Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mick LaSalle. Thomas Dunne Books, 2000

The author is calling the five years between when talkies became the thing and the enforcement of the Production Code- 1929 to 1934. It’s a time that many don’t even know existed; they think that strong women who had sex, had out of wedlock babies, got divorced, didn’t exist until the late 60s. Two women in particular embodied the woman of the era (five years barely constitutes an era!): Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. Now, everyone who has even a passing interest in film knows Garbo’s name, but many don’t have a clue who Shearer was. She was intensely driven and consistently strove to break barriers in film; she wore thin, close fitting costumes with no underwear, she had roles where she did the things women in real life were doing but weren’t considered ‘nice’. The fact that she was married to Irving Thalberg, boy-wonder producer at MGM helped; he gave her the green light for the movies she wanted to do.

Shearer and Garbo were the flag bearers, but they opened the way for many, many other female actors. The pre-Code era was the era of actresses: Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, Dietrich, Loretta Young, Constance Bennett, Jean Harlow, and many more started their film careers during this era. The characters they portrayed were, as the title says, complicated women. They were women with choices, until the characters who were given the okay during Code years. During the decades of the Code, if a woman had sex outside of marriage she had to be punished- she died, got thrown in jail, lost her children, or found herself out on the streets. Women had to take whatever men dished out; they were martyrs to marriage and motherhood. If they had careers, they had to give them up or at least make them second to their duties as wives and mothers, and never have more success than their men did.

I found the book very interesting; I’ve been a fan of old movies ever since I was a kid. I knew vaguely about pre-Code movies, but didn’t realize how much was done during those five short years. The book gives both the history of the pre-Code years and the biographies of Garbo and Shearer- especially Shearer. She dominates the pages. And I can see why the author chose her as his icon of the era; while many thing of Mae West when they think about this era, her first movie wasn’t made until 1932. It was fun to read about this era but sad that the Code came into being; the movies weren’t just about sex but about women having their own lives and destinies rather than being appendages of men. They were about how women were really living their lives after the changes of the roaring 20s. They had careers, they didn’t put up with cheating husbands, they gave their opinions. The were complicated! Five stars.