Hacker Cinema
A Place in the Sun
1951 · Film · 122 min
Directed by George Stevens
A young social climber wins the heart of a beautiful heiress but his former girlfriend's pregnancy stands in the way of his ambition.
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A couple movies that touched on the abortion question include "Dirty Dancing" and "A Place In The Sun".
I could say that it can feel like a life-ending situation to become pregnant but you might not really get it without some emotional connection, hence the movie references.
Alternatively, you could imagine a situation where you'd want to punch someone in the face for saying "why don't you just live with it?" and substitute that for how some women feel when they're unexpectedly pregnant.
Certainly with legal and safe abortion, many more abortions are performed than would have been in the previous regime. But just like some people will risk their career or commit suicide rather than accept a life changing event, women were willing to risk it all to avoid becoming a mother at that point in their life.
I’ll play:
The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Casablanca (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Great Expectations (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), All About Eve (1950), A Place In The Sun (1951), High Noon (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), The Wages of Fear (1953). (I slipped two French films in.)
Almost anything by Hawks during those years. Or Hitchcock. Almost anything with Bogart. Or Grant. Or by Wilder.
Tons of noir films skirted the rules.
Look, I’m not a fan of the Hays code but some of those movies were to me better because of what they had to imply.
This is after the Hays code but as an example I recently watched the original 3:10 to Yuma and the remake. I hated the remake. What appeals to me about Elmore Leonard stories is that despite being about bad guys, they have a degree of charm to them (Out of Sight, Justified, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty,etc). The remake took all of the charm out of the original and replaced it with graphic violence and cruelty.