages; and the enticing warmth that she could—chillingly—turn on or off at will. Douglas Sirk spoke later of how Stanwyck seemed to have been “deeply touched by life.” Her most arresting trait is her level, unwavering gaze, both bold and sad—what Sirk called her “amazing tragic stillness.” The simplicity of her style comes from a steely inner resolve, a hard-won self-mastery that allows her to look at the world without fear—but not without anger or sorrow. “My life has been hard, bitter,” Lily tells her husband. “I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed.”

Movies of the early thirties revel in the victory of experience over innocence, but they mourn it too. James Cagney stumbles into the gutter in the rain muttering, “I ain’t so tough.” Ann Dvorak, as a drug addict whose sleazy lover has kidnapped her son, crashes through a window and plummets to the street below to save the boy’s life. Paul Muni, fugitive from a chain gang, fades into the darkness, answering his girlfriend’s question, “How do you survive?” with the despairing words, “I steal!”7 It is this sense of bitter knowledge, of deeply-felt experience, that makes the best pre-Code movies truly “adult.” W.H. Auden said that the purpose of art is to make self-deception more difficult: “by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.” Enchantment and intoxication have always been Hollywood’s stock in trade, but occasionally—in Out of the Past, in The Lady Eve, in Blonde Crazy—the studios blended cocktails of fantasy and disillusionment, of disappointment and romance. Hollywood in the 1930s cast its lingering spell not with cynical magic, but with magical cynicism.

by Imogen Sara Smith

NOTES

1. In, respectively, Man’s Castle, Baby Face, Murder at the Vanities.

2. What happened to the cut footage? Most of it probably wound up in the wastebasket, though some found a home elsewhere. In his book The Silent Clowns Walter Kerr recounts how a boyhood friendship with his local projectionist enabled him to amass “what must unquestionably have been the most extensive collection of shots of Vilma Banky’s décolletage existing anywhere in America.”

3. Native New Yorkers Cagney and Blondell were appearing together in a play called “Penny Arcade” when they were both offered contracts by Warner Brothers, the studio that, with its Vitaphone process, had pushed the changeover to sound. “Penny Arcade” became the film Sinners’ Holiday; Cagney and Blondell made six more films together and formed a life-long friendship.

4. Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which echoes the great Depression anthem, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in its complaint that the men who built the country and fought to defend it were now reduced to begging for bread. These two songs were exceptional; Tin Pan Alley churned out hundreds of “keep smiling” ditties during the Depression, leaving it to Woody Guthrie to express the nation’s bitter mood in songs like “I Ain’t Got No Home in this World Anymore.”

5. The pre-Code Two Kinds of Women opens with the governor of a western state rehearsing a passionate speech decrying the evil influence of New York City on the rest of the nation, leading America’s youth astray with the lure of glamour and fast living. The scene cuts to the next room where the governor’s daughter (Miriam Hopkins) lounges on a sofa in sexy pajamas, reading The New Yorker and listening to a radio program broadcasting jazz from a Manhattan nightclub. The movie makes no secret of which side it’s on. At the end the daughter says that she and her New York playboy husband will announce that they are moving to South Dakota for the fresh air and clean living—until her father is re-elected, after which, “We’ll come back and live on East 58th Street!”

6. Producers and filmmakers at Warner Brothers were particularly hostile to the new regime. Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade features a puritanical censor who keeps popping up to warn Cagney, a director of musical prologues, “You’ll have to put some bathing suits on those mermaids—you know Pennsylvania.” Ultimately, he’s revealed as worse than just a buffoon when he’s caught in flagrante delicto with the film’s floozy.

7. In, respectively, Public Enemy, Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

[thebestoftimes]

Do you have any nonfiction you can recommend? Cheers!

I do! I am warning you though that I read a lot of memoirs because I find them fascinating and I learn about major events best through personal stories. But some of these are just plain nonfiction that I enjoyed.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Fear by Bob Woodward

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

Sold by Patricia McCormick

Hidden Girl by Shyima Hall

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (it’s a graphic novel how cool is that)

Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson

BRO TUMBLR POSTEDTHIS WHEN I WASN’T FINISHED anyways

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier

They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky by Alephonsion Deng

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

These aren’t nonfiction but they have enough cultural accuracies for you to learn a shit ton while you read a scrumptious story: The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns both by Khaled Hosseini

I wish i had more but most of the non-fiction i consume is in article and textbook format :( that being said if anyone has any delicious nonfic to rec to me please feel free to do so i am open to basically all subjects!

[lboogie1906]

Congressman Louis Stokes (February 23, 1925 – August 18, 2015) was an attorney, civil rights pioneer, and politician. He served 15 terms in the House of Representatives – representing the east side of Cleveland – and was the first African American congressman elected in the state of Ohio. He was one of the Cold War-era chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee, headed the Congressional Black Caucus, and was the first African American on the House Appropriations Committee.

He was born in Cleveland, the son of Louise and Charles Stokes. He and his brother, politician Carl B. Stokes, lived in one of the first federally funded housing projects, the Outhwaite Homes. He attended Central High School and served in the Army (1943-46). After attending Western Reserve University and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law on the G.I. Bill, he began practicing law in Cleveland in 1953. He argued the “stop and frisk” case of Terry v. Ohio before the SCOTUS in 1968. Later in 1968, he was elected to the House. He shifted to the newly created 11th District, covering much of the same area following a 1992 redistricting.

He married Jeannette “Jay” Stokes and they had four children. His daughter, Angela, is a former Cleveland Municipal Court judge who served (1995-2015), while another, Lori, is the Co-anchor of The 5 O’clock News and The 10 O’clock News and Anchor of The 6 O’clock News and former Co-anchor of Good Day New York WNYW Fox 5. His son, Chuck, is a journalist with WXYZ-TV in Detroit. His brother, Carl B. Stokes, was the first African American mayor of a large American city. He was a cousin of funk and R&B musician Rick James.

He was a Prince Hall Freemason and a member of the Cleveland Alumni chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #kappaalphapsi