A list of our favorite pre-code talkies, as fresh and irreverent today as they were 90 years ago.
When the stock market crashed in October 1929, half of the banks in America failed, and millions of people found themselves out of work. How did a desperate population cheer itself up? By going to the movies—the early years of the Depression coincided with a magical period in the history of U.S. cinema. These motion pictures, known as “pre-Code” films, were fast-talking, funny, and sometimes, frankly, filthy, flaunting a degree of sexual permissiveness that would not return for decades.
The cinematic hijinks were short-lived. In 1934, a conservative establishment pushed back, instituting a puritanical set of regulations known as the Hays Code, and the wild pre-Code days came to a screeching halt. The new rules prohibited a movie from “lowering the moral standards of those who see it,” and forbade, among other things, depictions of homosexuality, nudity, lustful kissing, and suggestive dancing.
But in the brief window that preceded the prudish Hays Code, Hollywood had so much fun: so much unbridled passion, so much dirty dancing! In our own dark hour, don’t you want to see booze-soaked soirees, faithless spouses, illicit affairs, shameless ladies of the evening, and irresistibly sexy hoodlums? These days, you don’t even need to go to the cinema—you can obey
rules and stream these films straight to your living room. Here, a list of our favorite pre-Code talkies, as fresh and irreverent today as they were 90 years ago.“The public enemy of sweethearts and wives! Yet Science says she’s not to blame!” read the tagline for this steamy 1932 vehicle for Jean Harlow, starring as a stunningly amoral gold digger who manages to employ every dastardly trick in the book to get her man—or should we say “men.
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