Norma Shearer was bored. It was 1929 and the actress had just wrapped up Their Own Desire, playing a predictable good girl. She always played the good girl, but now she craved something more nuanced. Her husband Irving Thalberg, MGM’s production head, had just bought the rights to a provocative novel. The film adaptation, The Divorcee, was about a woman who finds out her husband is cheating and decides to respond in kind, embarking on a life of sexual adventure. When Shearer suggested she play the role, her husband laughed at her. She climbed into her yellow Rolls Royce with her negligee and boudoir furniture and headed to a photography studio. “Can you turn me into a siren?” she asked the photographer. The pictures won her the part, and the role proved to be highly controversial. A woman who slept with someone beside her husband portrayed as a heroine was unheard of. The film’s poster read, “If the world permits the husband to philander — why not the wife?”

Americans were shocked. Bedroom equality was not an idea condoned by “polite company.” The film was supposed to be provocative — and it provoked one person in particular. Joseph Breen was a pro-censorship staunch Catholic and the following year he would score a powerful role in Hollywood, targeting actresses like Greta Garbo and Shearer exactly because they sought to dispel stereotypes with daring, new roles. Breen liked the trope of the virginal woman and he wanted to make sure that she was the only heroine Americans saw.

Between 1929 and 1934, some of the most progressive Hollywood films were made. The roaring twenties had transformed the screen, reinforcing and compounding delightfully experimental attitudes toward gender and sex in real life. Family values, prudishness, religion, and gender stereotypes were out — refreshingly radical and sexually liberated women were in. But like Siamese twins, cultural shifts come paired with their correlative conservative backlash.

In Design for Living (1933), the heroine had two lovers and chose to keep them both. Torch Singer (1933) featured an unwed mother, while Men in White (1934) touched on illegal abortions. In Queen Christina (1933), Greta Garbo played a cross-dressing bisexual monarch. Film critic Mike LaSalle said of the movie, “It’s one of the best examinations of sexual identity, and it’s one of the most humane films that Hollywood ever made.” Murder at the Vanities (1934) had the heroine crooning an ode to marijuana. (Though the star of the show, Kitty Carlisle Hart, turned out to be less savvy than the character she was playing, mistakenly thinking marijuana was “some kind of a Mexican musical instrument.”) Female (1933) featured a tough, free-loving female auto magnate. In total, these films give the impression of enlightened and liberated people earnestly exploring cultural orthodoxy — and having a whole lot of fun while doing it. Women were not any one thing, these films argued, and nothing was beyond scrutiny in this brave new century.

Hollywood movies were, in theory, meant to adhere to the Hays code, a list of “do’s and don’ts” developed in 1930 for what was acceptable in cinema. But these were treated as suggestions and widely ignored. In response to the flouting of the code, the Catholic church issued a slew of condemnations. The Legion of Decency, a Catholic organization that effectively alerted parishioners as to whether they were allowed to see a movie, singled out Norma Shearer: “We advise strong guard over all pictures which feature Norma Shearer,” an announcement read. The archbishop of Philadelphia told worshipers that the film industry was “promoting a sex mania in our land,” and instructed Catholics not to go to the movies under pain of mortal sin, until instructed otherwise.