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Earliest Movies About Taboo Subjects

Started by MortSahlFan, April 01, 2020, 10:26:15 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

MortSahlFan

The earlier, the better, as they seem to handle the subject matter better, especially with quality writing, instead of being crass.. Nothing after the 1970s. From any country. For some reason, they just seem to be better. Nothing silly, but something mature. I'm watching "Pale Flower" and loving it, and there's a mention of a guy who is a "dope addict"... I do remember liking "The Man With The Golden Arm", too.

Not the exploitation stuff like "Reefer Madness"

bgmnts

In the Heat of the Night is an obvious one.

NurseNugent

Are silent films of any interest? Bed and Sofa made in 1927 covers abortion, a manage a trois relationship and housing crisis.

It is available in YouTube.

Lemming

Recently saw Madchen in Uniform (1931) which is a German film about a teenager who goes to an all-female boarding school and falls in love with her (female) teacher. It's really good, if a little bit uncomfortable in how it seems to advocate a student-teacher relationship with a substantial age gap. Goebbels had it censored then tried to destroy any remaining copies of it. Literal Nazi.

studpuppet

Extase ('Ecstacy') from 1933 contains what's probably the first portrayal of sex and a female orgasm on screen, thanks to Hedy Lamarr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gfxcfn1qyw


Glebe

^That's funny just saw that mentioned online somewhere the other day.

chveik

Quote from: Glebe on April 01, 2020, 11:44:41 PM
^That's funny just saw that mentioned online somewhere the other day.

I bet you did, you dirty old bollocks

bgmnts

So that's what a lady orgasm looks like.

Glebe



Dex Sawash

Ernest Rides His Stepsister Again

Edit- misread thread title as 'Earnest movies'

Sebastian Cobb

I've caught some interesting pulpy ones as part of the byNWR project when they were on Mubi (you can watch them on byNWR aswell).

These are all restorations, things thought to be lost and found in archives and in some cases abandoned film labs.

Shanty Tramp
A small-town Southern prostitute has to decide between her lust for a black man and her meal-ticket, the sleazy revival-tent preacher who's just rolled into town.

https://www.bynwr.com/articles/shanty-tramp

Spring Night, Summer Night
The melancholy story of a half brother and sister in rural southern Ohio whose relationship suddenly turns intimate, sending the already-struggling farm family into a crisis of love, shame and recrimination. Cast entirely with regional actors and filmed on location in shimmering 35mm B&W.

https://www.bynwr.com/articles/spring-night-summer-night-1

Not really what you asked for, but it also has the wonderful Night Tide:


Dennis Hopper's first starring role is as Johnny Drake, a sailor who spots the stunning Mora (Linda Lawson) in a beatnik jazz club, falls in love with her, and gradually is drawn into a strange world in which she may or may not be a mermaid.
https://www.bynwr.com/articles/night-tide


Blumf

Fritz Lang's M (1931) did a pretty good turn with Peter Lorre as a deranged child killer, even showing him in a sympathetic light as suffering from his condition. Also deals with mob justice, but I'm sure there are earlier examples of that.

MortSahlFan

Quote from: Blumf on April 02, 2020, 12:49:14 PM
Fritz Lang's M (1931) did a pretty good turn with Peter Lorre as a deranged child killer, even showing him in a sympathetic light as suffering from his condition. Also deals with mob justice, but I'm sure there are earlier examples of that.
Great example, and it was done so well. No exploitation, just an amazing thriller.

Sebastian Cobb

The 1960's British noir Victim about a gay man killing himself is very good, deals with the public's views of it at the time well and the police chief seems to be very regretful in applying the laws of the day. First British film to use the word 'homosexual' apparently.

dissolute ocelot

There is some debate over whether The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1895) has a homosexual subtext. It features two men (apparently sailors) dancing together, nudge nudge wink wink. Vito Russo, expert on all things gay in the movies, claims yes, but others dispute. German director Richard Oswald's Different from the Others is generally reckoned the first film with an explicit message of not persecuting homosexuals; Victim reportedly lifted its story.

Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8-LPlN4kcU

A movie I can scarcely believe exists. It details the adventures of the world famous scientific detective, Coke Ennyday, a man so dependent on cocaine that he shoots up three times in as many minutes and keeps a enormous tin of powdered coke on his desk. It was made before the introduction of the Hayes Code. It's not really about drug abuse, but it illustrates that cocaine use was A Thing well known enough in 1916 that Douglas Fairbanks starred in a slapstick Sherlock Holmes piss-take where the main joke is "lol he's a cokehead".

kalowski

Quote from: studpuppet on April 01, 2020, 11:43:26 PM
Extase ('Ecstacy') from 1933 contains what's probably the first portrayal of sex and a female orgasm on screen, thanks to Hedy Lamarr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gfxcfn1qyw


God, Hedy Lamarr was so cool
QuoteDuring World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented.

studpuppet

Quote from: kalowski on April 03, 2020, 10:59:55 PM
God, Hedy Lamarr was so cool

Bombshell is a good recent documentary on her.

Speaking of documentaries, I reminded myself about this one. As a teenager in the eighties, there were certain videos that did the rounds - Clockwork Orange was one and this was the other. NSFW, home, or anywhere else for that matter, and I'd imagine it was the first of its kind?

Thomas

Quote from: Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse on April 03, 2020, 10:04:37 PM
The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8-LPlN4kcU

A movie I can scarcely believe exists. It details the adventures of the world famous scientific detective, Coke Ennyday, a man so dependent on cocaine that he shoots up three times in as many minutes and keeps a enormous tin of powdered coke on his desk. It was made before the introduction of the Hayes Code. It's not really about drug abuse, but it illustrates that cocaine use was A Thing well known enough in 1916 that Douglas Fairbanks starred in a slapstick Sherlock Holmes piss-take where the main joke is "lol he's a cokehead".

Straight on tomorrow's 'culture consumption' list, cheers.

Some of the pre-Code films I've watched recently have featured surprisingly candid and explicit elements. Well, they shouldn't be surprising, really. It just reminds my silly modern mind that they were human, of course, back then. It's not like they actually wandered around in black-and-white, reproducing asexually, plunged into orchestral darkness whenever something romantic might be about to happen.

Watching a Code-era film comes with inherent spoilers, if you're aware of some of the restrictions. I learned the other day that the Code forbade characters who commit murder from getting away with their crimes. So if you're watching a '40s crime flick, and you're wandering whether the killer will escape - forgettaboudit. Though 1945's excellent Detour manages to adhere to this in a creative and almost ambiguous way.

On the subject of Detour, here's a grimly fascinating real-world parallel -
Spoiler alert
in the film, Tom Neal's character accidentally kills two people in what appear to be straightforward murders. Twenty years later, this precise scenario arose when Neal killed his wife. Of course, we can only accept the judgement of those in 1965 that it was truly an accident.
[close]

MortSahlFan

Quote from: studpuppet on April 03, 2020, 11:47:39 PM
Bombshell is a good recent documentary on her.

Speaking of documentaries, I reminded myself about this one. As a teenager in the eighties, there were certain videos that did the rounds - Clockwork Orange was one and this was the other. NSFW, home, or anywhere else for that matter, and I'd imagine it was the first of its kind?

I don't want to start an entire new thread and appear to be self-serving, but you bring up a good idea...

Documentaries about taboo subjects.


EOLAN

Freaks (1932)

A story based on carnival sideshow performers; many with disabilities and deformities. Their harsh and demeaning treatment.
Still many arguments whether the film is exploitative of those actors or offers them an opportunity to portray their story compassionately. Not explicit but some would say it does look to push an anti-eugenics message.

Don't know any other films like it. 

spaghetamine

Quote from: Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse on April 03, 2020, 10:04:37 PM
The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8-LPlN4kcU

A movie I can scarcely believe exists. It details the adventures of the world famous scientific detective, Coke Ennyday, a man so dependent on cocaine that he shoots up three times in as many minutes and keeps a enormous tin of powdered coke on his desk. It was made before the introduction of the Hayes Code. It's not really about drug abuse, but it illustrates that cocaine use was A Thing well known enough in 1916 that Douglas Fairbanks starred in a slapstick Sherlock Holmes piss-take where the main joke is "lol he's a cokehead".

fucking loving this, thanks for posting!

Ignatius_S

The Bigamist - about a man who... well you can probably guess. Ida Lupino is outstanding as director and co-star of a drama, which was more ambiguous and restrained than I expected (partly because it was on a crime DVD compilation).

Ignatius_S

Quote from: Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse on April 03, 2020, 10:04:37 PM
The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8-LPlN4kcU

A movie I can scarcely believe exists. It details the adventures of the world famous scientific detective, Coke Ennyday, a man so dependent on cocaine that he shoots up three times in as many minutes and keeps a enormous tin of powdered coke on his desk. It was made before the introduction of the Hayes Code. It's not really about drug abuse, but it illustrates that cocaine use was A Thing well known enough in 1916 that Douglas Fairbanks starred in a slapstick Sherlock Holmes piss-take where the main joke is "lol he's a cokehead".

Well, many a film then was quirky....

Drugs had only just been prohibited when the film was made and widely used, so as you say, the audience would have got it. Although the extent of the use here was particularly OTT, drugs being portrayed for comic effect, such as Easy Street (where Chaplin sits on a syringe) although I think that was slightly later.

Ignatius_S

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on April 02, 2020, 10:45:58 AM
I've caught some interesting pulpy ones as part of the byNWR project when they were on Mubi (you can watch them on byNWR aswell).

These are all restorations, things thought to be lost and found in archives and in some cases abandoned film labs.

Shanty Tramp
A small-town Southern prostitute has to decide between her lust for a black man and her meal-ticket, the sleazy revival-tent preacher who's just rolled into town.

https://www.bynwr.com/articles/shanty-tramp

The melancholy story of a half brother and sister in rural southern Ohio whose relationship suddenly turns intimate, sending the already-struggling farm family into a crisis of love, shame and recrimination. Cast entirely with regional actors and filmed on location in shimmering 35mm B&W....

Both strictly exploitation flicks - although Spring Night, Summer Night is an excellent film and superior.

Brundle-Fly

Never Take Sweets from a Stranger  (1960). Quite a bold movie at the time addressing child sex abuse in a small community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04fHbbjI2xY

MortSahlFan

"Spring Night, Summer Night" -- no exploitation at all. Very cinema-verite.

The Pawnbroker (1964)

One of the first films to deal with the Holocaust and one of the first American films to show an exposed Breast.