Censorship put an end to such provocative potboilers as “Baby Face” but ushered in comedies like “The Thin Man.” Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source: Everett (Photographs)

In “Baby Face” (1933), one of the most pungent movies ever made in Hollywood, Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily, a young woman raised in a speakeasy next to a Pennsylvania steel mill. Her father pimps her out to workers and local pols, but she fights off the men who want her—though not, we are given to understand, all of them. The point is that she chooses. The performance is classic early Stanwyck: the slouching walk, the acetylene voice, the eyes that lock onto a man in contempt and then soften at will into mock-desire. Lily is a near-slattern looking to find her pride. In town, a German cobbler, who reads Nietzsche in his spare time, scolds her for lacking the “will to power.” He tells her, “You have power over men. . . . Use men to get the things you want.”

So Lily goes to New York, gets a job at a large midtown bank, and immediately begins sleeping her way to the top. (Literally: in between short scenes of seduction, the camera tilts up the outside of the bank building, as she ascends from the personnel department to filing and on to mortgages.) After two of her lovers wind up dead, she nabs the bank founder’s grandson (George Brent), and attains jewelry, furs, Paris, a maid, and a chauffeured car. When he gets in trouble at his company, she refuses to sell her jewels to save him. Stanwyck, her blond hair ironed flat, sets her lower lip in defiance, and says, “I can’t do it. I’ve got to think of myself. I’ve gone through a lot to get those things.” In the end, however, Lily redeems herself, keeps her man, and emerges if not rich then, at least, happy.

That’s the original conclusion of “Baby Face,” which appears in the restored version of the film. But, in 1933, after censors banned the movie in several big cities, Warner Bros., which produced it, did some quick reshooting and forced a punitive ending on Lily, in which she loses everything. At the same time, the studio left the movie’s general aura of corruption—sex for favors and much else—intact. The picture hovers between a celebration of a woman’s will and a dirty joke. Are the attitudes in “Baby Face” realistic or merely cynical? Perhaps they’re both.

According to the film historian Thomas Doherty, in his excellent “Pre-Code Hollywood” (1999), the rushed changes to a finished film helped persuade Hollywood that it might have to think seriously about censorship. In the early nineteen-thirties, “Baby Face” was hardly the only picture to create a scandal. There were other films devoted to “bad girls,” such as “Red-Headed Woman,” in which Jean Harlow, working with a script by Anita Loos, starred as an unstoppable and unpunished home-wrecker; and “The Story of Temple Drake,” from the Faulkner novel “Sanctuary,” in which a Southern belle (a sensational Miriam Hopkins) lives with a gangster for a while before returning to respectability. Then, there were Mae West’s happily lewd provocations “I’m No Angel” and “She Done Him Wrong,” in which she looks men up and down, takes her choice, and turns sex into an ever-ripening insinuation. Marlene Dietrich, in the movies she made with the director Josef von Sternberg and the screenwriter Jules Furthman, especially “Blonde Venus,” accepts some of the men who hurl themselves at her and discards others. Dietrich’s beauty was masked in careless insolence. “Morality,” in any ordinary sense of the word, didn’t apply to her.

These movies, with their sardonic bluntness and their suggestive dialogue, were made in pre-Code Hollywood, the brief, giddy period that lasted from 1930 to 1934. The phrase is actually a misnomer: there were local censors, in states and cities, almost from the beginning of the movies, and a set of moral standards, promoted by film executives, had existed since 1922. In the early thirties, however, conventional notions of female virtue were brushed aside by box-office hunger. What, besides greed, explains the flagrancies of the period? Sound had arrived in 1927, and, after a couple of awkward years, the film image, at first pinioned by the microphone, broke gloriously free. Suddenly, audiences were engulfed by audible moving pictures, enchanted by a rush of city voices and city sounds, including gunfire, tapping feet, and tapping keys. In movies, the Roaring Twenties made the most noise in the early thirties. Newspaper comedies were among the popular genres, and also gangster movies (“Scarface,” “The Public Enemy”), musicals (“42nd Street,” “Love Me Tonight”), horror and “exploration” films (“Dracula” and the racist, semi-nude “Tarzan” series), and turbulent melodramas (“Three on a Match,” “Rain”).

Many of these films are vital, tough, and likable. But it’s the pre-Code movies about women that are the most remarkable now, in part because their sexual attitudes don’t fit into any obvious political or moral pattern. Feminist film critics have embraced the period for its self-determined women and its eager acknowledgment of female sexuality. Yet these freedoms didn’t always work out so well for women. The atmosphere of the movies could be crude. There’s an unmistakably sour element of male mockery in the portrait of Lily’s opportunism in “Baby Face.” (The original poster described it as a “man-to-man story of a man-to-man girl.”) For good and for ill, the Mae West classics are redolent of the whiskey-and-tobacco-juice reek of nineteenth-century saloons. For every movie like “Red Dust” (1932), in which Harlow and Clark Gable tussled in the steaming M-G-M jungle—moments of what you might call healthy open sex—there were many films that were merely naughty or mildly voyeuristic.

The pre-Code cinema was full of women undressing, in negligees, or “scantily clad,” like the chorines in “Gold Diggers of 1933,” lined up for one of Busby Berkeley’s geometrical dance numbers. In the “Gold Diggers” movies (they were a series), penniless young women, with a sigh, seek their fortune among the tuxedoed gents who prowl the back stages of Broadway, and a few of them find love with the sappy, stagestruck juvenile Dick Powell. The mercenary sex in these Depression-era movies comes off as both a survivalist tactic and a repeated joke. Claudette Colbert was one of the most appealing people ever to become a movie star, but, sitting naked in bubbling asses’ milk in “The Sign of the Cross” (1932), Cecil B. DeMille’s ludicrous Christian morality play of the Roman era, she’s trapped by the director’s hypocritical lasciviousness.

The studios went after the box office in the most direct way. But, after 1934, when censorship seriously came into effect, more imaginative people made better movies and still scored at the box office. Censorship can cripple, inhibit, and destroy, but, in forcing artists to invent, it can liberate, too. Now that it scarcely exists, we can see that we may have lost as much as we’ve won.

The movie-censorship story is one of starts and stops, halfhearted attempts, and a public caught between Victorian standards and an eager desire to see the forbidden. In “The Kiss,” a twenty-second film from 1896, the Broadway team of John C. Rice and May Irwin re-created, in closeup, the amorous conclusion to a play that they had recently starred in. Rice throws his head back, smoothes his mustache, clasps Irwin’s face, and plants his lips on hers. A critic of the time wrote that “the spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear. When only life-sized, it was pronounced beastly. Magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over, it is absolutely disgusting.” No less a sexual prophet than D. H. Lawrence, writing more than thirty years later, was shocked by couples kissing on the big screen, which he thought “pornographical,” and likely to “excite men and woman to secret and separate masturbation.”

“I just called to say I love you, but come to think of it—can I borrow some money?” Facebook

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During the past hundred years or so, what audiences will accept—and what they want—in sexual representation has moved in a more or less continuous line of increased explicitness, with each new liberty seeming to push the earlier prohibitions back into the moral infancy of American society. Today, much of the sexual imagery that alarmed the censors seems trivial, the alarm itself near-hysterical. A recent book on movie censorship, Jeremy Geltzer’s “Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures” (University of Texas), is mainly devoted to the many cases of prohibition, large and small, and the very slow but steady expansion of legal protections for the film industry. Geltzer, a movie-loving lawyer, has written what is, in effect, a guide to the moral presumptions of those who felt emboldened to speak for the movie audience.