Bird of Paradise

Bird of Paradise is a 1932 American pre-
Code romantic adventure drama film directed by King Vidor and

starring Dolores del Río, who plays Luana and Joel McCrea, who plays
Johnny.
Plot: Out at an isolated tropical island chain somewhere in the Pacific

Ocean, a young sailor meets an attractive native girl with the help of a
shark. With brief nudity and underwater swimming scenes, they swiftly fall
in love, but her father, the chief, doesn't like it. She's been promised to
another man – a prince on a neighboring island.
Luana is spirited away to this island for the arranged marriage, while
Johnny is waylaid, but he eventually rescues her. Johnny and Luana then
steal away to another island where they hope to live out the rest of their
lives. But the volcano god demands a sacrifice.
Bird of Paradise created a scandal after its release owing to a scene which
appeared to show Dolores del Río swimming naked. She was, in fact,
wearing a flesh-coloured G-string. The film was made before
the Production Code was strictly enforced, so brief nudity in American
movies was not unknown. Film director Orson Welles said del Río
represented the highest erotic ideal with her performance in the film.
In the early 1930s, Hollywood produced a number of pictures that exploited

popular interest in “exotic” tropical locations. Director King Vidor presents
this “tragic” romance as a clash between modern “civilization” and a sexual
idyll enjoyed by Rousseauian-like Noble savages. The sexuality and
the racially mixed couple breeched the as yet unenforced prohibitions of
the Hays Code. Titillate
Pre-Code Hollywood was the brief era in the American film

industry between the widespread adoption of sound in film in 1929 and the
enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines,
popularly known as the Hays Code, in mid-1934. This code was a list of
production directives established by a Hollywood board led by Will Hays, a
former US Postmaster General, and the President of the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors of America. In 1930 Will Hays produced a list of
rules and guidelines called "The Don'ts and Be Carefuls". Although the
Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor, and it did not become
rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934, with the establishment of
the Production Code Administration. Before that date, film content was
restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations
Committee and the major studios, and popular opinion, than by strict
adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood
filmmakers.
As a result, some films in the late 1920s and early 1930s depicted or
implied graphic sexual innuendo, romantic and sexual relationships
between white and black people, mild profanity, illegal drug
use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence,
and homosexuality. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their
deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions.
Beginning in late 1933 and escalating throughout the first half of 1934,
American Roman Catholics launched a campaign against what they
deemed the immorality of American cinema. This, plus a potential
government takeover of film censorship and social research that indicated
that movies that depict bad behaviors promote bad behavior, was enough
pressure to force the studios to capitulate to greater oversight.
God's Little Acre is a 1958 comedy-drama film of Erskine Caldwell's

1933 novel of the same name.
The film was as controversial as the novel, although unlike its source
material it was not subjected to prosecution for obscenity. Although both
the book and film were laced throughout with racy innuendo calling into
question the issue of marital fidelity, the film adaptation may have been the
more alarming because it portrayed a popular uprising, or workers'
insurrection, down in Georgia, by laid-off and locked out millworkers trying
to gain control of the factory equipment on which their jobs depended.
When the film was first released, audiences under 18 years of age were
prohibited from viewing what were perceived to be numerous sexy scenes
throughout, although in recent decades the film's scandalous reputation
has diminished.
Plot
Widower Ty Ty Walden and three of his adult children live in the
backwoods of Georgia during the Great Depression.
The show is set during a labor lockout at the local cotton mill. The mill has
been closed for months, causing much tension among the unemployed
men.
Ty Ty is a farmer who has been digging on his land for 15 years, searching
for the treasure his grandfather left him. Consequently, the farm has
suffered from 15 years' neglect. In the belief that having an albino with him
in his quest for treasure will bring him great fortune, Ty Ty imprisons one,
demanding that he help him locate the buried treasure.
A would-be hero by the name of Will is determined to break into the mill
and turn on the electricity so everyone can get back to work. In the middle
of the night, after drinking heavily, Will leaves his house. After some
distractions instigated by Griselda, he turns on the power, and the
machines reactivate to the cheers of the crowd. But things go horribly
wrong.
Things eventually work out for Ty Ty's family he after declares that he will
stop digging for gold if God will protect his sons.
Time passes. The family contentedly plows the fields for the first time in
years, and it looks like they may finally produce a crop. But Ty Ty is given a
sign and starts digging again and finally finds .... comic irony.
Is this film spoof or commentary or both? See what you think.
In this film you may recognize Tina Louise Gillian’s Island, Jack Lord
Hawaii 5-O, Buddy Hackett, Robert Ryan from numerous Westerns
Erskine Caldwell was an novelist and short story writer. His writings about
poverty, racism and social problems in the American South in novels such
as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), won him critical
acclaim.
In his youth Caldwell dropped out of College to sign aboard a boat
supplying guns to Central America. Caldwell later entered the University of
Virginia with a scholarship from the United Daughters of the Confederacy,
but was enrolled for only a year. Following this, Caldwell worked as a
football player, a bodyguard and a seller of "bad" real estate.
After two more enrollments at college, Caldwell went to work for the Atlanta
Journal, but left after a year, and moved to Maine, where wrote his first two
novels of poor (white trash) Georgia: The Bastard in (1929) and Poor Fool
in (1930). He moved back down South and wrote his most famous his
novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre.
His first book, The Bastard, was banned and copies of it were seized by
authorities. With the publication of God's Little Acre, the New York Society
for the Suppression of Vice instigated legal action against him. Caldwell
was arrested at a book-signing there but was exonerated in court. I
imagine that this attention boosted sales.
In 1941, during World War II, Caldwell obtained a visa from the USSR that
allowed him to travel to Ukraine and work as a foreign correspondent,
documenting the war effort there for Life magazine, CBS radio and the
newspaper PM. After the war, he wrote movie scripts for about five years
and wrote articles from Mexico and Czechoslovakia for the North American
Newspaper Alliance.
During the last twenty years of his life, his routine was to travel the world for
six months of each year, taking with him notebooks in which to jot down his
ideas. Many of these notebooks were not published, but can be examined
in a museum dedicated to him in the town square of Moreland, Georgia,
where the home in which he was born was relocated and dedicated to his
memory.

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Bird of Paradise is a 1932 American pre-

Code romantic adventure drama film directed by King Vidor and

Plot: Out at an isolated tropical island chain somewhere in the Pacific

In the early 1930s, Hollywood produced a number of pictures that exploited

Pre-Code Hollywood was the brief era in the American film

God's Little Acre is a 1958 comedy-drama film of Erskine Caldwell's

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