These are 2 official promotional DVDs from TCM (Turner Classic Movies).  Both DVDs feature the entire programs.  The DVDs have basic information stamped on them and they both come inside plain jewel cases.  The DVDs were not issued sealed. The DVDs are in mint condition and have never been viewed.

 

See my other items for more pre-Hays Code DVDs.   Buy both sets and get free shipping (within the USA).

 

The first DVD is the 2003 documentary Complicated Women explores the provocative role of women in pre-code Hollywood. Covering the years from 1929, when sound pushed movies into the modern era, until 1934, when the Hays Code virtually neutered film content, Complicated Women looks at the stereotype breaking films of this period, movies that no longer portrayed women as virgins or vamps. Instead, the liberated female of the pre-code films had dimensions; good girls had lovers and babies and held down jobs, while the bad girls were cast in a sympathetic light. And they did it all without apology.

Complicated Women is narrated by Jane Fonda.  Despite its scholarly roots, the documentary relies primarily on film clips to tell the story. The clips are numerous, well chosen and many of them rarely seen since their original release. Best of all, the clips in Complicated Women make these early pictures more accessible and will leave viewers wanting to see the entire film and learn more about the pre-code stars.

One of the major pre-code stars is Norma Shearer, reigning queen of MGM, who persuaded the powers that be (including husband Irving Thalberg) to cast her as an adulteress in The Divorcee (1930). Shearer saw the role as an opportunity to change her image. In turn, The Divorcee was one of the first films to transform the image of the devoted wife. When her husband has an affair, Shearer's character takes matters into her own hands and has an affair of her own. On the flip side, Greta Garbo in both A Woman of Affairs (1928) and Anna Christie (1930) manages to make the vamp (and in the case of Anna Christie, the prostitute) acceptable. As Complicated Women puts it, "Norma Shearer took the ingénue into bedroom, and Garbo made the tramp moral."

Cast: Jane Fonda (Narrator), Frances Dee, Kitty Carlisle, BW&C-55m. Closed captioning.

The 2nd DVD is "Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood."  75 minutes, 2012.

Salacious dialogue, chorus girls in filmy, barely there golden costumes, gangsters who glamourize violence: Those are all the things we think of when we talk about pre-Code cinema, a term used to refer to movies made before 1934, the year the Motion Picture Production Code began to be strictly enforced. The Code was a set of moral guidelines instituted by the Hays Office, a watchdog group led by the former U.S. postmaster general Will Hays, indicating what kinds of scenes, situations and language were acceptable in films. Its goal was to protect moviegoers from any unwholesome influences that might float down from the screen and do moral harm.

Though the Code wasn't fully enforced until 1934, it had actually been instituted in 1930, as Hollywood's way of responding to anxiety over the way film content had been changing since the advent of talkies. The 2008 documentary Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood, written by Steven Smith and featuring the insights of film historians and cultural critics including Molly Haskell, Camille Paglia and Leonard Maltin, lays out the history of the Code in clear, chronological detail, explaining how it came into being and, later, how movies changed when it began to be enforced. In 1930, the MPPDA, a trade association of movie studios that had been formed in 1922 (and which was later renamed The Motion Picture Association of America, as it's known today), introduced and immediately adopted the Motion Picture Production Code. Hays, the MPPDA's first president, oversaw the drafting of the Code, and although the studios were willing to abide by it - they had, after all, helped forge it - economic pressures in the early years of the Depression led them to virtually ignore its admonitions. Failing box-office figures meant the studios needed to lure audiences into movie theaters, and portraying all manner of dazzling criminal activity and saucy antics among sophisticated city folk was the best way to do that.