In the film Tonight or Never (1931), Gloria Swanson stars as a talented opera singer whose career is stalled because she lacks passion to make truly great performances. Instead she is left with a cold vibrato that hits every note but without heart. Her singing coach tells her that until she experiences love, her performances will remain empty pursuits of notoriety, popularity, and fame.
Enter the dashing suitor: Standing on the street below her hotel room, the opera singer Nella (Gloria Swanson), sees a handsome man watching through her window. Later, he throws a bouquet through the open window. She’s intrigued but insists on departing immediately to return home to Budapest with her fiancé and manager, Count Albert von Gronac, who has been out drinking at the club.
In Budapest, Nella discovers that her fiancé has been cheating on her, so she considers finding the dashing suitor for her own affair. She learns the suitor (Jim) has come to Budapest, so she goes to his hotel where she has dinner alone, sending a message to his room by way of the waiter played by a young Boris Karloff.
The film was released in a period called Pre-Code Hollywood where films were no longer silent but also not yet censored by the Hays Code, which was enforced starting in 1934 by the Production Code Administration. This explains a lot.
Take Gloria Swanson’s costumes, for example, designed by Coco Chanel, they include a silky, sheer pantsuit. Or the low cut, shimmering sequin gown she wears to Jim’s hotel room—taking off her wrap so that he must notice her bare shoulders and shiny bodice. None of these actions, nor what happens next, keep within the code.
Here’s a sample of what’s in the code that ‘shall not appear’: any licentious or suggestive nudity—in fact or in silhouette; and any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture. (Don’t look, Jim…you’re looking.)
Note: There’s another part of the code banning scenes of childbirth, in fact, or in silhouette — obviously not adhered to by Alex Garland in the more recent film Men.
Tonight or Never is like taking the band aid off early twentieth century film to expose the cultural expression of what real people were feeling and thinking and doing in life before it was masked on the big screen (1934 to 1968) by censorship. And, in my opinion, this makes the film worth watching.
It also makes me reflect on the history of female desire in other art forms like literature.
“In nineteenth-century European literature there is a hardly an example of a female character who has what was called “a past”, or who has had an adulterous relationship, who survives to the end of the novel, regardless of the country of origin. The fate of the fallen woman was suicide, murder, or deportation to Australia. It would be reassuring if redemption was one of the options, but no examples come to mind. David Copperfield’s childhood sweetheart, little Emily, is deported to Australia as the result of having been seduced by David’s best friend. In Oliver Twist, the prostitute Nancy dies horribly at the hands of her lover, Bill Sykes, and in another Dickens novel, Bleak House, Lady Deadlock - who had a lover and an illegitimate child years before marrying her husband - dies after a 12 hour walk through the night in the snow. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina expiates her sins by jumping under a train. And Flaubert’s Emma Bovary dies of arsenic poisoning, as described in horrific detail over many pages. It is said that Tolstoy and Flaubert loved their heroines but were forced by public expectation to end their characters’ lives by such shocking and ghastly deaths.” —Excerpt from a paper by John Studd originally given as a lecture to The London Medical Society in 2006
By the time Gloria Swanson appeared in Tonight or Never, she had received two of three Oscars nominations. She disappeared for years from the motion picture industry around the time the Hays Code began to be enforced, appearing in only one film from 1934 until her role in 1950 in Sunset Boulevard (her third nomination). She more or less retired after Sunset Boulevard, which is considered to be one of the top 100 films of all time.
I don’t work in the film industry, but I think it must be very hard to make films or TV shows with or without the Hays Code. What is true? How do you depict it? What makes a great performance? What are the outside pressures forced upon us, the artists, the art?
I don’t know, but Tonight or Never tells a story about something more universal and expansive than the outside forces that would try to diminish depictions of love and romance. Maybe Gloria Swanson knew that life would be nothing without love.
“I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my center and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.” — Jane Eyre
Great review! I never heard of the Hays Code. I am going to watch the movie!