It’s Hard to Resist ‘Forbidden Hollywood Collection’

Before the Production Code went into effect, Hollywood in the 1930s produced zesty, racy, socially conscious films that gave actors something to say and do, and audiences something to take home that wasn’t just brightly colored, romanticized pap.

MGM/UA Video in its continuing “Forbidden Hollywood” laser-disc series offers more than just a taste of what that Depression-era time was like in this mesmerizing group of releases. The latest in the series, “The Forbidden Hollywood Collection” ($100), brings together six fascinating 1932-33 black-and-white films set in a time and place all too painfully reminiscent of contemporary times and places. Times were rough. Businesses were foundering. Men (and women) who wanted to survive were manipulative, cunning and ruthless and not above using anyone to stay on top of the pack.

Sitting down with “Female,” “Blessed Event,” “Ladies They Talk About,” “Three on a Match,” “Skyscraper Souls” and “Employees’ Entrance” provides a provocative window into those days. Actors like Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young, Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell just starting out, and others like Ruth Chatterton, Lee Tracy and Warren William in their heyday are captivating as they handle the kind of material that would not be seen or heard for decades later.

Nothing prepares you for the 1933 “Employees’ Entrance” and the 1932 “Skyscraper Souls,” two realistic films that capture the mood and desperation of the times, and so closely parallel the lean-and-mean practices of contemporary business that it can be downright uncomfortable.

The images of a department store in “Employees’ Entrance” offer one of the most revealing portraits of the 1930s ever put on film. Even the elevator operator’s rundown of what’s available on each floor, salted throughout the film, is fascinating. The underrated Warren William plays a ruthless executive who wants to pull his store from its moribund traditional ways into a slick 20th-Century operation. He fires loyal employees who don’t fit into his vision, treats those who work for him as hired slaves who must be at his beck and call 24 hours a day-seven days a week, steals away clever competitors and ruins the lives of anyone who dares to challenge him.

A 19-year-old Loretta Young presents a rare combination of naivete and callousness as she tries to make a life for herself and her husband. Watch carefully. This is one of the last times you’ll see a wife seduced by her husband’s employer reunite with her spouse at film’s end--without being branded with an A or committing suicide. Future censors would demand that such a fallen woman suffer retribution for her sins.

William is back as a ruthless financial wizard in “Skyscraper Souls,” building a gigantic monolith to himself and destroying anyone who gets in his way. (Does the phrase Trump Towers mean anything to you?) Particularly fascinating are the “Grand Hotel”-like glimpses we get into the lives of those who work in the building. Stunning vignettes include a poignant turn by Jean Hersholt as a timid jeweler in love with a floozy transformed into an honest woman by Hersholt’s love.

William’s ruthless financial maneuvering in the stock market looks like a game plan for “Barbarians at the Gate.” The unlikely melodramatic ending aside, “Skyscraper Souls” is an intriguing look at the Depression era through anything but rose-tinted glances.

The 1932 “Blessed Event” featuring Lee Tracy in his most well-known role as a Walter Winchell-like newspaper columnist may surprise anyone who thinks prying into public lives started with the National Enquirer or “Hard Copy.” Tracy pulls out all the stops portraying a real rat whose rapid-fire delivery, biting one-liners and cruel “Blessed Event” items make him the feared, powerful toast of the town. It’s one of the great, underrated newspaper films with Dick Powell, as a crooner who stands up to Tracy, engagingly silly in his film debut.

You couldn’t get a stronger picture of feminism 60 years ago than in 1933’s “Female” with an engaging Ruth Chatterton in top form as the boss of an auto company. She uses men the way they’ve always used women and runs her company and her life in a way Donald Trump would understand. It’s a brutal portrait until she falls for George Brent (to whom she was actually married at the time), the one man who stands up to her. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of wimpy ending that takes the sting out of her character, but after all, this is still the movies, not real life.

“Ladies They Talk About,” a 1933 “women in prison” film, reveals a tough, mesmerizing Barbara Stanwyck as a poor girl gone wrong, a delightful Lillian Roth as her savvy prison pal and Preston Foster as the solid citizen trying to set things right. Some of the melodrama may seem a bit much for today’s sophisticates, but the brittle look at these “Ladies” is daring even by today’s standards.

The 1932 “Three on a Match” may be the most overwrought of the lot. The lives of three childhood friends played by a demure Bette Davis, a sassy Joan Blondell and a moody Ann Dvorak intertwine a decade later in a film where determined acting gives new life to old cliches. Director Mervyn LeRoy barrels his way through a ragged script, getting revealing performances out of everyone, including Edward Arnold’s typical crime boss-turn and Humphrey Bogart as a young tough without the redeeming values his later good bad guys would boast.

Topping it all off are the bare-it-all original trailers for “Female,” “Blessed Event” and “Ladies They Talk About.” The only quibble to the otherwise fine offering is MGM/UA’s failure to put the descriptive material on each film and chapter stops on a separate, pullout brochure, as MGM/UA has done with most of its other sets. Gluing them to the insides of the covers makes them difficult to refer to and awkward to use. Discs get strewn about and the inside covers are hard to read.

Laserbits

New Movies Just Out: “Jack the Bear” (FoxVideo, letterboxed, $40); “Map of the Human Heart” (Warner, $35); “Who’s the Man” (Columbia TriStar, $40); “Sliver,” the sexy thriller starring Sharon Stone (Paramount, $35); “Tom and Jerry: The Movie,” (MGM/UA, $35.)

Coming Soon: FoxVideo’s “Rising Sun,” with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, is due the end of December, at $50.