5 Lusty Pre-Code Classics

Blame it on Fatty Arbuckle. The tremendously successful silent-movie comic (who had a $1 million contract from Paramount Pictures) became caught up in a horrific scandal in September 1921 when a young starlet, Virginia Rappe, fell ill during a riotous party in Arbuckle’s San Francisco hotel suite and died soon after. Arbuckle was accused of rape and manslaughter, and though he was fully exonerated after three subsequent trials, the scandal destroyed his career and helped to fan a movement throughout the country to clamp down on the immorality of the booming film industry.

Seeing this as a threat on their livelihood, in 1922 the studio titans of Hollywood hired Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian elder, former Postmaster General and Republican National Committee head, to be the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), a newly formed industry-run organization that would protect its image and moral standing in the eyes of the public and government watchdogs. For the next 12 years, Hays attempted to do just that, but the movies continued to get lustier, actively promoting their forbidden pleasures and inciting state censorship boards in New York and other states.

Finally, in June 1934, the MPPDA formalized a “Production Code” (which became known as the “Hays Code,” after the organization’s president and spokesman), which featured lists of “don’ts” and “be carefuls” that every studio agreed to abide by and submit their films to for approval. No more “profanity,” “nudity,” “illicit drugs,” “sex perversion,” “ridicule of the clergy” or even “miscegenation” would be allowed, and the “be careful” portion of the Code covered most crimes and moral transgressions and how they should be resolved onscreen. Hollywood’s freewheeling era was officially over. The Code reigned until 1968, when the current rating system was developed.

Here are five classic movies that managed to revel in their abandon just before the Code made self-censorship an industry fact of life. They all feature water: perhaps a sign of purity?

 

Tarzan and His Mate (1934)

This is the first sequel to follow MGM’s wildly successful Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s pulp-fiction character, and starring Olympic gold medalist Johnny Weissmuller and, as his jungle mate, Jane, Maureen O’Hara. It’s the only movie in the series to feature Jane nude, in a stunningly beautiful sequence underwater; MGM promoted the six-foot-three Weissmuller as “the only man in Hollywood who’s natural in the flesh and can act without his clothes.”

 

Red Dust (1932)

One of the sexiest pairings in golden-era Hollywood, all-American stud Clark Gable and bleached-blond bombshell Jean Harlow, steam up the screen in this wonderful romance. The teasing, fleshy rain-barrel sequence would never have been filmed once the Hays Code was enforced, but it helped turn the movie into a smash. Harlow, a Midwestern teenage runaway, was only 21, and despite her sassy persona, led a life filled with tragedy. Her husband, Paul Bern, killed himself during the production of Red Dust, and Harlow herself died five years later of kidney failure at the peak of her career.

 

Footlight Parade (1933)

It’s difficult to imagine how the genius of choreographer-mastermind Busby Berkeley could have thrived without psychedelic drugs, but considering the degree of precision and organization it must have taken to put together his visual feasts, surely he must have been sober. Still, the “By a Waterfall” sequence in this movie is one of his trippiest, and certainly his wettest and most erotic: the size of the tank and soundstage where it was filmed, and the number of semi-naked girls involved, is, as they say, sick. And the sexual symbolism ain’t that subtle, either.

 

The Sign of the Cross (1932)

Most modern moviegoers, if they’ve heard of Cecil B. DeMille at all, associate him with his big-budget period spectaculars like The Ten Commandments—“Oh, Moses, Moses, why of all men did I fall in love with the prince of fools?!” says Anne Baxter as Nefretiri in that one. But DeMille had been at it since the silent era, and this ancient Roman melodrama with Charles Laughton as the mad Emperor Nero and Claudette Colbert as his Empress Poppaea is a doozy. With no Code to hem him in, DeMille clearly had more fun with Roman decadence and debauchery than with Christian piety, and he even brought us a naked Colbert bathing in milk.

 

King Kong (1933)

This granddaddy of special-effects thrillers is actually quite romantic—and risqué—for a B-movie about a gargantuan, terrorizing ape. Fay Wray screaming endlessly when she’s tied up and forced to meet Kong is the scene everyone remembers, but subsequent scenes on Skull Island, when her dress is ripped and when she swims away from him, are uncomfortably real. Kong himself is a timeless metaphor for the beast within all of us.