Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 144: Fri May 24

Devil and the Deep (Gering, 1932): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm


This is a Women and Cocaine presentation at the Cinema Museum and here is their introduction:

This May we celebrate Tallulah Bankhead, a star whose outrageous behaviour inspired her good friend Marlene Dietrich to declare she was “the most immoral woman who ever lived”. Devil and the Deep (1932) follows a Naval commander as he sets out for revenge after learning of his wife’s affair. The film was marketed with the tagline “Twenty men sent to the bottom of the sea-for one woman’s sin!” Tallulah stars alongside a stellar cast that features Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Charles Laughton in his first American role.

The film will be preceded by a short introduction, and followed by a raffle. Women and Cocaine Presents is a film night at The Cinema Museum to celebrate the Fierce and Liberated women of Pre code cinema. From the period of 1930 to 1934, before the introduction of censorship, women were depicted in roles with a frankness and sex-positivity that remains rare even today. These newly independent women pushed gender boundaries as they pursued their own economic freedom and excitement, defying the previous Victorian ideals of domesticity, sexual purity and religion. Hollywood soon caught on and began to represent these women on screen, and each month we celebrate a different woman from that era.

“My father warned me about men & booze, but he never mentioned a word about women & cocaine” – Tallulah Bankhead.

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