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By Kimberly Martin

"If motion pictures consistently hold up for admiration high types of characters and present stories that will affect lives for the better, they can become the most powerful force for the improvement of mankind. . . . No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin." -- Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code)

"I'm in an orgy, wallowing. And I love it!" -- Norma Shearer in Strangers May Kiss (1931)

Between 1930 and 1934, the United States found itself crippled by the Great Depression, and Hollywood also found itself strapped for cash when breadlines started stretching longer than box-office lines. The novelty of talkies had worn off faster than a falling stockbroker, and years of lurid scandals only added to Tinseltown's troubles, forcing major studios to (at least pretend to) censor its sinfulness by passing the Motion Picture Production Code (commonly known as the Hays Code) in 1930.

It didn't take long for movie producers to figure out how to keep the cash flowing in the Depression's darkest days. Hollywood said to hell with the Code and, for four glorious years, raised the "spirits" of the public and kept 'em "coming" back for more by filling reel after reel with so much gratuitous sex, nudity, and violence that Will H. Hays finally said enough in 1934 and replaced Mae West with Shirley Temple seemingly overnight.

It's hard to believe that movies like Merrily We Go to Hell (1932), Madam Satan (1930) (featuring an orgiastic party upon a zeppelin complete with wife swapping, bootleg booze, and half-naked girls being "sold" in a mock slave auction), Hips, Hips, Hooray! (1934) (with naked chorus girls bobbing in and out of glass-sided bathtubs), and The Story of Temple Drake (1933) (where the title character is raped, finds she likes it, then goes to work in a brothel) were ever made in the first place, much less by mainstream Hollywood. And these are just the tip of the iceberg!

Unlike the flesh-filled B-movies of the '50s and '60s, Pre-Codes were "A" movies, put out by major studios, featuring astronomical stars like Joan Crawford (Picture: 1 - 2), Jean Harlow (Picture: 1 - 2), Norma Shearer (Picture: 1), and even Clara Bow. Most of this stuff wouldn't even be made today--it would be the modern equivalent of putting Gwyneth Paltrow in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Or having a chain-smoking, booze-and-smack-addicted Julia Roberts swept away by a Tommy Gun-toting Richard Gere. Or a gangland Ghost in which dead drug dealer Patrick Swayze enlists the help of the devil (Whoopi Goldberg) to re-unite him with his moll (Demi Moore) in hell.


SONG & DANCE

Musical extravaganzas were the perfect Pre-Code place to put a plethora of pert puppies on display, usually via semi- or fully-nude chorus girls. Busby Berkeley loved 'em, as can be seen in his fabulous flesh feasts 42nd Street (1933) and Fashions of 1934 (1934). 1934 also brought one of the strangest cinematic musical numbers of all time, "Sweet Marihuana", to the screen in Murder at the Vanities. A group of topless back-up dancers accompany this loving ode to devil weed as the murder victim's blood drips onto the girls from the rafters. And speaking of the devil, just three years earlier The Devil's Cabaret (1931) crammed enough deviousness for three films into its sixteen minutes, and in two-strip Technicolor to boot! Satan persuades a crowd of people to willingly go to Hades by entertaining them in his very own nightclub, complete with scantily clad, horn-wearing, singing-and-dancing girls who run gleeful circles around a giant, illuminated devil's head as it emerges from the stage.

Dancing raised "eyebrows" in non-musical films as well, such as Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), in which then-jazz-baby Joan Crawford hosts a lingerie party on a yacht where everyone walks around in their underwear, and The Sign of the Cross (1932), controversial for its Sapphic girl-on-girl seduction dance in which a pagan priestess attempts to tempt a Christian slave girl.


BIG STARS AS BAD GIRLS

Fallen women, kept women, prostitutes, and sex-hungry females of all sorts scorched the screen--and got away with it--throughout the Pre-Code era.

S&M-loving Jean Harlow seduces her boss to get ahead, shoots her husband, and, in the end, laughs her way to the race track with her chauffeur in Red-Headed Woman (1932). In Female (1933), Ruth Chatterton doesn't have to sleep her way to the top after she inherits an automobile factory from her father--she makes her male employees do it instead, by earning their bonuses in her bedroom.

Sexually ambiguous Marlene Dietrich (Picture: 1) ditches her tux and shows more tail as a man-eating cabaret performer in The Blue Angel (1930) and a globe-trotting prostitute in Blonde Venus (1932). Norma Shearer also throws clothes and morality to the wind in The Divorcee (1930) and Strangers May Kiss (1931). In Faithless (1932), notorious lush Tallulah Bankhead goes broke and starts selling her "ass"-ets to buy medicine for her ailing husband. Barbara Stanwyck got in on more Pre-Code action than them all, playing an anti-marriage, free-loving good-time gal in Illicit (1931), a woman in prison in the heavily lesbian-themed Ladies They Talk About (1933), and an ambitious whore in Baby Face (1933) who starts out turning tricks in her father's speakeasy/brothel and subsequently does anything (and everyone) to get ahead in New York City.

Unbelievably, the Silent Screen's baddest girl, Clara Bow, got even badder in her 1932 talkie Call Her Savage. She has sex with men of other races (a half-breed Indian named Moonglow, whom she also works up with whippings), other women's men, other men for money, and even simulates sex with a Great Dane! All the while with visibly erect nipples as she wears see-through clothing with no bra underneath. Her behavior is explained away as the result of her own Indian blood, hence the film's title.


BEASTS AND JUNGLE HEAT

To round out the roundup, other major films of the early '30s also pushed the bestiality envelope or otherwise tested the boundaries of "natural". Fay Wray gets most of her clothes ripped off by a finger-sniffing ape in King Kong (1933), and Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) and Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan (Picture: 1)) get primitive in Tarzan and His Mate (1934). Jane's non-wedded "mate" rips her dress off in mid-air as he tosses her into a lagoon. The pair then shares an eye-popping skinny-dipping scene, which was cut for many years due to its full-rear and frontal nudity.

The scenes were restored in 1991 by the Turner Entertainment Corporation for the film's MGM-UA Home Video release. Many Pre-Codes can currently be found in all their uncut glory on video or cable.


For further reading:

Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood by Mark A. Vieira

Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 by Thomas Doherty

Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood by Mick Lasalle