ONE OF THE most interesting and pleasurable aspects of Hollywood films from the 1920s to the 60s at least, has been the suggestive or insinuated  pleasurable nature of countless scenes, moments, episodes in such films, as opposed to the explicit films of today. Yet the creation of such cinematic scenes was also the result of official production codes in Hollywood’s early film industry, which restricted the explicit communication of sexuality, violence, and coarse language.

Since the 1920s, Hollywood had discovered the exciting ability of creative motion pictures to project  aspects of the female body, especially through stage dancing and fashion, but also festive social activities, romantic and flirtatious episodes, etc.

The freshness and excitement of the new creative cinematic medium offered unchartered visual freedom, for which there were hardly any guidelines beyond the moral discretion and integrity of individual film producers and directors.

As usual, it is only after the Arts — whether  literature, theatre, or film, even painting — established a direction of freedom in their genres, and also showed the possibility of furthering this creative freedom, that methods of supervising, even guiding and censoring, were introduced by an official combination of religious and State representatives of ‘society’.

Those who know the history of Hollywood film productions  since the 1920s are well aware of the production codes and guidelines that were introduced to prevent Hollywood films from spiraling out of control in a surfeit of abused freedom.

Today, of course, those codes and guidelines have been reinterpreted and applied in a more categorical manner that admits the relevance of explicit scenes — whether sexual, violent, linguistic — to various mature social functions related to psychological and sociological truths in the cherished tradition of American and international democratic freedom.

The effect of all these restrictions by the ‘Legion of Decency’, also pressure groups and organizations, on the totally exposed early creations of the Hollywood Film Industry, however, produced highly suggestive and intellectually symbolic styles of cinematic scene presentation and acting which contributed beautifully to the specific artistic originality of numerous classic Hollywood films from the 1930s to the 60s, and their influence today on a minority of outstanding contemporary American, European and Brazilian films.

Presented with restrictions to early explicit scene depictions of certain actions, activities and dialogue, film directors, screen-writers, actors, actresses, and cameramen had to devise a language of signs which substituted for total depiction, and this led to the relevance of semiotics to high-quality filmmaking today.

To dismiss this subtle cinematic style as completely redundant and old-fashioned in contrast to today’s explicitness would be short-sighted, and even educationally backward. Also, to think that the past absence of explicit scenes was simply a naturally backward chapter in film-production would be to drain filmmaking of its perennial potential for generating beautiful, contemplative, suggestive, and intensely sensual scenes.

A dogged belief in art as ‘imitation of reality’, rather than art as reality reinterpreted artistically, can deceive us that suggestiveness has been replaced by explicitness today. At present, we can say without hesitation that the loss of much social and communicative charm, as well as intellectual and imaginative stimulation in a barrage of brash, frenetic American films with extraordinary plots, is the result of an obsession with film as a container of realistic mundane details, or a projected mythology of devised futuristic lifestyles.

If such approaches to filmmaking become the norm, it is because a certain prescribed concept and definition of ‘reality’ has come to dominate cinematic creations. Consider some examples of an approach to filmmaking in 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s Hollywood when explicit realism was boxed in by all sorts of restrictions.

The high professional esteem deservedly bestowed today on legendary screen-stars of those decades, like Clark Gable, Cary Grant, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Dana Andrews, Robert Mitchum, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Myrna Loy, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Gloria Grahame, Veronica Lake, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Dorothy Malone, or Cyd Charisse comes from their ability to inject mundane reality with unique interpretative sign language, or signification, under sensitive direction.

One of the noticeable points of this signification is its combined social and sensual connotation in a manner which does not demand any extraordinary individual skill of the ‘stars’, but shares everyday expressions of pleasure with audiences.

The specific ability of such methods of creative expression is the key quality which enables these classic films to influence any viewer’s lifestyle via suggestive scenes and acting. In 1934, Frank Capra’s Oscar-winning ‘IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT’, for all its dated corny tongue-in-cheek humour, launched a brilliant synthesis of social commentary and suggestive sexuality with absurd scenes of Claudette Colbert’s upper-class lifestyle becoming  teased and liberated by Clark Gable’s experienced ‘man-about-town’ identity.

When he shows her how to ‘dunk’ a doughnut in coffee, the scene reeks of common yet sophisticated epicurean sensuality. This also is one of the first important films to skillfully attack the puritanical idea that couples could not be shown in bed together. From our present perspective, it may seem pointless and absurd to even mention such antique restrictions in film-making, but what is important and interesting is the totally creative significations in filmmaking such naïve restrictions gave birth to.

The root cause of both social censorship by various organizations and its resulting creative ingenuity among many filmmakers is, of course, the surprising communicative power of the photographic/cinematic image. The image’s ability to influence our lives in a perceived negative or positive fashion by visual titillation or imitation, made it perhaps the most commercially productive and valuable commodity in our contemporary civilization.

However, our approach to image-making, via explicit exposure or suggestive arrangements, can decide the brevity or durability of meaning and pleasure in what is projected for our consideration and consumption. The difference between suggestive images of pleasure in classic Hollywood’s restrictive era and today’s explicit filmmaking is that in the best instances –and this extends to  films maintaining that suggestive stylistic tradition today, classic film imagery leaves much more to the imagination’s prolonged involvement, rather than the instant  explicit gratification found in many contemporary films.

Nevertheless, to recognise this difference between suggestiveness and explicitness does not mean that one should replace the other as some media-style of a dominant behavioural trend.

All sorts of explicit visual imagery — from magazines to films, TV programmes and music videos — serve to release sexual tension or provide sensual stimulation in young and old alike. But the suggestive pleasure of certain cinematic styles is something else entirely. Take a wonderful film — on several levels: Sensual, sociological, linguistic — like ‘CHINA SEAS’ of 1935, with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In one scene, Harlow, a loose, adventurous woman in love with Gable, the captain of a large steamer plying the sea between Hong Kong and Singapore, barges into his cabin while the ship is preparing to
leave Hong Kong, insisting that she wants to make the trip with a reluctant Gable.

The scene makes it obvious that Gable and Harlow often sleep together on board, but the restrictions of the era forbade showing couples lying in bed together. So what does Harlow do? She leaps upon Gable’s cabin bed and sits before him on her heels, her knees together on the sheet. It takes little contemplation to realise that Harlow’s posture on the bed is far more sexually potent than if she had undressed and slipped between the sheets, because her posture itself, filmed from behind, activates not the familiar sexual activity of ‘sleeping’ in  bed, but the very sex act itself.

Further, this suggestive sex act is fully explored by Harlow’s keeping on her clothes, or not being scantily clad. Here, more becomes less, helped by Harlow’s  unique creative fashion sense, which utilized sleek clinging dresses and skirts to accent her breasts, hips, stomach, buttocks and legs.

Indeed, it is Harlow’s long tight white skirt which allows us to see the bouncy roundness of her buttocks resting on her heels on Gable’s cabin bed, in a posture which by merely tipping forward would quickly put her on her elbows and knees. But the highest suggestive scenes of visual pleasure occur when a rollicking Harlow sits bouncing in her chair in the ship’s saloon, playing games with a group of inebriated male passengers as the ship encounters a storm at sea.

Nothing demonstrates the advantage of suggestiveness over explicitness better than Harlow’s soft satin dress, its thin straps over her shoulders clearly proving that only her bare skin lies beneath. The material of her dress is important because it allows her breasts to move freely against it as she gesticulates. If she wore nothing, and her breasts were visible, the scene would lose most of its power, due to explicitness.

However, in combination with her clothes, it is Harlow’s specific individual figure (along with her speech) which, from the start, had projected her creativity and demand as a screen-star.

So, what makes this scene in ‘CHINA SEAS’ work beautifully is the fact that Harlow’s breasts were neither large nor small, but more importantly, pointed, so that flesh and material project visual pleasure by their combination.

When the raging waves spray the saloon and a wet Harlow is lifted by Gable to a safer room, we see for a few amazing moments her bare breasts through the shiny wet material. For a film of 1935 this scene in ‘CHINA SEAS’ offers much more suggestive cinematic pleasure than most of the explicit ‘sexy’ scenes in today’s films and music videos.