Books by Mick LaSalle

Between 1929 and 1934, women in American cinema were modern!  They took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, led unapologetic careers, and, in general, acted the way many think women acted only after 1968. 

Before then, women on screen had come in two varieties - good or bad - sweet ingenue or vamp.  Then two stars came along and blasted away these stereotypes.  Garbo turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale.  Meanwhile, Norma Shearer succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she'd never been: the bedroom.  Garbo and Shearer took the stereotypes and made them complicated.

In the wake of these complicated women came others, a deluge of indelible stars - Constance Bennett, Ruth Chatterton, Mae Clarke, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, Ann Harding, Jean Harlow, Miriam Hopkins, Dorothy Mackaill, Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West, and Loretta Young - who all came into their own during the pre-Code era.  These women pushed the limits and shaped their images along modem lines.

Then, in July 1934, the draconian Production Code became the law in Hollywood and these modern women of the screen were banished, not to be seen again until the Code was repealed three decades later. 

Mick LaSalle, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, takes readers on a tour of pre-Code films and reveals how this was the true Golden Age of women's films, and how the movies of the pre-Code are still worth watching.  The bold, pioneering, and complicated women of the pre-Code era are about to take their place in the pantheon of film history, and America is about to reclaim a rich legacy.

From the author of the widely praised Complicated Women comes this thorough and readable study of leading men during the pre-Code Hollywood era. Film critic Mick LaSalle (San Francisco Chronicle) turns his attention to the pivotal five years between 1929 and mid-1934, a period of loosened censorship that finally ended with the imposition of a harsh Production Code. (As LaSalle argues, this Code would, for the next thirty-four years, censor much of the life and honesty out of American movies.)

Dangerous Men takes a close look at the images of manhood during this pre-Code era, which coincided with the culmination of a generation-long transformation in the American masculine ideal. By the late 1920s, the tumult of a new century had made the nineteenth century's notion of the ideal man seem like a repressed stuffed shirt, a deluded optimist. The smiling, confident hero of just a few years before fell out of favor, and the new heroes who emerged in the wake of World War I were gangsters, opportunists, sleazy businessmen, shifty lawyers, and shell-shocked soldiers—men whose very existence threatened the status quo.

Thus LaSalle considers the lives and careers of such household names as James Cagney, Clark Gable, Edward G. Robinson, Maurice Chevalier, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper, along with lesser-known figures like Richard Barthelmess, Lee Tracy, Robert Montgomery, and the magnificent Warren William. Within the work of these actors LaSalle locates and explicates a manhood more exuberant and contentious, and yet also more humane, than anything that has followed on the American screen.

Quotes :

"Before the movies were childish, they were adult. Mick LaSalle opens the door to a golden era."—Roger Ebert

"Old Hollywood never dies. In a worthy mate for his Complicated Women, LaSalle argues that the filmic ideal of modern man derives from leading men of the 'pre-Code era' . . . [Dangerous Men offers] smart vignettes about the stars, their films, and the era. The usual suspects—Cagney, Cooper, Gable, et alia—receive their due, but also limned are the now-shadowy Warren William, Ramon Navarro, and John Gilbert. LaSalle, once again expert in selecting the telling anecdote about a subject, makes his love of his subject evident throughout a highly readable work of film history."—Booklist

"A companion volume to LaSalle's Complicated Women, about female stars of Hollywood's aesthetically rich pre-Code era. In 1929 the advent of talking movies opened the door to more provocative Hollywood filmmaking, often imbued with strong social commentary. But in 1934, reactionary forces succeeded in establishing the Production Code, a mechanism that allowed a small group to decide what was acceptable for the nation's movie screens—a form of control that held sway for the next quarter-century. LaSalle's premise is that the five-year pre-Code era of 1929-34 was a seminal period in American movie-making that helped foster the very ideal of the modern man, caught between his own sense of right and an increasingly mechanized, conformist society. Those years offered directors opportunities to express serious concerns about American society while featuring an array of leading men—Clark Gable, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Rudolph Valentino, among others—who were 'dangerous' in that they broke with the smiling, swashbuckling heroes of the '20s silents. They questioned and resisted authority, shaded the lines between good and evil, challenged concepts of law and order, and introduced caddish and even cruel behavior in screen romances. Above all, they were the key players in an emboldened Hollywood that made movies about and for a generation disillusioned by WWI and the Depression. This is film studies and not social history, yet LaSalle's descriptions of films and stars can't help but illuminate America at a time that was uncertain. The author's erudition is great, and his writing is lively, precise, and witty in his discussions of classic films such as Public Enemy, Gold Diggers of 1933, 42nd Street, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Little Caesar, Central Park, All Quiet on the Western Front, Wild Boys of the Road, and Son of the Sheik. Trenchant film-by-film analysis from an author clearly in love with his subject. A compelling introduction to one of Hollywood's golden eras."—Kirkus Reviews