Pre-Code Hollywood (1930-1934): What Changed When the Code Was Enforced

In Baby Face (1933), Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman who climbs a New York bank’s office tower one floor at a time, using every man she meets as a rung on the ladder. Censors in New York State demanded cuts before release, and the softened version was the one most people saw for the next seventy years. Then, in 2004, an uncut print turned up at the Library of Congress, and audiences finally got to see how far a Warner Bros. programmer could go in 1933. That gap between what was filmed and what was later allowed is the whole story of pre code movies: the roughly four years when Hollywood had a censorship code on paper and very little of it in practice.

A code that nobody enforced

The Motion Picture Production Code was adopted by the industry’s trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, in 1930. Will Hays, the association’s president, had been brought in during the 1920s to clean up Hollywood’s image, and the Code was drafted by Martin Quigley, a Catholic trade-paper publisher, and Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest. Its first general principle stated that no picture should be produced that would lower the moral standards of those who saw it.

The problem was enforcement. The Studio Relations Committee could advise and negotiate, but the producers themselves had the final word on disputes, and box-office pressure in the early Depression pushed them toward sensation. Ticket sales fell sharply after 1930, and studios discovered that sex, crime and scandal sold seats. For four years the Code was mostly a list of suggestions.

What pre-Code films got away with

It would be wrong to imagine the era as a free-for-all; state and city censor boards still cut films, and local cuts varied wildly. But compared with what came after, the early 1930s were remarkably frank on several fronts.

• Women who win by breaking the rules. Stanwyck in Baby Face, Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman (1932), Ruth Chatterton running a car company in Female (1933): heroines whose ambition was not punished in the final reel.
• Gangsters as stars. The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) made criminals charismatic, which alarmed reformers. Scarface was held up and released with the subtitle “Shame of the Nation” and added scenes condemning gangsters.
• Social anger. Warner Bros. in particular turned Depression headlines into films about chain gangs, unemployment and corrupt business, with endings that did not tie everything up.
• Adult comedy. Ernst Lubitsch at Paramount and Mae West’s vehicles built entire films around innuendo and characters who enjoyed themselves without regret.
• Drugs, adultery and ambiguous morals. Characters used narcotics, lived together unmarried, or simply got away with things, in a way that later became nearly impossible.

July 1934: the Code gets teeth

Pressure built through 1933 and 1934 from several directions. The Catholic Legion of Decency, organized in those years, asked millions of Catholics to pledge to avoid objectionable films, and Protestant and civic groups joined the campaign. There was also talk of federal regulation.

The industry responded by creating the Production Code Administration, headed by Joseph Breen. From July 1, 1934, member companies agreed not to distribute or exhibit any film without a PCA certificate of approval, and a film released without one could bring a $25,000 fine. Because the major studios owned the important theater chains, this made the seal effectively mandatory. Breen’s office read scripts before shooting, negotiated changes, and reviewed finished films.

The effects were immediate:

• Crime could not pay, and the audience could not be invited to sympathize with criminals.
• Adultery and sex outside marriage could be implied but had to be punished or regretted.
• Profanity, drug use and a long list of “vulgar” subjects disappeared.
• Clergy, the law and the institution of marriage had to be treated with respect.

Older films were affected too. Studios wanting to reissue early-1930s titles had to submit them for approval, and some were refused or cut. Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) was among those denied reissue approval in the mid-1930s, and it was rarely seen for decades. Some early sound horror films lost lines or moments for later re-release, and restorations have since put much of that material back. It is one reason so many pre-Code films were unfamiliar until television, home video and archive restorations brought them back into circulation.

Ten pre code movies to start with

You will notice how heavily this list leans on Warner Bros. That is not an accident. Warner’s early-1930s output was fast, cheap, topical and frequently in trouble with censors, and the studio’s habit of running features at seventy minutes or less means you can watch two in an evening.

The faces of the era

A handful of performers became so identified with the pre-Code years that their careers changed shape once Breen arrived.

Mae West wrote much of her own material and arrived at Paramount already famous from the stage. She Done Him Wrong (1933, Lowell Sherman), with a young Cary Grant, was nominated for Best Picture and did huge business. After 1934 her scripts were scrutinized line by line, and the double meanings that were her trademark had to be smuggled in far more carefully.

Norma Shearer, MGM’s prestige star, won the Best Actress Oscar for The Divorcee (1930), playing a wife who answers her husband’s infidelity with her own. It is a surprisingly direct film about a double standard that the Code would soon make hard to discuss.

James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson became stars through the gangster cycle, Robinson with Little Caesar (1931, Mervyn LeRoy) and Cagney with The Public Enemy. Warner Bros. kept both busy after 1934, often by moving them to the right side of the law, as in Cagney’s G Men (1935).

How to watch pre-Code films today

A few practical notes from years of catching these at repertory screenings and on classic-film television.

1. Check the version. Several pre-Code titles exist in a censored reissue cut and a restored original. Restoration notes on a disc or broadcast usually say which you are watching.
2. Expect a different rhythm. Early sound films can feel stagey for the first few minutes. By 1932 most studios had loosened up, and the dialogue gets much quicker.
3. Watch for Warren William, Joan Blondell and Lee Tracy. These are the character faces of the period, and once you start recognizing them the era opens up.
4. Remember the attitudes are of their time. Pre-Code frankness extended to racial and ethnic stereotypes that are uncomfortable now. That is part of the historical record too.

Why the era still matters

Pre-Code films are sometimes sold purely as naughty curiosities, which misses their real value. They show Hollywood responding to the Depression in real time, with films about bank failures, unemployment and corrupt institutions made months after the headlines. They also show how good the studio writers and directors already were before the Code forced them into indirection. The wit of later screwball comedy and the moral shadows of film noir both owe something to the generation that learned its craft between 1930 and 1934, and then had to find new ways to say the same things.

For the broader context of how the Code shaped the following three decades, my overview of the golden age of Hollywood picks up where this period ends.