Why Be Good?: Sexuality & Censorship in Early Cinema
2.42007HD
Before the G, PG and R ratings system there was the Production Code, and before that there was, well, nothing. This eye-opening documentary examines the rampant sexuality of early Hollywood through movie clips and reminiscences by stars of the era. Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Marlene Dietrich...
A venal, spoiled stockbroker's wife impulsively embezzles $10,000 from the charity she chairs and desperately turns to a Burmese ivory trader to replace the stolen money.
Anna Mirrel, a young Jewish girl in Czarist Russia, is forced to degrade herself in order to visit her father, whom she believes to be ill. She obtains a yellow passport, signifying that she is a prostitute.
Two playboys stumble drunkenly home, where the owner falls asleep and the other attacks the maid. The butler intervenes and a fight results in the death of the assailant. A French girl, escaping from a pimp who kidnapped her, witnesses the crime. The butler convinces his master he is the killer,...
Sensible Betty Manners is the wife of the frivolous John Manners. John fritters away his time playing the horses rather than paying attention to his job on Wall Street. He pays dearly for this when the market goes wrong, and he is wiped out. Coincidentally an old friend, Sir Harry, arrives bringing...
Henry Sherwin is led to believe by mine expert James Fleming that the mine he invested all his money in is valueless, though Fleming has discovered a rich vein of gold that he keeps secret. When Sherwin dies shortly thereafter, he leaves his daughter Betty in the care of John Kenwood and his...
When a cowpoke steps into a fight and saves the life of a disreputable gambler, the gambler decides to reciprocate by revealing to his new-found friend the truth about the cowpoke's fiancée.
A young woman who agrees to a sham wedding with Lord Riginald Belsize because his inheritance prohibits him from marrying his girlfriend who is an actress. Belsize is convinced if he marries someone else and hires that woman to be his "wife" he can hide his relationship with his girlfriend.
The marriage of a wealthy and frivolous member of French nobility, Loyette Merval, to an American aristocratic idler named Willard Standish, is a loving one, except for their mutual dissatisfaction with Willard's idleness. After Willard becomes a chauffeur, Loyette's subsequent disgust causes him...
Rustler Pete Sontag kidnaps Merlin Warner after he kills her father. Pete, a drug smuggler who uses his saloon as a front, coerces Merlin though beatings to become the dancer Mexicali Mae. She meets and falls in love with morphine addict Joe Blanchard but Pete frames Joe for a murder that he...
Marion Clark, a manicurist, is unimpressed by the wealthy but dissipated men who frequent her shop, preferring city editor Dick Strong, who lives in her boardinghouse. Dick's sister Gladys, however, is intrigued by the wilder side of life in New York and allows one of the boarders to take her to a...
