Maniac 1934

Madge Bellamy in White Zombie (1932, Victor Halperin), Jean Rollin’s favorite movie and one he considered to be an “absolute masterpiece”.

Merrily We Go To Hell, 1932, Dorothy Arzner 

“I have good-looking legs so why shouldn’t I show them? And anyway I’m an extremist by nature. When girls are wearing short skirts as they are now I want mine still shorter. Of course, I’m in favor of short skirts or any other kind of a costume which gives me an opportunity to show off my legs.” – Alice White in 1929.

From the “Sweet Marijuana” musical number in Mitchell Leisen’s Murder at the Vanities (1934). 

Joan Blondell has a very pre-Code confrontation with Claire Dodd in Footlight Parade (1933).

Theresa Harris and Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face (1933)

Greta Garbo in Mata Hari (1931). This whole film is like a moving glamour shot.

42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, 1933)

Miriam Hopkins and Claudette Colbert in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the era in the American film industry between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (usually labeled, albeit inaccurately after 1934, as the “Hays Code”) censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers. As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, miscegenation, profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence and homosexuality.

Clara Bow in 1927’s World War 1 film “Wings”

Clara Bow in “Hula”

Susan Hayward

Gilda (1946) dir. Charles Vidor

Katharine Hepburn putting a drunk Ginger Rogers to sleep in Stage Door (1937)