Prohibition lasted til FDR in 1933. But movies of 1931 like The Front Page blithely and without comment use free flowing alcohol in many scenes.
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You're remembering correctly on both counts — Prohibition legally remained in force until December 5, 1933, yet many films from 1930–1933 depict alcohol as if it were freely available, with characters drinking openly in homes, offices, speakeasies, and hotel suites, and often without any narrative acknowledgement of illegality.
This discrepancy is not a mistake. It reflects Hollywood’s uneasy but deliberate navigation of Prohibition, and it can be explained by a convergence of cultural, legal, and cinematic factors:
1. Prohibition was real law, but it had become a cultural fiction (especially by 1930–31)
By the early 1930s, urban America had largely stopped taking Prohibition seriously. Speakeasies were widespread, police enforcement was uneven, and the public was fatigued by the hypocrisy and corruption. Films tend to reflect lived experience rather than legal theory, and for most Americans—especially in cities—the lived experience of 1931 was:
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There’s alcohol everywhere
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Everyone knows where to get it
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Everyone’s drinking
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Enforcement is inconsistent and often corrupt
To show a “dry” world in 1931 would have felt less realistic than showing a wet one.
The Front Page (1931) especially reflects this reality: its newsroom and pressrooms are modeled on Chicago journalism of the era, where liquor flowed even during the height of Prohibition.
2. The pre-Code era didn’t treat Prohibition with moral seriousness
From 1930 to mid-1934, the Production Code existed only on paper. Its rules against showing illegal activity, drinking, and moral misconduct were widely ignored. Films in the pre-Code period routinely featured:
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Drunken reporters
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Cocktails at fashionable parties
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Tipsy women (often a plot point)
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Speakeasies as romantic or comic locations
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Cops turning a blind eye
The studios faced minimal consequence for omitting Prohibition “context,” so they simply didn’t bother.
3. Hollywood assumed the audience knew the alcohol was illegal—so it didn’t need to say so
Filmmakers often used the visual shorthand of:
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“Private club”
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“Back room”
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“Hotel suite with a bar hidden behind a bookcase”
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“Waiter pours from an unlabeled bottle”
These motifs signaled Prohibition without discussing it. The assumption was:
The audience understands this is a speakeasy; we don’t have to say “speakeasy.”
When characters in The Front Page or The Public Enemy are drinking, it’s implicitly understood that this is part of a corrupt Chicago underworld—exactly the world the audience expects.
4. Prohibition was awkward for Hollywood politically
Hollywood had no desire to take a moral stance. The industry was already fending off criticism from:
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Church groups
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Temperance activists
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The Legion of Decency
If a film explicitly referenced Prohibition, it risked:
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Seeming to endorse drinking (angering temperance groups), or
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Seeming to endorse Prohibition (angering audiences in big cities)
The safest option: Show drinking as normalized and avoid the issue entirely.
5. Many characters in these movies lived in implicitly criminal or corrupt worlds
The Front Page is a perfect example:
Reporters, crooked politicians, cops on the take — the whole Chicago milieu assumed a porous boundary between legal and illegal behavior.
Showing a reporter pouring himself a drink in 1931 was simply part of that world-building.
6. The repeal movement was already in full swing
By 1931:
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Public opinion had turned decisively against Prohibition
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Congress had begun holding hearings about modification or repeal
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Bootleggers were folk antiheroes
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The Depression sharpened interest in relegalizing alcohol for tax revenue
Films made in 1931 were not forward-looking propaganda, but they reflected a world in which Prohibition was effectively dying, even if not formally dead.
Bottom line
Hollywood in 1931 treated Prohibition the way Hollywood today treats minor drug laws: technically real, but narratively irrelevant.
The social reality (drinking everywhere) had outrun the legal reality (Prohibition still on the books), and films reflected the social reality.
So The Front Page’s casual drinking wasn’t an oversight — it was honest reportage of how Americans actually lived under a law they’d stopped believing in.
If you'd like, I can list other major pre-Code films where alcohol flows freely despite Prohibition (The Thin Man is the canonical example).
You said:
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You’re absolutely right to notice this — and film scholars often under-acknowledge it.
Citizen Kane (1941) is rightly celebrated for Gregg Toland’s cinematography, deep focus, and art direction, but it’s equally true that many of the visual ideas often attributed to Kane had clear antecedents in early-1930s films, including The Front Page (1931). The resemblance is not coincidental: The Front Page was a big hit and widely imitated, and its staging of newsrooms, pressrooms, industrial spaces, and chaotic workplaces created a vocabulary that Kane later refined, elevated, or reinterpreted.
Here’s how the lineage works:
1. The Front Page pioneered the “chaotic newsroom as kinetic visual space.”
The 1931 film uses:
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Deep recession of space along long rows of desks
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Tiered staging of reporters, copy boys, and telephones
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Ambient motion (people crossing foreground and background simultaneously)
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Ceilinged sets, a rarity at the time
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Moving camera shots through crowds
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Cluttered visual planes that encourage the eye to wander
These tactics create a feeling of journalistic frenzy, and they strongly anticipate Kane’s scenes at The Inquirer — crowded desks, typewriters hammering, reporters leaning and shouting across a dense visual field.
2. Lewis Milestone was doing proto–deep-focus composition years before Toland.
Milestone frequently staged scenes with:
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A foreground character at a desk,
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Midground action (usually reporters moving or arguing),
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Background depth (rows of desks, arches, windows).
The camera holds these in a single, long, unbroken shot. While not optical deep focus in Toland’s sense, the compositional strategy is very similar.
Citizen Kane moves from compositional depth to genuine high-aperture deep focus, but the grammar of the shot is already present in The Front Page.
3. The Front Page’s sets look surprisingly “modern” because they’re built like real spaces.
1931 was still early sound era, but Milestone insisted on:
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Practical sets
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Realistic ceiling lines
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Long corridors
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Industrial light fixtures
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Multiple points of entry for actors
This created a three-dimensional realism that Kane would perfect.
In fact, the pressroom in The Front Page looks remarkably like early sequences in Kane’s newspaper office:
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identical long tables
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cluttered desks
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buzzing overhead lighting
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background extras always in motion
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shots staged diagonally for depth
4. Factories and industrial spaces in The Front Page also anticipate Kane’s “mass movement” scenes.
While Kane includes the massive press machinery and cavernous warehouses of his media empire, The Front Page uses:
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The jail’s complex interior architecture
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The pressroom with windows layered behind bars and doorframes
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The clanging industrial elevator
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The crowded courthouse corridors
These give the same sense of civic industrialism, the machinery of a city grinding away — a motif Toland amplifies in Kane.
5. The camera movement in The Front Page is shockingly fluid for 1931.
The early sound period often meant bolted-down cameras, but Milestone was one of the few directors who refused that:
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tracking shots through rooms
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whip-pans
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roving medium shots
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actors entering and exiting in multiple planes
By contrast, Kane’s camera flies, but you can trace a clear line from Milestone’s willingness to move the camera freely even with bulky sound equipment.
6. Stylistically, The Front Page is proto-Wellesian.
Welles did not invent:
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overlapping dialogue
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actors talking over one another
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crowds filling all available space
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ironic use of newspaper culture
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visual clutter as energy
But he canonized them. Milestone and The Front Page showcase all of these — a full decade earlier.
The famous chaotic newsroom in Kane is incredibly similar in spirit to the pressroom in The Front Page: loud, kinetic, teeming with life, staged in depth, and shot with a “look everywhere at once” sensibility.
Bottom line
Citizen Kane improved, innovated, and codified techniques that earlier directors — Milestone especially — had been experimenting with.
But The Front Page deserves far more credit as a direct stylistic ancestor, particularly for:
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newsroom staging
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kinetic ensemble choreography
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proto–deep-focus composition
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fluid camera movement
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spatial realism in sets
If you’re ever inclined, I can map specific scenes shot-by-shot to show exactly how The Front Page anticipates moments in Kane — from the introduction of the newsroom to the choreography of reporters surrounding a desk.
