If there was ever any doubt that movie studios in the pre-Code era were fully aware of the financial perks of naughtiness, films like Parachute Jumper and Call Me Savage (both 1932), with their laundry lists of violations of the Production Code, put those doubts to rest. Scandal sold so well that even otherwise innocuous dramas ensured a little titillation was included. These spicy bits, however, had to be set apart from the rest of the film so they could be removed by state censorship boards without damaging the plot.

This lead to some rather forced risque moments, such as in the low-budget 1930 talkie The Fall Guy. Hardly offensive on any level for the first act, the film is suddenly interrupted by a bizarre scene where Ned Sparks drawls out a rude word -- twice! -- and for no reason except the studio wanted to include a little bawdy language.

During the silent and pre-Code eras, studios had, in theory, free reign over the subject matter of their films. In practice, they were often hampered by censorship boards and an outspoken minority segment of the public that believed Hollywood was peddling immorality; these were people who always knew movies were no good, the scandals of the 1920s just proved it. Their complaints were compounded by the spectre of government censorship, raised in 1915 when the Supreme Court ruled that freedom of speech did not apply to films.

In an attempt to avoid forced censorship and appease the public, Hollywood film studios created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1922, and hired Will H. Hays as president of the organization. Intended more as a public relations tactic than an actual attempt at self-regulation, studios repeatedly ignored Hays' attempts to achieve some type of code of standards for films; though studios adopted Hays' Production Code in early 1930, filmmakers cheerfully ignored it for years.

Ignored, that is, until offending films were prevented from release. Though studios had final cut, it was not uncommon for a script or even a finished movie to be rejected by a handful of state censorship boards or the Hays Office, spurring negotiations between censors and studios that lead to rewrites and reshoots to tone down the content. The Studio Relations Committee founded by Hays in 1927 was meant to enforce standards, but they had no real power beyond attempted negotiations. As a result, much of the problem content was left untouched. Sure, there were plenty who felt movies were indecent, but there were also those pesky studio receipts that proved week after week that salaciousness sold tickets.

Somewhat ironically, the Ned Sparks scene in the middle of The Fall Guy was likely spared the censor's scissors thanks to the banality of the surrounding film. Context was key for a pre-Code film; too much realism, such as in the infamous Scarface (1932), and studios would find it harder to for those moments of naughtiness to pass review. Studios relied on couching strong content in humor, satire and social commentary. The incredible film Our Betters (1933) is one of the best examples of this tactic. A witty, urbane W. Somerset Maugham satire, Our Betters features wealthy society mavens in an escalating series of scandalous behavior that culminates in a pre-Code punchline for the ages, and gets away with it all by skewering the idle rich, judging them as immoral and useless, a popular tack in the time of the Depression.

The most important weapon in a filmmaker's arsenal during the pre-Code era was the finale, an ending that could be both spectacular and a way to reset the context of the film, turning sins into stepping stones on the path to morality. Studios quickly learned that a proper comeuppance for a troubled protagonist in the final act could, if played just right, allow for at least two acts of sensational debauchery before the piper would have to be paid. This strategy is most obviously deployed in the so-called fallen women films, where the offending female was safely married and tamed by the final frames.

One of the most well-known of the fallen woman films is the Jean Harlow shocker Red-Headed Woman (1932). Concerning Lil (Harlow), a provocative, gold-digging secretary looking to snag the rich young boss' son for herself, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer always intended for the film to be a comedy. Studio head Irving Thalberg knew the MPPDA would never let a film based on the novel pass; as author Katherine Brush once explained, 'I heard a girl at the next table quote another girl as having said, 'Just look at all these diamond bracelets -- and I've only been in New York a year!' So there it was, in sixteen words, and that's the way I wrote it.'

From those sixteen words, Brush crafted an exploration of the few choices a lower-class woman like Lil had if she wanted to become either successful or financially stable. In the film, Lil indulges in many of the same machinations F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby had. Like Gatsby, Lil is determined to become truly upper class, to improve herself and her status beyond simple monetary stability, but once she infiltrates the culture of the rich, learns all too well that money doesn't buy class.

It's no surprise, then, that Fitzgerald was assigned the first adaptation of Red-Headed Woman by the studio. He retained most of Brush's sharp, mature themes, however, and Thalberg was displeased. He sent the screenplay to Anita Loos, who gave the material a much lighter treatment, though only in scattered moments. A breezy pop song may have warbled over the title screen and pre-Code darling Una Merkel may have let loose with a series of wisecracks, yet at the preview, Thalberg and Loos noticed the ending was the only time the audience laughed; if the movie was intended as a comedy, no one seemed to notice. Red-Headed Woman went back to the proverbial drawing board, the studio tacking on two brief scenes to the very beginning, showing Lil sharpening her feminine wiles.


The end result, as generations of filmgoers have discovered, is an intense, even brutal drama book-ended by incongruous comedy. This is especially noticeable in the finale after Lil, having gone from the rich Bill Legendre (Chester Morris) to the even richer Charles Gaerste (Henry Stephenson), loses it all when her affair with chauffeur Albert (Charles Boyer) is revealed. Gaerste kicks her out, forcing her to return to Legendre. After a dramatic showdown, Lil shoots Legendre, but the film immediately cuts to a series of faceless gossips who reassure the audience that Legendre is neither dead nor going to prosecute. The film then fast forwards to France at some indeterminate time in the future, where Legendre stumbles across Lil with a new, rich, elderly husband, a fabulous society life, and Albert still hanging around as 'chauffeur.'

The comedy in this ending derives not just from the fact that Lil got away with everything and still had a boyfriend on the side, but from the heavy implications that the only place a woman like Lil could succeed would be in France. The stereotype of the French as open-minded comes into play, most in the audience old enough to remember the tales of France's libertine ways during the First World War. Despite being wealthy, fluent in French and clearly successful in her machinations, Lil's win is couched in the fact that she cannot succeed in America, but has to go to a land of lax morality; therefore, it's no win at all.

The MPPDA, always on the lookout for transgressions of their moral code, particularly hated gold diggers, the staples of fallen woman films. Though some changes to Red-Headed Woman were made at the MPPDA's request, the film, for the most part, remained intact, the studio sure that the comedy kept Red-Headed Woman from exhibiting a flagrant disregard of morals. Many in the public disagreed. Shocked viewers wrote indignant editorials and local theater owners registered their exasperation, many decrying the Hays Office for not doing its job. Red-Headed Woman became the gold standard by which all other indecent, immoral films would be measured.

It was a reputation that remained unchallenged until the release of the gritty Baby Face in 1933. Shocking even today for its frank depiction of promiscuity, the Baby Face available to the public for over seven decades was actually a tamed-down version. In 2004, an earlier, more complete print of the film was discovered, and though often referred to as 'uncensored,' this version could be more accurately described as 'less censored.' Nearly a decade before this 2004 discovery, Lea Jacobs extensively detailed the many edits to Baby Face in her book The Wages of Sin. After a series of changes made both in the script phase and post-production, what was found in 2004 seems to have been the first final cut, the version presented to the New York State board of censors before it was rejected and shelved in favor of a second, heavily-edited version.

In Baby Face, Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily, a young woman who is degraded and used at the hands of her bootlegger father. When he dies, she and her friend Chico (Theresa Harris) head to the big city in search of a future. Lily takes advantage of her good looks and willing ways, moving from menial jobs at a large bank to higher-paying secretarial work very quickly, and attracting the notice of plenty of men all too happy to help her, though unaware that they are being used.

In comparing the two versions of Baby Face, one immediately notices a difference in tone rather than a difference in kind. Adult themes are presented in both versions via cinematic ellipses, but in later edits, the studio was forced to rely even more heavily on metaphor and implication. A few seconds here, a few frames there, and a line or two in a problematic scene were excised from the original cut, softening the tone and making it easier for audiences to miss the meaning behind over-the-shoulder glances and Lily's promised 'experience.' The most notable revisions, however, seem strange to our modern eyes: removing all references to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In the unreleased version of the film, Lily's trek to New York begins at the behest of elderly friend Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), a German immigrant who uses Nietzsche's Will to Power to teach Lily that she must 'use men, not let them use you.' These mentions of Nietzsche and encouragements to staunch individualism were replaced entirely in the theatrical release of the film, Cragg instead warning Lily to behave herself and not become caught up in the hedonism of the metropolis.

The use of Nietzsche in the original script was a radical thing indeed. The philosopher's Ubermenschen and 'Nietzschean eugenics' appealed to many European Fascists of the early 20th century; the character of Cragg was apparently intended to be as much bad influence as mentor. He was a man who, like his fellow Fascists two decades prior, took snippets of Nietzsche out of context to support his own problematic political beliefs. Lily, then, was not only encouraged by Cragg but being used, the intellectual version of her treatment at the hands of the roughneck crowd at her father's bar.

As noted in Wages of Sin, several censors voiced concerns about the preliminary scripts for Baby Face, the Studio Relations Committee cautioning that the film might be banned in Canadian provinces just as Red-Headed Woman had been. Many objections focused on the use of Nietzsche and drove the studio to turn Cragg into a kindly grandfather figure. Ultimately, this undermined the context by which Warner Bros. meant to frame Lily's fall. If she could be shown as having been lead astray by a self-appointed intellectual with undue influence, it would mitigate many of her sins, just as MGM had hoped comedy would mitigate the sins of the Red-Headed Woman. But Nietzsche was obviously off limits for Baby Face, and once that was removed, her character became far less sympathetic, and an unsympathetic fallen woman was a difficult sell indeed.

In the film, Lily hops from man to man until landing Courtland Trenholm (George Brent), president of Gotham Bank. They marry, but soon the bank fails and Trenholm finds himself indicted and in need of a million dollars, presumably to reimburse account holders. Whether the film originally included details on this indictment is unclear, as even in the less censored cut, the matter is glossed over. Lily has the money, mostly from Trenholm's gifts -- was he skimming from the bank to fund his wife's expensive tastes? -- but she knows that money is the only thing preventing her from going back to being the kind of person who callously used men. 'My life has been bitter and hard,' she explains. 'I'm not like other women.'


It's then that we realize Lily is no garden-variety gold digger. She's a woman who has been through tremendous struggle, trying to make her way in a society that let her down as a young woman and now, as an adult, doesn't offer her many options. She cares for Trenholm, but is too frightened to let her love override her survival instinct. As her shell-shocked face shows, it's an instinct honed to a discrete sharpness by Cragg, his call to ruthlessness harming her more than it harmed those she used along the way.

With the mentions of Nietzsche removed, this scene loses important context. Even worse, it annihilates the impact of the original scripted ending: Trenholm committing suicide after Lily refuses to help him. The scene where Lily finds Trenholm lying shot on the floor was clearly the intended finale, but Warners realized early on that Baby Face could not be released with an ending that let Lily escape with only karmic punishment. By the time the film went to the New York censorship board, a new scene that showed Trenholm survived the attempt had been added, Lily forgoing all riches to save her man. It's an incongruous moment, tonally and aesthetically inconsistent. The script, which had been sharp, direct and clever throughout, is dull and lifeless in this tacked-on bit, and there are noticeable differences in lighting, film stock, and even Stanwyck's wig.

But the tried-and-true pre-Code method of making up for the sins of the first hour with a redemptive finale didn't work this time, and the studio was forced to add yet another scene, a third ending designed to make it perfectly clear that Lily did not gain a single material thing from her scandalous behavior. She and her husband are back in her old hometown, now poor, with Trenholm working in a steel mill. It's only then that Lily's sins were redeemed; when she was safely ensconced in low-income marital bliss, she was finally tamed enough for public consumption... or so the studio thought.

Baby Face created quite a furor on release. Met with popular approval but critical disdain, it was banned in Australia and Switzerland, as well as some Canadian provinces and two U.S. states. Variety declared Baby Face had 'no merit for general or popular appeal,' the Legion of Decency condemned the film, concerned citizen's groups led protests and more pressure was put on U.S. senators and representatives to forcibly prevent studios from releasing films like these.

They nearly got their wish. Just six months after the release of Baby Face, legislation allowing the government to censor films was ready to be introduced to the U.S. Senate. Hollywood, seeing no other alternative, embraced the Code to avoid government involvement. Agreeing to self-regulate based on the rules of the newly-formed Production Code Administration, studios continued to make softer versions of films featuring complicated women, such as Stella Dallas (1937) and Kitty Foyle (1940). Occasionally, this new style of fallen women film would go into bizarre contortions to pass the Code. Take That Certain Woman (1937), a film with an almost identical plot to Stella Dallas and Kitty Foyle, which is resolved after the horrible injury and lingering death of a woman that allows her widow to remarry his first wife and rectify the 'immorality' of a past divorce.

It was a curious state for filmmaking to exist in, one where reality was subsumed under the desires of morality groups who found things like divorce and promiscuity unacceptable, but blessed death and disaster meted out to offending fictional characters. There were many fine films starring women made in the immediate years following adoption of the Production Code, but almost all were tepid versions of what had come before. They were women with modest ambitions now, safely married and only driven to questionable behavior after being done wrong by their husbands. There was a new woman in town, and despite audiences still clamoring for female characters with healthy ambition and adult desires, neither Jean Harlow's Lil nor Barbara Stanwyck's Lily could be shown in theaters again for decades.

When not watching classic movies, Stacia Kissick Jones is writing about them, dreaming about them or complaining about them. Her ruminations are there for all to see at She Blogged by Night.