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Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood

Book by Mick LaSalle · 3 quotes · Filmmaking, Apologizing, Baby

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Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood Quotes

“Before the code, women on screen took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, held down professional positions without apologizing for their self-sufficiency, and in general acted the way many of us think woman acted only after 1969.”

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Book:Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood
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“It was strange. It was painful. It was wonderful. It was something unique to the twentieth century. To sit in a theater in 1994 and fall in love with a woman from 1929 … that would be like sitting in a theater in 1929 and falling in love with someone from 1864 … or like watching 1994 from the year 2059. These leaps across time are fantastic. Yet it’s inevitable that soon people will think nothing of watching a movie from a century before, any more than we would consider it odd to read a hundred-year-old book.”

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“Hollywood’s motives in marketing sex may have been cynical—Hollywood’s motives always are. But in providing audiences with sophisticated fare, it was also responding to real cultural changes that had happened within American society. Hollywood was a few years behind the trend, of course, but that’s nothing new. Don’t forget, this is the same industry that for seventy years has made wonderful, passionate, stirring anti-war movies six or seven years after every war, never during one.”

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Book:Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood
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