Pre-Code Hollywood: The Four Years American Movies Ran Wild

In the spring of 1933, Paramount Pictures was days from collapse. The studio had fallen into receivership, its theater chain hemorrhaging cash as the Depression emptied box offices across the country. Then a former vaudeville star approaching forty, whom Paramount had signed only the year before, sashayed onto the screen in a picture called She Done Him Wrong, looked a young Cary Grant up and down, and purred an invitation that would outlive them both. Mae West did not save the movies single-handedly. But her films made so much money, so fast, that they are widely credited with pulling Paramount back from the brink. The lesson Hollywood took from her success was blunt and dangerous: in hard times, sex sells tickets.

This is the strange, brief window historians call Pre-Code Hollywood, roughly 1930 to the middle of 1934. The talkies had arrived only a few years earlier, and with sound the screen had suddenly found its voice, wisecracking, seductive, cynical. What almost no one remembers is that a moral code already existed on paper for the entire stretch. It simply was not enforced. For four extraordinary years, American movies said and showed things they would not be permitted to again until the late 1960s.

Sin sells

The Depression is the engine of the whole story. With a quarter of the workforce out of a job and studios teetering, the men who ran Hollywood reached for whatever filled seats. Gangsters, kept women, chorus girls on the make, and killers with machine guns proved reliably profitable. Warner Bros. built a house style out of it. Little Caesar (1931) made a star of Edward G. Robinson; The Public Enemy, the same year, made one of James Cagney, and gave the era its most notorious breakfast when Cagney mashed half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face. Over at the independent shop of eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, Howard Hawks directed Scarface (1932), a portrait of a Capone-like thug so violent that censors held up its release for the better part of a year and forced a moralizing subtitle onto it before it could open.

The women were, if anything, more transgressive. In Red-Headed Woman (1932), Jean Harlow played a homewrecker who sleeps her way upward and, scandalously, is never punished for it, ending the film rich and content. Barbara Stanwyck's Baby Face (1933) followed the same amoral arc even more nakedly: a speakeasy girl who beds her way up the floors of a Manhattan bank, the camera tilting up the building's exterior with each conquest. Cecil B. DeMille, ever the showman, wrapped his religious epic The Sign of the Cross (1932) around a scene of Claudette Colbert bathing in what was described as asses' milk, piety as a delivery system for spectacle. And Mae West wrote her own double entendres so deftly that she could smuggle almost anything past a distracted censor.

"Why don't you come up sometime and see me?"

That line, from She Done Him Wrong, became so famous it entered the language slightly rewritten. West's genius was innuendo: she rarely said anything you could point to, which made her impossible to cut and irresistible to audiences. It also made her, in the eyes of a gathering opposition, public enemy number one.

The backlash gathers

Here is the wrinkle that surprises people. The Production Code was not written in 1934. It was written in 1930, by a Catholic layman and trade publisher named Martin Quigley and a Jesuit priest, Father Daniel Lord, and it was formally adopted by the studios that same year. The industry's public guardian, Will H. Hays, a former Postmaster General hired back in 1922 to clean up Hollywood's image after a string of scandals, had lent the Code his name and his blessing. But the document had no teeth. Studios treated it as a suggestion, negotiating cuts film by film while the profits from sin kept rolling in.

Outrage built slowly, then all at once. Women's clubs, Protestant reformers, and above all the Catholic Church grew furious at what their congregations were watching. In 1933 the American bishops moved to organize what became the Legion of Decency, which rated films and, crucially, could mobilize millions of Catholics to boycott any picture, or any theater, it condemned. That was a threat the studios could count in dollars. A raunchy, now-lost 1933 comedy called Convention City, about businessmen misbehaving at a hotel gathering, became a byword for how far things had gone. The mood inside the industry shifted from defiance to fear.

The seal comes down

In July 1934, the studios blinked. They handed real enforcement power to a new body, the Production Code Administration, and put it under a tough, devout Catholic named Joseph Breen. From that point on, no member studio could release a film in America without a PCA seal of approval, and releasing one without it carried a heavy fine. Breen read every script before shooting and every finished picture before release. A married couple could not share a bed on screen. Crime could never pay. Adultery could not be presented as attractive, or go unpunished. Even the running time of a kiss was policed.

The change was immediate and total. Mae West's scripts came back from Breen's office gutted; her career never recovered its early wattage. Baby Face and its sisters vanished from circulation, some not seen in their original form for decades. Filmmakers who wanted to talk about sex, and the best of them always did, had to learn a new grammar of suggestion: the closed door, the fade to black, the cut to crashing waves. It is no accident that the screwball comedy flowered in exactly these years. Denied explicitness, writers like the ones behind It Happened One Night, which swept the Oscars for 1934, poured all that pent-up sexual energy into banter, timing, and a blanket strung across a motel room.

The Code Breen enforced would govern what Americans could see at the movies for the next three decades, not loosening until the ratings system replaced it in 1968. What came next was the era we now call Hollywood's Golden Age, the great machine of the studio system operating at full glamour and confidence, its stars luminous, its stories impeccably controlled. It produced some of the most beloved films ever made. But it did so inside a cage that the wild, frank, unrepeatable years of 1930 to 1934 had built, in the very act of provoking someone, at last, to slam the door.