Bound for stardom: why was Golden Age Hollywood obsessed with bondage?
Picture the scene. Elmer Frisby is a lobby clerk in an Iowa hotel – in the town of Pratt Falls, to be precise. Like thousands of equally anonymous cyphers, he has entered a magazine contest with a spectacular prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to the movie capital of America, and the guarantee of a contract with a major studio.
And as far as young Frisby is concerned, regardless of his deficiencies in looks and charisma, that contract already has his name at the top of the page.
Therein lies the comedy in Hollywood Bound, a Vitaphone short that reached the silver screen in 1928, and has now lent its title to a new book on the history of bondage in film. When Frisby arrived, it was merely 17 years since Hollywood had greeted its first film studio, and the “HOLLYWOODLAND” sign on Mount Lee was still an advertising gimmick rather than an iconic landmark.
Yet the Los Angeles suburb nestled beneath the hills was already a dream destination. To be “Hollywood bound” was to invest in America’s most enduring fantasy of the 20th century: the movies.
Since the 1920s, generations of wannabe divas and junior matinee idols have travelled west. They’re still crossing the continent on the same route, ensuring that Hollywood’s diners and gas stations can boast the world’s most glamorous (and surgically enhanced) staff, each of them convinced that they are only a chance encounter or a screen test away from immortality.
Not that the movie career which was the summit of Elmer Frisby’s ambitions would have been a cosy route to paradise. Many of those nai?ve, dream-struck arrivals were (and probably still are, though no-one talks about it) bound to trade something precious for their shot at stardom: their dignity, their innocence, their soul – or, at the very least, sexual favours for a casting director.
That was the silent fate of a whole generation of female stars. And their subservience didn’t end there: once they’d swallowed their medicine, they were tied into studio contracts that effectively revived the shadow of slavery.
Being Hollywood-bound was the status quo of every movie actor during the golden decades of the studio system. The dictators of MGM or Fox or RKO dangled their clients in their hands like eternally smiling puppets. Hollywood hype promised the worldwide audience that “you make the stars”, but a moment’s hesitation on the casting couch or a misplaced word in a director’s ear could be enough to divert even the most compelling of faces from a starring role into bit-part backdrop. Movie legend is rich with careers that might have been and dreams that were stifled at birth.
So it is entirely appropriate that a cast of characters – some forgotten as soon as their image flickered off the screen, others cemented in the permanent record of movie history – should be bound by contracts to the studios and then bound in a somewhat more exotic fashion on screen.
Hollywood was a city of extremes: not for Tinseltown the carefully judged subtleties of shot and tone that were the hallmark of the art-house auteurs. The studios demanded passion, thrills, suspense, violent outbursts of emotion and movement. For every protagonist sweeping across the screen with a silvery rapier or a sensuous leer, there had to be a victim, waiting to be tossed aside with contemptuous ease or devoured in a paroxysm of lust.
This constant release of inhibitions required an equal measure of restraint. And so it was that innocent maidens were pinned down by rapacious seducers; monstrous villains chained to receive their just desserts; valiant heroes manacled or trussed or viciously tied, awaiting the cruellest of tortures, physical or psychological – only to free themselves in the final reel, and carry off the heroines to safety and romance.
A certain amount of bondage was strictly necessary to the smooth running of the Hollywood machine. Frankenstein’s monster needed to be held in check to prevent him spreading carnage beyond the laboratory. The electric chair would be less forbidding a fate if the condemned criminal could simply get up and walk away whenever he started to fry.
And it was, of course, necessary for audiences to see the evil exploits of the movies’ most deranged villains, so that the battle between good and evil would assume mythic proportions.
As you turn the pages of the book Hollywood Bound, however, it is impossible not to wonder whether there was perhaps, on occasion, just the slightest hint of an extra-curricular agenda at work – whether, to be blunt, somebody was taking a devious pleasure in the possibilities of binding and tormenting some of the movies’ biggest stars.
Take the innocent victim of Sign of the Cross, for example (as an ape, played by an actor, was about to do). Was her virtual nudity strictly necessary? Or did the expression on the face of the statue to which she was bound actually mirror that of her director, Cecil B DeMille, who might have been waiting his entire life for the moment when he could strip some innocent maiden naked and... well, we must avert our eyes and move on.
Not that the directors can take all the blame. Sometimes, the stars seemed to be more than a little complicit in their fate. Look into the eyes of Moses, as portrayed by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (another DeMille picture), and tell me: does not the enchained father of the Jewish faith have something else in mind beyond counting up the commandments and letting his people go?
It is clear that the precise overtones and undercurrents of the ways in which the movie industry treated its stars and starlets demand further study – which is why the publisher has compiled this helpful guide to the history of movie bondage. Assembled here is all the evidence for the prosecution: proof positive that unnatural forces were at work in the movie capital of the world, whenever an innocent thespian dared to become Hollywood-bound.
This is an edited version of the foreword to Hollywood Bound: A Photographic Ride Through the History of Movie Bondage, published by Reel Art Press