What was the last Hollywood movie of the ‘Pre-Code’ era?
Perhaps you’ve heard the term ‘pre-Code’ tossed around a lot in relation to old Hollywood movies and wondered what it means. You might know that it has something to do with censorship and that the Code in question was the Hays Code, but the history is pretty convoluted and imprecise, which makes it a challenging area to summarise.
For starters, the beginning of the pre-Code era is debatable. Some say that it started in the late 1920s, while others say that it actually began when the Code was introduced in 1930 and lasted until the Code was enforced in 1934. Whichever version you ascribe to, the movies that are most emblematic of the era were made in the early ‘30s.
Pre-code films were full of sex, violence, and wanton disregard for the law. Though all of them would be tame by today’s standards, they were markedly more explicit than the movies that came after. Pre-Code films also featured queer characters and romantic relationships between mixed-race couples, two things that became all but illegal once the Code was enforced.
This era in film history coincided with the Great Depression, and many of the films featured powerful messages about the state of the country. Some of them overtly criticised capitalism, while others showed their protagonists resorting to sex work to afford their next meal. Gangsters were often shown in a heroic light, suggesting that they were more morally virtuous than the bankers and politicians who sent the country into a recession.
In June of 1934, the Production Code Administration was created in order to finally enforce all the rules that filmmakers had been flaunting. It stated that every film made after July 1st of that year would require a certificate of approval in order to be released, which tipped the calendar over from the pre-Code era to the era in which the Hays Code reigned supreme.
It’s hard to pinpoint the last film to make it into theatres without a certificate, but an overview of some of the last ones gives a pretty good idea of the things that the Code sought to ban. Roy William Neil’s Black Moon was released on June 15th and was a horror movie about a white woman who returns to her hometown in Jamaica. It’s pretty gory by Old Hollywood standards and is, by modern standards, grotesquely racist.
Born to be Bad was a classic melodrama starring Loretta Young and Cary Grant (yes, that one) and featured a soon-to-be taboo storyline of an unwed mother who blackmails a man after he accidentally hits her son with his truck. It also showed Young in lingerie, which would also be banned shortly thereafter. Interestingly enough, the film went through multiple reshoots and edits before it made it into theatres, suggesting that the Code held some sway before it came into full effect.
One of the most interesting pre-Code films that made it through under the wire was Dr Monica, which was released mere days before the Code was enforced. It starred Kay Francis as an obstetrician who is unable to have children and discovers that a baby she is about to deliver was fathered by her husband. To make matters worse, she learns that the mother has tried every avenue to abort it. A female doctor was a rarity even in the pre-Code era but became even more so afterwards. Meanwhile, a storyline about an extramarital affair and several attempted abortions was decidedly non-Code compliant.
Why was the Hays Code introduced?
To put it bluntly: puritanical conservatism bolstered by several Hollywood scandals. In truth, the scandals had less to do with the movies than with the personal lives of the movie stars and filmmakers. Director William Desmond Taylor’s murder became tabloid fodder due to his relationships with three high-profile women, while Fatty Arbuckle’s alleged rape of the actor Virginia Rappe was also turned into salacious headlines.
Conservatives in America felt that Hollywood was a cesspit of depravity, and although that suspicion wasn’t really backed up by the relatively tame movies that the town was churning out, activists started gaining momentum and demanding that the content of the films be regulated to within an inch of their lives. Between the mid-1930s and early 1960s, viewers were asked to believe, among other absurdities, that husbands and wives slept in separate single beds, crime was always punished, and childbirth didn’t actually involve pregnancy or labour.
