Some Warners Musicals and the Spirit of the Production Code

Warners backstage musicals of 1933 appear regularly in accounts of "pre-Code Hollywood" that highlight their apparent violations of the Production Code. Those films are often contrasted with the RKO Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers romantic dance musicals, largely produced after the Code's...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Quarterly review of film and video 2025-01, Vol.42 (1), p.184-203
Main Author: Shearer, Martha
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Busby Berkeley
Film musical
Production Code
Warner Bros
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Summary:Warners backstage musicals of 1933 appear regularly in accounts of "pre-Code Hollywood" that highlight their apparent violations of the Production Code. Those films are often contrasted with the RKO Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers romantic dance musicals, largely produced after the Code's supposed "enforcement" from 1934. This article argues, however, that the apparently dramatic contrast between the decade's two major cycles and their relationship to the Code is better understood as a process that Richard Maltby argues was characteristic of early 1930s Hollywood: "the more gradual, more complex and less melodramatic evolution of systems of convention in representation." Placing the aesthetics of Warners musicals in dialogue with Production Code files and internal studio documents, this article contends that the musical's shift towards a romantic model was a pragmatic response to the Code, one that was already in progress before July 1934. Genre-if understood as an historical process rather than one essential definition or a set of monolithic subgenres-can make such aesthetic shifts and institutional renegotiations visible.
ISSN:1050-9208
1543-5326
DOI:10.1080/10509208.2024.2410519