Pre-Code sex films

However, these movies generated a furious reaction from civic leaders, especially outside major cities, and the accompanying scandals that engulfed the nascent industry led to the creation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America trade association in 1922.

As a result, several independent producers, including some of those who made "sex hygiene" films contributed to the emergence of a new type of motion picture, featuring highly melodramatic stories that included nudity, drug use, violence and even thinly-veiled sexual intercourse under the guise of presenting "documents" on moral and social issues that major studios were tacitly forbidden to touch directly.

By the spring of 1930, exploitation films, until then mostly ignored by the industry (to the point trade publications plainly omitted the box-office takings of "sex" pictures), gained unexpected prominence with Unguarded Girls reaching a "de luxe" Broadway house (the Earl Carroll Theatre prior to renovations).

Ingagi, a bogus documentary featuring the presence of naked women and "the sex lives of gorillas", became a rousing success thanks to its massive advertising campaign.

It generally debuted in or near the top of the box-office tallies in spite of often being released in low-class theaters, as the MPPDA forbade movie houses operated by member studios from showing the film owing to its allegations of fakery and indecency.

A brief vogue of crime films flooded movie screens beginning in the fall of 1930, but waned by the 1931–32 season as public outcry over the portrayal of criminals increased.

[14] A commonly repeated theme by those supporting censorship, and one mentioned in the code itself,[15] was the notion that film was a medium that greatly appealed to the masses and thus needed to be regulated.

Women who make up the bulk of the picture audiences are also the majority reader of the tabloids, scandal sheets, flashy magazines, and erotic books ... the mind of the average man seems wholesome in comparison ... Women love dirt, nothing shocks 'em.Pre-code female audiences liked to delight in the carnal lifestyles of mistresses and adulteresses as well as being gratified by their usually inevitable downfall in the closing scenes of the picture.

[18] And while gangster pictures were claimed to corrupt the morals of young boys, vice films were blamed for threatening the purity of adolescent women.

"[22] In Madam Satan (1930) adultery is explicitly condoned and is a sign for a wife that she needs to act in a more enticing way to maintain her husband's interest.

During the Great Depression, relations between spouses often deteriorated due to financial strain, marriages lessened, and husbands abandoned their families in increased numbers.

[19] One of the most prominent examples of punishment for immoral transgressions in a vice film was The Story of Temple Drake (1933), where a promiscuous woman is raped and forced into prostitution.

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.

[30] Jean Harlow, an actress who was by all reports a lighthearted, kind person off the screen, frequently played bad girl characters and dubbed them "sex vultures".

"[34][35] Similarly, in Baby Face Barbara Stanwyck is an abused runaway determined to use sex to advance herself financially[36] and sleeps her way to the top of Gotham Trust.

Men are driven mad with lust over her and they commit murder, attempt suicide, and are ruined financially for associating with her before she mends her ways in the final reel.

[39] Cinema classified as "fallen woman" films was often inspired by real-life hardships women endured in the early Depression era workplace.

[40] Homosexuals were portrayed in several Pre-Code films such as Call Her Savage, Our Betters, Footlight Parade, Only Yesterday, Sailor's Luck, Sunny Skies, and Cavalcade.

[44] Bisexual actress Marlene Dietrich cultivated a cross-gender fan base and started a trend when she began wearing men's suits, a style well ahead of its time in the 1930s.

This 1932 promotional photo of Joan Blondell was later banned under the then unenforceable Motion Picture Production Code .
The Kiss (1896) was the first kiss on film from the Edison Studios of Thomas A. Edison , filmed in the first movie studio in the United States, which drew the general outrage of movie goers, civic leaders, and religious leaders, as utterly shocking, obscene and completely immoral.
Publicity photos like this ( Ina Claire in a publicity still for the 1932 film The Greeks Had a Word for Them ), with a woman lying down, posing rapturously, provoked outrage among civic leaders.
Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face (1933). Movies in the pre-code era were frequently portrayed as lurid during their marketing campaigns. In Baby Face Stanwyck sleeps her way up the corporate ladder of a New York bank.
Jean Harlow was described in the Encyclopedia of Hollywood as "the reigning sex symbol of the 1930s." [ 20 ] Harlow was propelled to stardom in pre-code films such as Platinum Blonde , Red Dust and Red-Headed Woman .
Marlene Dietrich , who was openly bisexual, wore men's clothes in public. In a society still markedly against homosexuality and crossdressing, this caused quite an uproar. In 1933 her studio, Paramount, signed a largely ineffectual document stating that they would not allow women in men's clothes to appear in their films to both quell the backlash and generate some publicity. [ 28 ]