Friday, May 16, 2008

Who is Leo Forbstein?

Leo Forbstein, the man, the mystery.
Who is this guy? I always search for his name before every film. They used to show the credits before the movie. I always look for his name and without fail, there he is. I don't know anything about him other than he is a frequent friend singing along and accompanying with intuitive grace every scene and mood of the films of the Pre Code era. I adore his work ethic and economy. I love his dominance of the Pre Code era. He is credited in nearly every film. The Leo Forbstein orchestra is a tour de force. These players must have done nothing but record for these films all day and night! I would love if anyone knows anyone who played for Leo Forbstein or could tell me more about this incredible fixture of the precode film era.

If anyone can tell me Leo Forbstein stories, I would love to hear them!

Leo F. Forbstein (October 16, 1892 - February 12, 1948) was an Academy Award-winning film musical director and orchestra conductor who worked on more than 550 projects during a twenty-year period.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Forbstein was attracted to music as a child, learning the violin at the age of four. As a conductor at the Royal Theater in St. Joseph, he synchronized the orchestra with the action in silent films; he then became principal conductor at the Newman Theatre in Kansas City, where the organist was future Warner Bros. colleague Carl W. Stalling. In the mid-1920s, Forbstein relocated to Hollywood to head the symphony orchestra at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre. He soon signed with Warner Bros. as one of the directors of its Vitaphone Orchestra, alongside Erno Rapee (then Warners' general music director), Louis Silvers, and David Mendoza; Forbstein's first screen credit was The Squall in 1929. In 1931, Warners dismissed Rapee and Mendoza in a consolidation and economy move and Forbstein became the company's general music director.

In 1936, Forbstein and composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold were write-in candidates for the Oscar for Best Music, Score for their work on Captain Blood. The following year he was nominated officially for The Charge of the Light Brigade and Anthony Adverse, winning for the latter. He was nominated again for The Life of Emile Zola in 1938.

Forbstein was married to the former Bess Gallas from October 16, 1914 until his death from a heart attack in Los Angeles, California. They had one daughter, Harriet.

Notable film credits

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Ecomomic Turmoil and Social Distress

Fallen-women, backstage musicals, social-problem films, and "anarchic" comedies—were distinctly connected to the economic distress of the early 1930s and the social-psychological anxieties it produced. Filmmakers were more likely to make, and audiences were more likely to respond to, films that called into question dominant attitudes toward sexuality, upper-class respectability, and the institutions of law and order.

Ecomomic Instability
The Plow That Broke the Plains
(1936) demonstrated how the drought, dust storms, and market collapse forced Great Plains farmers to leave the land, then concluded with the government's plan of resettlement and soil conservation.

Social-Psychological Anxiety
Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia.

Rags to Riches
Little Caesar
(1931)
Scarface (1932)
Public Enemy (1931)

Fallen Women

Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise, 1931 (Gretta Garbo)
Possessed, 1931 (Joan Crawford)
Rain, 1932 (Joan Crawford)
Blonde Venus, 1932 (Marlene Dietrich )
Red Dust (Jean Harlow )
Red-Headed Woman (Jean Harlow )

Backstage Musicals

The Gold Diggers of 1933
42nd Street

Social Problem Films

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Wild Boys of the Road (1933)
Our Daily Bread (1934)

Anarchic Comedies

Duck Soup (1933)
She Done Him Wrong (1933)
I'm No Angel (1934)



Pre Code List for June

The Divorcee
Waterloo Bridge: A James Whale film with ,Mae Clarke
The Public Enemy
Blonde Crazy: Cagney and Joan Blondell
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins.
Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face
Grand Hotel: Best Picture Winner
Red-Headed Woman: with Jean Harlow
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang: with Paul Muni and directed by Mervyn LeRoy.
Gabriel Over the White House: A scorching view of Depression-era America and an exploration of the advantages of a benevolent dictator.
The Gold Diggers of 1933: directed by Mervin LeRoy, with choreography by Busby Berkeley. Baby Face: The uncut original version, rediscovered in 2005,with Barbara Stanwyck.
Queen Christina: with Garbo
The Scarlet Empress: by Von Sternberg-Dietrich

Why I Love "Baby Face"

Baby Face stars Barbara Stanwick as an ambitious, clear minded, leader who is delt a bit of cumbersome circumstances. We find her working as a hostess in her own home for her father's makeshift speak easy. It is heavily implied that her father prostitutes her out and that there is some incest going on. At no point in the opening sequence is she a passive victim waiting to be saved or redeemed. We find her instead gravitating toward the intellectual customer of her fathers and being given sound advice. She takes the information and capitalizes on it. There is no waiting for someone to put her in a livable situation, instead we find someone who is constantly scanning all possibilities until she finds one that she can take action on.

The score by Leo Forbstien is playful and smart. My favorite theme is the corporate ladder climbing motif that is accompanied by the visual of the outside of the New York skyscraper where Baby Face is working. The motif is usually begins as Baby Face is securing another upward promotion. She smiles at a handsome successful man, the door closes behind them, the theme starts, we see the outside window of the department she is currently in, and when we ascend to the next level of the building or department, she appears in a better outfit and a better job.

What I like about these images of sexual power is not the use of sex to obtain power, but rather the dramatization of how a woman understands her given circumstances and is not conflicted by false morality imposed by those in control. She needs work, she is smart, she is capable
and ambitious. She is detached from sex emotionally at this point in the movie, so she has no
need for it other that to serve her practically.

Baby Face is a person who we are not supposed to like, but like her anyway. She is an anti hero which is such a fantastic and rare character for women to be portrayed as. She's tough, funny, smart, sexy and in front of every situation.

What is a Pre Code Film

Pre-Code

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Pre-Code films were created before the Motion Picture Production Code or Hays Code took effect on 1 July 1934 in the United States of America. Although an existing code of conduct for the film industry came into being in 1930, many ignored it and it was not enforced very enthusiastically.

The original code was written by a Jesuit priest, Father Daniel A. Lord and officially adopted in 1930. The code was effectively ignored because many found such censorship prudish, due to the liberal social attitudes of the 1920s and early 1930s. This was a period in which the Victorian era was looked upon as being naïve and backward and was constantly ridiculed as such.

Films in the late 1920s and early 30s reflected the liberal attitudes of the day and could include sexual innuendos, references to homosexuality, miscegenation, illegal drug use, infidelity, abortion, and profane language (such as the word "damn") as well as women in their undergarments. Such behavior was common in the liberal climate of cities at that time, although it often shocked audiences in rural areas.

Popular character roles include tough-talking, assertive women, gangsters, and prostitutes.

Of particular note were both the references to sexual promiscuity, drug use, bloody gangster life, and morally ambiguous endings, which drew the ire from various religious groups – some Protestant, but overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

In particular, Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, apostolic delegate to the Catholic Church in the U.S. called upon American Catholics to unite against the surging immorality of the cinema. As a result, many religious groups created their own leagues, such as the Catholic Legion of Decency (eventually renamed to the "National Legion of Decency") in 1933, premised around controlling and enforcing decency standards in theatres, and boycotting movies which they deemed offensive. Conservative Protestants tended to support much of the crackdown on "immorality", particularly in the South, which had its own form of censorship. By 1939 "Even black bellboys were routinely cut out of films shown in the South; from the evidence of Hollywood pictures of the 1930s, one might not suspect that black people existed in America".[1] Anything relating to the state of race relations in the South or miscegenation could never be exhibited below the Mason-Dixon line.

By 1934, theatre revenues were slumping (likely, in part, due to the Depression) and those in the film industry were unhappy with the prospect of losing even more of their audience, particularly in heavily Catholic cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, etc).

Thus, the pre-Code era effectively came to a close with the establishment of a special bureau (eventually christened The Breen Office, after Joseph Ignatius Breen, a former public relations executive), whose purpose was to review scripts and finished prints in order to ensure that they adhered to the new Code.

This effectively spelled the end of the pre-Code era, and shaped the trends in American film-making during the ensuing years. Enforcement of the code popularized several new trends, such as plots about headstrong, able, employed women (like Jean Arthur).