Ladies' Choice: Three on a Match and the Pre-Code picture

Steyn On-Line ^ | December 16, 2023 | Rick McGinnis

[Twotone]

There's a cherished myth that the films made before the enforcement of Will Hays' Motion Picture Production Code in 1934 are a lost paradise of moviemaking: a frank, honest, adult cinematic universe that we were only able to return to with the abandonment of the Code in the '60s and the emergence of a school of movie radicals – the "raging bulls" of Peter Biskind's famous book – who blew away the fusty moral cobwebs from Hollywood.

Part of this is a reaction to Joseph Breen, the man who Hays put in charge, and who ruled over the production offices and editing rooms of Hollywood until his retirement in 1954. Breen was, to be sure, an unpleasant character – a textbook establishment antisemite and proudly ignorant scold. Knowing that he had final say over your work must have been galling.

But it has to be remembered that Joseph Breen didn't make the movies: Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor and James Whale and Frank Capra and Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder and Dorothy Arzner and Mitchell Leisen and Fritz Lang and Elia Kazan and many others did. And that by the time Breen retired, the code was being undermined by both the studios and independent producers. It would limp on for another decade but its end in 1968 was little more than burying the corpse that had been mouldering in plain sight.

But let's examine this myth of the pre-Code picture by looking at one that's considered a classic – Mervyn LeRoy's Three on a Match (1932), made by First National Pictures and distributed by its parent company, Warner Bros. The film begins with a news and headline montage that tells us it's 1919 by summing up three key events...

[ansel12]

Hadda was a nice woman and would always get around to playing during a party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadda_Brooks

[Beowulf9]

Well personally I wish they’d bring BACK the Hays code. I avoid the movie most of the time. I don’t want to see sex, hear curses, see nude scenes.

[AlaskaErik]

Three on a match is actually a World War 1 superstition. It stems from three soldiers lighting their cigarettes off of one match. A sniper sees the first soldier lighting up, takes aim at the second soldier and shoots the third. So when there are three on a match, one dies.