page_title: Pre-Code Hollywood
section_title: Content
hierarchical_section_title: Pre-Code Hollywood / Sex films / Content
caption_attribution_description: English: Mae West in "Go West Young Man", a film directed by Henry Hathaway (1936)
context_page_description: Pre-Code Hollywood was the brief era in the American film industry between the widespread adoption of sound in pictures in 1929 and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines, popularly known as the "Hays Code", in mid-1934. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor, and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934, with the establishment of the Production Code Administration. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee and the major studios, and popular opinion, than by strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.
  As a result, some films in the late 1920s and early 1930s depicted or implied sexual innuendo, romantic and sexual relationships between white and black people, mild profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence, and homosexuality. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions.
context_section_description: In pre-Code Hollywood, the sex film became synonymous with women's pictures — Darryl F. Zanuck once told Wingate that he was ordered by Warner Brothers' New York corporate office to reserve 20% of the studio's output for "women's pictures, which inevitably means sex pictures." Vice films typically tacked on endings where the most sin-filled characters were either punished or redeemed. Films explored Code-defying subjects in an unapologetic manner with the premise that an end-reel moment could redeem all that had gone before. The concept of marriage was often tested in films such as The Prodigal (1931), in which a woman is having an affair with a seedy character, and later falls in love with her brother-in-law. When her mother-in-law steps in at the end of the film, it is to encourage one son to grant his wife a divorce so she can marry his brother, with whom she is obviously in love. The older woman proclaims the message of the film in a line near the end: "This the twentieth century. Go out into the world and get what happiness you can."
  In Madame Satan (1930), adultery is explicitly condoned and used as a sign for a wife that she needs to act in a more enticing way to maintain her husband's interest. In Secrets (1933), a husband admits to serial adultery, only this time he repents and the marriage is saved. The films took aim at what was already a damaged institution. During the Great Depression, relations between spouses often deteriorated due to financial strain, marriages lessened, and husbands abandoned their families in increased numbers. Marriage rates continually declined in the early 1930s, finally rising in 1934, the final year of the pre-Code era, and although divorce rates lowered, this is likely because desertion became a more common method of separation. Consequently, female characters, such as Ruth Chatterton's in Female, live promiscuous bachelorette lifestyles, and control their own financial destiny (Chatterton supervises an auto factory) without regret.
  In The Divorcee (1930), starring Norma Shearer, a wife discovers that her husband (played by Chester Morris), has been cheating on her. In reaction, she decides to have an affair with his best friend  (played by Robert Montgomery). When the husband finds out, he decides to leave her. After pleading with him to stay, the wife unleashes her frustrations upon him, and in a moment of inspiration reveals her desire to live a fearless, sexually liberated life without him. According to at least one film historian, this was the motion picture that inspired other films centering upon sophisticated female protagonists, who stayed out late, had affairs, wore revealing gowns, and who basically destroyed the sexual double standard by asserting themselves both within society and in the bedroom. From The Divorcee onward, there developed "a trend toward a sophistication in women's pictures that would continue unabated until the end of the Pre-Code era in mid-1934."
  One of the most prominent examples of punishment for immoral transgressions in vice film can be seen in The Story of Temple Drake, based on the William Faulkner novel Sanctuary. In Drake, the title character (played by Miriam Hopkins), a cold, vapid "party girl", the daughter of a judge, is raped and forced into prostitution by a backwoods character, and according to pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty, the film implies that the deeds done to her are in recompense for her immorality. Later, in court, she confesses that she killed the man who raped and kept her. She faints after this confession, upon which her lawyer carries her out, leading to a "happy ending". In the RKO film Christopher Strong, Katharine Hepburn plays an aviator who becomes pregnant from an affair with a married man. She commits suicide by flying her plane directly upwards until she breaks the world altitude record, at which point she takes off her oxygen mask and plummets to earth. Strong female characters often ended films as "reformed" women, after experiencing situations in which their progressive outlook proved faulty.
  Female protagonist
caption: Mae West is some­times er­ro­ne­ous­ly called the reason for the Production Code.[204]  Even under the Code she managed to wear an almost trans­par­ent dress in Go West, Young Man (1936).
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