Adventure Films, Epics, and Westerns:

1920s Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller portrayed a vine-swinging, jungle-calling ape man called Tarzan (the 10th incarnation) in the first of his twelve films as "Lord of the Jungle" in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), which was then quickly followed with Tarzan and His Mate (1934). [In the first six of these films, his co-star was the lovely Maureen O'Sullivan.]

Adventure films stirred audiences like Best Picture Award winner Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) (the first (and best) of three film versions), a commercially-successful film shot on location, brought a merciless Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton) into conflict with Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable), producing the popular catch-phrase: 'Mr. Christian - Come here!' The most expensive serial to date, Universal's Flash Gordon (1936), starring Buster Crabbe, premiered its first chapter in 1936.

One film had everything, and was perhaps cinema's most original creation - RKO's spectacular, campy adventure/fantasy film by producer-directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest G. Schoedsack King Kong (1933), a phenomenal film that raised the bar for special effects for many decades - due to the genius of special effects man Willis H. O'Brien. It utilized stop-motion animation and one of the earliest uses of back-projection, and it was accompanied by Max Steiner's emphatic score. The film, the first to be heavily promoted on the radio, starred Fay Wray as the love interest - an attractive object of the giant ape's desire, held in his clutching hands just before he met his spectacular death in a last stand on top of New York's Empire State Building. The classic, futuristic sci-fi film from British producer Alexander Korda's London Films - Things to Come (1936), envisioned the future from the perspective of the 1930s.

One of the greatest swashbucklers of all-time came in the late 1930s Technicolor adventure film - Warner Bros.' The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland playing Robin Hood and Maid Marian respectively - it was the costliest film ever made by the studio up to that time. Flynn was also featured in many classic costumed adventure films in the decade, including his star-making role in Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940).

The Western film genre was honored when the panoramic pioneering film Cimarron (1931) won the Best Picture Academy Award - the first and only Oscar RKO Studios ever received. By the late 1930s, Gene Autry became the cinema's most popular cowboy, after appearing and starring in his first B-western feature film, Republic Pictures' Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935).

Claudette Colbert starred as the famed Egyptian queen in Cecil B. DeMille's opulent production of Cleopatra (1934). Norwegian Olympic skating star Sonja Henie had her film debut in Fox's musical One in a Million (1936). After her discovery at the age of 15 at Schwab's Drugstore in Hollywood and her recommendation to director Mervyn LeRoy, young teenaged Lana Turner launched her career with her memorable "tight sweater" debut - a 75-foot tracking shot in Warners' They Won't Forget (1937). Ronald Reagan first appeared in a feature film in 1937, in Warner Bros.' Love Is On the Air (1937). Hedy Lamarr made her American film debut in the late 1930s, co-starring with Charles Boyer in Algiers (1938), following her scandalous nude appearance in the Czech film Ecstasy (1933).

The Hays Production Code: The Hays Office

Backed by the Catholic church and their Catholic Legion of Decency (founded in 1934 by a council of Catholic American Bishops), and the Wall Street financiers who supported the studios, former Postmaster General Will Hays headed up Hollywood's self-regulatory Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) that was founded in 1922. It created the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) in 1927 (under the command of stringent Catholic Joseph Breen), issued a definitive Motion Picture Production Code in March, 1930, and created the Production Code Administration (PCA) (also headed by Breen) in 1934. The "Pre-Code" years refers to the five years before the Code took effect, between 1930 and mid 1934. When the code became official, Hollywood would operate under the constraint of a rigid set of mandates.

Regulations of the code included censorship of language, references to sex, violence, and morality. The conservative and repressive code required, among other things, no promiscuity, no venereal disease, no excessive violence or brutality, twin beds for married couples, no ridicule of ministers of religion, the prohibition of various words ("sex", "hell", and "damn"), and no clear depictions of rape, seduction, adultery or passionate, illicit sex. There was to be no "excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embracing, suggestive postures and gestures." Sinful activity (such as criminality or sex outside marriage) could often exist in a film IF it was punished or if it ended in misery.

All films would be submitted for a "seal of approval" - and if a film was unacceptable and denied a seal, it was not to be exhibited in theaters, and the studio would be fined $25,000. Many films were either suppressed, or severely mutilated or censored to fit the seal's requirements, but until 1934, restrictions on content were mostly evaded and ignored. In the early days of the Depression in the early 1930s, the desperate Hollywood studios used the open sexuality of platinum blonde Jean Harlow and the outrageous bawdiness of Mae West to increase their profits. The Hays Office and church leaders would soon interpret their screen behaviors as obscene and lacking in morals.

The steamy Red Dust (1932) caused controversy for its heated-up love triangle between adulterous Mary Astor, Clark Gable, and prostitute Jean Harlow (and for her nude bathing scene in a rain-barrel). Beginning in mid-year 1934 (until challenges in the mid-1950s and the abolition of the code in 1968), films felt the cold effects of strict enforcement, vigilance and censorship of the (Hays) Production Code of the MPPDA.

Film studios submitted their films for review before release in order to be awarded an MPPDA seal of approval - if they met strict standards of decency. Without a seal, films were threatened with negative publicity and potential box-office failure. The era of separate beds and squeaky-clean morality was just beginning with the enforcement of the Code after mid-1934, and would remain for over 30 years.