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Part 3: Gendered bodies of corruption

‘Fallen’ Women in a corrupt man’s world in Pre-Code Hollywood

Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris

Abstract

In pre-Code Hollywood, looser censorship restrictions allowed filmmakers to focus more openly on adult themes of sexuality and violence. This era gave birth to proto-feminist movies which mostly transgressed the Production Code rules relating to gender and sexuality and female sexuality as they mainly targeted “the representation of female sexuality and sensuality” (McGregor, The Catholic Church and Hollywood). Staging often sexually active and relatively independent women, these films explored their fights for control over their lives in an environment defined by bourgeois morality and the Catholic Church’s prescriptions at work even before the 1930 Hays Code and its enforcement in 1934. This paper will examine how C. Brown in A Free Soul (1931), J. Conway in Red-Headed Woman (1932), M. Curtiz in Female (1933) and A. Green in Baby Face (1933) explore the way women choose to reappropriate men’s standards and fashion others to blaze their own paths into society.

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  • 1 Alexander McGregor, The Catholic Church and Hollywood: Censorship and Morality in 1930s Cinema (New (...)
  • 2 Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman 1928-1942 (Berkeley: University of Ca (...)

1In pre-Code Hollywood, looser censorship restrictions allowed filmmakers to focus more openly on adult themes of sexuality and violence. This era gave birth to what could be called proto-feminist movies which mostly transgressed the Production Code rules relating to gender and sexuality and more specifically, female sexuality. The rules mainly targeted “the representation of female sexuality and sensuality”1. Staging often sexually active and relatively independent women, these films explored their fights for control over their lives in an environment defined by bourgeois morality and, among others, the Catholic Church’s prescriptions at play even before the 1930 Hays Code and its full enforcement in July 1934. As a genre, the fallen woman film itself is often thought to have precipitated the need for regulating the representation of sexuality for the next decades and the rise of censorship in the wake of mounting criticism of the pernicious impact of cinema on female spectators in the 1910s. The rise of the movie-struck girl motif in the press functioned as a cautionary tale on the difficulty of finding work in Hollywood and the dangers the girls were exposed to2. It paved the way for a major backlash against the type of licentiousness the pre-Code films tackled.

2This paper will examine how directors like Clarence Brown in A Free Soul (MGM, 1931), Jack Conway in Red-Headed Woman (MGM, 1932) and Alfred Green in Baby Face (WB, 1933) explore the way women choose to reappropriate men’s standards and fashion others to blaze their own paths into society. Their various representational strategies include salacious, corrupt and at times violent tactics and provide fascinating insights into core issues of the American society at the end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s. To various degrees, these practises seemed to have been common until the formal guidelines that determined acceptable ways for the handling of crime, religion, sex, and violence on screen were scrupulously enforced in July 1934.

Counter Trajectories: Immorality and Politics

  • 3 Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 17.

3As early as the 1910s and in the wake of the mostly Catholic criticism of unchaste women, films started being targeted because they supposedly encouraged loose sexual mores – thus implying that “the process of identification with sexually delinquent female characters”3 was heightened by the (young) girls’ desire for the luxury items represented on screen owned by glamorous and perverted women.

  • 4 Martin in Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 17.
  • 5 Mark A.Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2019).
  • 6 Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 ( (...)
  • 7 Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet, “Gender and imagined purity of at the turn of the 20th century: the exam (...)

4Very early on then, the notion of transgression attached to loose females came to characterize the film industry at large which was consequently accused of offering “practical lessons in sin” as Mildred Martin was insisting4. The similar and broader notion of corruption was on most censors’ minds at the time and most often invoked in opposition to its antonym, purity. In some sort of reverse agenda, the “fallen woman cycle” both Mark Viera in Forbidden Hollywood5 and to a lesser extent Thomas Doherty in Pre-Code Hollywood6 address, was to inscribe on screen a very peculiar model of woman. One which was fundamentally at odds with the one the Catholic League of Decency or even a Boston reformist and journalist like Benjamin Flower and a religious leader like Mary Baker Eddy, who both opposed Catholicism, tried to impose on a large scale. These movies were on a direct collision course with what Eddy called “female purity” and marriage which exalted “pure, romantic love as a model for family and interpersonal relationships”7:

  • 8 Marin-Lamellet, “Gender and imagined purity”.

Christian Science was the first American religion and the first religion to be established by a woman. Most of its devotees were women. In Christian Science, since faith could cure and matter was unreal, bodies were spiritualized, which enabled the ‘emancipation of the soul.’ The climax of Flower’s discourse of imagined purity, which had always belittled bodily desires, therefore left women completely disembodied.8

  • 9 Winter in Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 77.

5The model of the “gold digger” out for a rich man’s money was popularized by Avery Hopwood in his 1919 Broadway play The Gold Diggers and adapted for the screen by Harry Beaumont in 1923. It would soon become prevalent in the “fallen woman” cycle while, simultaneously, the woman-falling-for-a-grifter model was also taking center stage. To varying degrees, all three movies are variations on the same recycled plots inherited from countless dime novels, newspaper stories, plays and photoplays from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Along with similarly-themed movies starring Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Blondell or Barbara Stanwyck, they immediately incurred the wrath of censors like the notorious Minneapolis author Alice Ames Winter of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. The latter consistently expressed her “revulsion” and lashed out at the “reflection[s] of the initiatory stages of the degeneration of a people” in a number of movies and more specifically in George Fitzmaurice’s 1931 Strangers May Kiss9 What was at stake with this flurry of “lost girls” movies was therefore a more realistic inscription of women’s lives and their struggles to get to the place they thought they deserved in early twentieth century society. Representing women’s bodies in unheard-of and sensual ways was a deliberately provocative representational strategy of the cycle’s directors. It also became a specific modality of inscription of the related and broader notion of corruption – whether the latter applied to the men’s controlling gaze and lewd ways of lusting after their bodies, or to the women’s own schemes to get what they wanted. The way they moved, dressed up and altogether used their bodies as weapons was to become the vector of a kind of “daring” and “glamour” and the specific target of the censors.

  • 10 Robert Warshow, “The Westerner,” in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other As (...)

6In A Free Soul, based on a 1927 novel by Adela Rogers whose father was also a famous alcoholic lawyer, Norma Shearer was very much aware of what was at stake and often insisted on low-cut dresses to enhance her sex appeal. Her character Jan Ashe falls in love with one of her father’s gangster clients and the illicit romance initiates a counter trajectory involving going against the decorous, conformist and self-righteous grain of her elitist family and of American society at the time. For director Clarence Brown, politicizing the way in which she uses her body becomes a way of hooking fans through the film’s ability to tell historical truths and inscribing the progress and transformation of women’s sexual mores in the frame. Staging such heroines had by then taken on political significance. The type of freedom they evince is very much akin to the function gangsters played on screen – without the tragic dimension Robert Warshow analyzed in his essay first released in The Partisan Review in February 1948, “The Gangster as a Tragic Hero.”10 By the early thirties, the loose-living heroine’s sexual aggressivity had become common enough a pattern to impose a politics of trespassing which also signified a political empowerment of women. Making maximum use of Shearer’s curvaceous figure, the filmmaker has her consistently striking provocative poses in revealing evening gowns when she is with the slick gangster boyfriend Ace (Clark Gable) she chases after, while choosing to remain rather distant and dressing in more conservative and sensible clothes when with her respectable upper-class polo player fiancé Dwight Winthrop (Leslie Howard). Jan’s revealing evening gowns when with her lover clearly inscribe in the frame that she has full control of her own body.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Jan and her gangster lover (Clark Gable): revealing evening gowns & full control of one’s own body A Free Soul, Clarence Brown, 1931

© Warner

  • 11 Most of Jason Joy’s letters have been collated and are now in the public domain online: https://dig (...)
  • 12 Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 78.

7But beyond a mere play on dress codes across social classes, the director toys with the different types of gaze and issues of cognitive differences. What Mulvey was to call decades later “the male gaze” which typically fragments the female body for male heterosexual pleasure is here redirected and reformatted into a different kind of female gaze – one which orchestrates its own display in order to subdue the male body for its own private visual and sexual pleasure. The controlling gaze here is no longer exclusively Ace’s and the filmic narrative is mostly structured around it. Clarence Brown ends a particularly bold seduction scene with a suggestive cut in A Free Soul. As Jan extends her arms to the glamorous gangster he feels compelled to come down beside her lascivious body on a divan. She is repeatedly framed clearly dictating the rules of the game when simultaneously rebuffing Ace when he tries to impose his own vision of the future and marriage on her and lecherously drawing him towards her. The suggestiveness of the double movement of repulsion/attraction is heightened by the final fade to black which leaves the subsequent love-making scene to the viewer’s imagination. The salaciousness of the scene caused Colonel Jason Joy then Director of Studio Relations for the Alliance of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP) from 1926 to 1932 to demand a very specific type of cuts that would instead tone down the sexual overtures11 and edit out Jan’s provocative line, “C’mon. Put ’em around me!” But Bernard Hyman who was in charge of the movie at MGM refused and even though the film was later “heavily cut by local censors and banned entirely in Ireland, […] it grossed nearly three times its cost”12. The logic of assertion of her own desire and reappropriation of the other’s body by the free-spirited female is pushed to the farcical extreme in Conway’s 1932 Red-Headed Woman. Lil’s relentless attempts at seducing married men and climbing the social ladder turn corruption into an asset. Men’s bodies become the means to a long series of increasingly ambitious goals. By late 1931 and early 1932, the stereotype of the ruthless social climber was already well established. What would soon have to be visibly altered was the length to which she could overtly go on screen and still be rewarded. Within a few months and as the year 1934 was getting closer, the “laughing sinners,” as Harry Beaumont called his 1931 film with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, were soon to vanish off frame.

Trading on Male Desire

  • 13 Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Cul (...)

8Jack Conway builds Lil’s persona around the notions of humor and manipulation, still riding the wave of “sex films” as the censors called them. And as in most comedies, the motif of repetition is at the heart of the filmic narrative which is propelled forward by the systematic exploitation of male desires. In The Immediate Experience, Robert Warshow highlighted how the same repetitiveness of the pattern ensured the success of the gangster film: “In its initial character, the gangster film is simply one example of the movies’ constant tendency to create fixed dramatic patterns that can be repeated indefinitely with a reasonable expectation of profit”13.

9In a similar way, the burlesque of the heroine relentlessly attempting to secure increasingly richer, more powerful lovers was supposed to ensure that the formula would work and keep censors away. Each new lover somehow erases the previous one and fulfils his stepping stone function so that Lil may reach her own private place in the sun. But the censors increasingly sensed that the threat was much more multidimensional and pervasive:

[…] the promiscuous embrace of sex was only the most commercial and carnal element of a broader assault on traditional values. The complete spectrum of vice, not sex alone, infested the films in question, an epicurean spirit of enthusiastic indulgence in activities illegal, forbidden, and stimulating. Antiauthoritarian, adultery-driven, and pleasure-seeking, the vice films surrendered willingly to one or more of the seven deadly sins and discovered that succumbing wasn’t necessarily fatal.

  • 14 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 103-104.

Both a cross-generic ingredient and a genre unto itself, vice energized compliant formats (notably gangster films and the backstage musicals) even as it fueled the whole body of the main attraction in “fallen women” and “bad girls films”.14

  • 15 Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 112.
  • 16 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 103.

10MGM Producer Irving Thalberg hoped to circumvent censorship by telling screenwriter Anita Loos “to make fun of its sex element”15 and have Jean Harlow joke that “Gentlemen prefer blondes, do they? Yes they do” in the first scene. The line was a playful echo of Anita Loos’s previous eponymous and wildly successful 1928 screenplay of the same title. But as the systematicity of the heroine’s class rise and her increasing raciness and glamour conditioned her attractiveness for the audience, the censors of the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) feared that the exchange of sex for money would become an even greater staple of the fallen woman cycle. A transitional film, Conway’s opus is possibly the last one to have exposed what Doherty calls the “complete spectrum of vice”16. As the MPPDA Digital Archive shows, in July 1932, Red-Headed Woman and other films pushed William Hays, then president of the MPPDA, to give a speech against the:

[s]erious crisis in moral standards in advertising [which] necessitates reinforcement of Advertising Code because of wave of criticism from “ordinary folk” and important people - newspapers have refused to print ads - editor Catholic World refused to honor a speaking engagement because of loss of faith in industry - danger is of admission taxes or censorship being passed.17

  • 18 Trotti in Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 112.
  • 19 Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 115.

11The road to perdition was still wildly seductive for many viewers and hence greatly profitable but producers were already feeling the brunt of mounting criticism on all fronts. By 1932 already, even though the Code had not been fully enforced yet, censorship posed a very real threat. The argument Thalberg made in favour of new restrictions meant to mitigate the conservative backlash which was of a moral, economic and legal nature. Lil’s morally dubious activities were also targeted by internal censor Lamar Trotti, Jason Joy’s assistant at the Studio Relations Committee, on April 27, 1932: “Not since I have been here have we had so many problems involving sex situations. The time has come to crack down as hard as we can”18. By recycling a fruitful formula and inserting a prologue playfully foregrounding Lil as a sexy shady dame, Thalberg eventually made the audience laugh and the film profitable, despite the numerous cuts it had to undergo in some states like Pennsylvania or Massachusetts19. The movie starts with a succession of three brief diagonal opening vignettes which all satirize Lil’s risqué attitude and announce her exploitative vision of men’s desires. Once again, the notions of manipulation and corruption are intrinsically connected as Lil is first captured dying her hair blonde, buying a see-through dress and attaching her boss’s picture to her garter belt so as to be more desirable. In her quest for power, her playacting caters to men’s most common fantasies – and “playacting” is the key word. The spectator had to see through and enjoy the gold digger’s art of composition at all times for the various boards of censors not to ban the film altogether.

Figure 2 and 3

Figure 2 and 3

The gold digger’s art of composition in Conway’s Red-headed Woman (1932) Red-headed Woman, Jack Conway, 1932

© Warner

12The heroine’s body becomes the primary material she ironically turns into the perfect receptacle of men’s fantasies. Lil’s motto, “Well, he’s a man, isn’t he?” [2:03], is the guiding principle of her upward mobility and takes Brown’s representation of Jan’s unbridled desire one step further. By highlighting the ruthless determination of Harlow’s character, Conway shifted the boundaries of gender stereotypes and contributed to curbing traditional mentalities and essentialist readings of women. But he also went against one of the 1930 Production Code’s most essential directives, that movies would preserve the moral standards of the viewers. In Red-Headed Woman and most of the other fallen woman cycle films, women are no longer the helpless and hapless victims of male corruption. They are framed adopting some of men’s most aggressive traits to assert themselves in a brutal world devastated by the Great Depression leveraging the stereotype of the assertive female climber to their advantage. In a society where millions of men had lost their jobs, they were mostly portrayed as combative and resourceful across a variety of media, from Dorothea Lange’s Depression photographs (Migrant Mother taken in 1936 is probably her most famous emblem of female endurance), to some 1940s Women’s Noir films. Shot over a decade later but set during the Depression, the filmic narrative of Michael Curtiz’s 1945 Mildred Pierce also revolves around a full-fledged, sometimes morally ambiguous career woman.

13In a rather pointed way, Conway and Loos make a clear connection between corruption, female sexuality and access to power. Exploiting men’s weaknesses becomes an art showcased by the film grammar. So as not to thwart the censors’ will any further, Conway uses an ellipsis early on and a fade to black [6:54] to materialize on screen the first time Lil seduces one of the rich men surrounding her. Alternating between the racy style of the dialogue and the highly suggestive but never fully explicit dimension of the image track, the director toys with the various images Lil can project. The viewer gets an immediate sense that she is experimenting with the different facets of the story she wants to tell so that her boss Bill Legendre Jr. will be hooked. The camera consistently frames her adjusting her attitude and discourse to the situation at hand and her performance heavily depends on her enticing face and body. It tracks her accomplished mastery of the art of seduction as she is actively crafting a skillful narrative giving men the key roles. The scene materializes the moment when Lil starts taking charge of her entire life. She cunningly playacts and constantly adjusts and reframes her life story to become a major player. The very fact that she is forever reshaping her life story is directly correlated to her increasingly gaining control. The camera captures Jean Harlow purposefully and physically “getting in the way” of the powerful men she encounters and alternating between medium close-ups and extreme close-ups showcasing body fragments so as to avoid any compromising realism. Part of the impact on the viewer has to do with the fact that she is transparent about her goals. The screenwriter toys with the notion of serious game throughout the film narrative. The sports metaphor Loos has Lil use about “being in the big leagues now” [16:58] reflects the seriousness of the game she is playing and her perfect mastery of it as opposed to the pathetically lecherous and hypocritical men and their female counterparts who shun her because of her lower-class origins. Earlier on and to get her out of the way, Mr. Legendre Sr. offers her money she turns down and asks her, “See here, young woman, what is your game?” [18:13], highlighting how good Lil has become at this traditionally male exercise. One of the best comedic devices lies in the disjunction between what the men actually see and fall for and the mechanic of erotics the audience gets to recognize and relate to. In the difficult context of the Great Depression when producers had to reach a broad audience by selecting provocative screenplays, however, the catering strategies changed sometimes within a few months until July 1934. As Thomas Doherty insists in Pre-Code Hollywood,

  • 20 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 2.

For four years, the Code commandments were violated with impunity and inventiveness in a series of wildly eccentric films. More unbridled, salacious, subversive and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, they look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe.20

Figure 4

Figure 4

The mechanic of erotics: Lil playacting and constantly adjusting and reframing her life story [6:54] to be “in the big leagues” [16:57] Red-headed Woman, Jack Conway, 1932

© Warner

  • 21 Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 204.

14The last stages in the overt resistance against censorship were to take place one year later, a few months away from the actual enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. The 1932 elliptical but highly suggestive and ironical style was to take on even more of a protest edge and serious tone. Even though less visually explicit, the sordid dimension of the other Lil’s situation is accentuated in the 1933 Alfred Green Baby Face. Barbara Stanwyck is caught in the same type of seedy and corrupt environment which also triggers her unquenchable thirst for social climbing. Once again, vice rules supreme and virtue goes unrewarded. This time however, the screenwriters Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola steered clear of the comic exaggeration and had a cobbler friend of Lil’s come up with quasi-philosophical remarks on women’s position in society and their necessary emancipation. So how did they get away with crafting a narrative featuring a young woman pimped by her own father, desperately trying to escape and succeeding - “a theme [deemed] sordid and of a troublesome nature” as James Wingate, successor to Joy and responsible for enforcing the Code from 1932 to 1934, told William Hays21?

“Merely a Strange Interlude”? (Sally to Lil in red-Headed Woman, [16:50])

151933 and the first half of 1934 were the final years before MPPDA president Will H. Hays appointed influential Catholic newspaper man Joseph Breen who was to become chief of the Production Code Administration for twenty years. Wildly influential in the nation’s cultural life, he was famously to start cracking down on all unorthodox forms of representation and mostly on disreputable “dames” — a word which was soon to be banned as well. As Thomas Doherty repeatedly mentioned in his works, it was on a list of prohibited words from 1934 onward but kept resurfacing later on as in High Sierra (1941) and Angel Face (1952) when Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum respectively use it more than a decade later.

16As early as March 1933, James Wingate, then Director of Studio Relations for the Association of Motion Picture Producers, sent a programmatic letter to Darryl F. Zanuck who had written the story of Baby Face to demand changes in the script and all future projects:

[…] Most of the company heads agree with Kent over She Done Him Wrong 9 March 1933 re West: ‘A like opinion has been expressed to me by most of the company heads. I cannot too strongly urge you to proceed in the strict enforcement of the Code. This renewed effort should apply to the scripts as they come in, the pictures in production, and to those about to be finished and now to be seen by you. We cannot wait to have the strictest care applied to only the pictures that will come out a few months from now’22.

  • 23 Changes in Dialogue and Cuts on “Baby Face,” page 1, MPA Baby Face file, Academy of Motion Picture (...)

17The program for the years to come was clear: Hollywood’s staging of dangerous liaisons and scandalous women on screen was coming to an end. The representation of moral reprobates in what the censors called “sex films” had to be held in check. It meant of course a change in the representational strategies of studios and directors and a brutal reworking of women’s images on screen. Alfred Green’s Baby Face with its bold portrayal of Barbara Stanwyck’s racy and calculating other Lil was a case in point. The original version provided a crude portrait of Depression-era America with its long lines of unemployed, drinking men, when the film industry was at the heart of unprecedented financial trouble and had to make profits after three years of partial abidance with the 1930 Production Code. It came to materialize the ultimate watershed moment before women’s immorality and corruption started being radically amended. Most of the changes the censors demanded had to do with Lil’s old friend, Mr. Cragg, and his advice, as well as a few highly sexually explicit lines, and the ending. The old cobbler who tells Lil she “doesn’t realize her potentialities” and that she has some power over men, soon became the target of censors and ended up becoming the voice of morality. Cragg’s iconoclastic sermon urging her to “use men – not let them use [her]. [B]e a master, not a slave” [12:09-13:29] was Warner Brothers’ last desperate attempt to attract viewers but had to be partly edited to please the various boards of censors as the Motion Picture Association of America Baby Face file at the Margaret Herrick Library shows: “A woman, beautiful like you, can get anything she wants in the world. But there is a right and wrong way – remember the price of the wrong way is too great. Go to some big city where you will find opportunities. Don’t let people mislead you, you must be a master – not a slave. Keep clean, be strong, defiant, and you will be a success”.23

18As the Motion Picture Code also stated, producers recognized:

their responsibility to the public because of [the] trust [placed in them by the people of the world] and because entertainment and art are important influences in the life of a nation.

Hence, though regarding motion pictures primarily as entertainment without any explicit purpose of teaching or propaganda, they know that the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking.24

19Lil’s upward trajectory to the top was therefore toned down so that success would not be overtly associated with corruption and female sexuality. Some of the techniques used in Baby Face actually foreshadow the innuendos and allusive representational strategies recurrent in later gangster and noir films. The inevitability of her immoral rise for instance is indirectly inscribed on screen by the tilt-up suggesting Lil’s irresistible ascent all the way to the top floors of the Gotham Trust Bank and its bosses as she sleeps her way to the top. The same movement up the skyscraper will again be materialized on screen upon her return to New York after being sent to Paris and marrying Trenholm (George Brent), the bank’s new boss.

Figure 5 and 6

Figure 5 and 6

The tilt-up suggestive of Lil’s irresistible rise as she sleeps her way to the top Red-headed Woman, Jack Conway, 1932

© Warner

  • 25 Forbidden Hollywood. Pre-Code Era, Warner Bros., 2020: ten films.
  • 26 Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 80-81.
  • 27 These “Changes in Dialogue and Cuts on ‘Baby Face’” are to be found on page 4 of the MPA Baby Face (...)

20But the censors’ pressure was so intense that Darryl Zanuck, the head of production at Warner Brothers, Markey and Scola partly caved in and introduced some changes which proved inconsistent with Lil’s disreputable progression. In the original script, when her husband falls into financial trouble and has to pay the bank back one million dollars, she refuses to lend him the money. He commits suicide and Lily, finally free, leaves New York. The Warners’ producers knew that the finale would be cut and they had Lil have an abrupt change of heart on the liner she has boarded, go back to Courtland and call an ambulance – which altogether contradicts the entire logic of the narrative arc. The first and current ending from the Forbidden Hollywood Collection of DVDs25 is still highly ambiguous. A few weeks after the shoot of the screenplay’s original ending, the two lead actors, Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent, were called back to film the ambulance scene. This revision in itself is what Lea Jacobs calls an “anomaly” as Lil’s “final sacrifice and her punishment [are] at odds with the system of repetition which governs the progression of the narrative as a whole [so] that the formation of the couple becomes possible”26. It shows Lil taking care of Trenholm in the ambulance and the medic exclaiming, “[h]e’s got a chance!” Hence the open ending once again leaves it to the viewer’ s imagination. The arc of redemption is therefore much less obvious and the film remains for a large part “morally unsound” – as archbishop John McNicholas was to call this series of movies when he founded the National Legion of Decency in 1934. The theatrical release version went one step further and included a new redemptive finale showing Lil finally caring for her husband and the two of them returning to the small industrial town penniless, but now leading an honest life, as one of the directors at the bank indicates when reading a letter he just got from them.27 The final shot is actually identical to the opening shot of the town, forcefully inscribing in the frame the much-needed compensating moral development the strict Catholic censor Joseph Breen was soon to impose. The various, mostly inconsistent amendments of the ending all foreground the constant balancing act studios and in-house censors had to do until July 1934, when this type of negotiations and relative leeway came to a brutal end. Lil’s redemption and punishment and the contrived formation of the couple is arguably the most improbable and illogical reversal in Baby Face’s finale. The film came out to mixed reviews and was banned in Chicago, Ohio, and Virginia. Reviewers sometimes vilified it as a serious threat to the nation’s morals as in several articles in Variety, and at other times, glorified its heroine’s boldness and freedom as in Liberty Magazine. Despite these cuts into its returns, it still earned a substantial profit of $93,135.

21Jan and the two Lils are all the forebears of the 1940s film noir femmes fatales. The moral ambiguity of the dangerous women later resurfaced to varying degrees in heroines of movies like Mildred in Michael Curtiz’s 1945 Mildred Pierce, or Carmen Sternwood and even Vivian Rutledge in Howard Hawks’ 1946 The Big Sleep. It is directly inherited from these 1930s “bad girls.”

22By the summer of 1934, the pledge of the pressure group of public protest against the movies’ graphic violence and sexual suggestiveness, the Legion of Decency, had been taken by eleven million Catholics and was fiercely dedicated to uprooting irreverent and immoral content in all motion pictures:

I wish to join the Legion of Decency, which condemns vile and unwholesome moving pictures. I unite with all who protest against them as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country, and to religion.

I condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land.28

23From now on, the operative phrase was to be “I condemn absolutely”.

Figure 7

Figure 7

The inconsistent amendments and improbable reversals of Baby Face’s finale: Lil’s redemption and punishment and the contrived formation of the couple. The looming backlash of the Lord-Hays’ Code Baby Face, Alfred E. Green, 1933

© Warner

24The three movies all correspond to strategic types of resistance to the inexorable march towards the Code’s implacable censorship. They provide fascinating insights into the evolution of women’s status in the 1930s American society. The “fallen woman” dimension was part reflection of actual progress in women’s liberation and new representational modalities and part pure marketing strategy on the studios’ part as they devised provocative, scandalous femino-centric narratives to attract audiences in desperate times when producers and studios were going bankrupt. They also highlighted to varying degrees the visual consequences of the moral battle between studios executives and the censor boards during the pre-Code era and the magnitude of the increasingly ruthless degree of control and rigid conception of “morality” they had to submit to in order to avoid being heavily edited, reshot or plainly rejected. From July 1934 onward, the moral dilemma was to be at the heart of movie censorship for decades. No “dame” could then go unpunished for her immorality and even less rewarded for it. Edited and added scenes as well as reshoots became common practice as internal censors tried to pre-empt any form of external control on the industry by meeting most of the demands of pressure groups and lobbies like the Catholic League of Decency. By mid-1934, the Lord-Hays’ Code was already ruling supreme and its backlash was to eradicate most references to lewdness, deviousness, miscegenation or any scene viewed as morally questionable. As a direct consequence, a new type of disguised suggestiveness like the “dark” steaminess of film noir for instance was also to materialize on screen, designed to circumvent the perceived immorality of movies and their effects on young spectators.

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Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen 16, no. 3 (1 October 1975): 6–18.

Rogers St Johns, Adela. A Free Soul. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1927.

Sova, Dawn B. Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures. New York, Facts on File, 2001: 32.

Vieira, Mark A. Forbidden Hollywood. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2019.

Vieira, Mark A. Sin in Soft Focus. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

Warshow, Robert. “The Westerner.” In The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, Robert Warshow. New York: Atheneum, 1977: 35-54.

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Notes

1 Alexander McGregor, The Catholic Church and Hollywood: Censorship and Morality in 1930s Cinema (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 104.

2 Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman 1928-1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 4.

3 Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 17.

4 Martin in Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 17.

5 Mark A.Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2019).

6 Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

7 Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet, “Gender and imagined purity of at the turn of the 20th century: the example of B.O. Flower, reformer,” accessed 11 November 2024, https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/66381#tocto2n10.

8 Marin-Lamellet, “Gender and imagined purity”.

9 Winter in Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 77.

10 Robert Warshow, “The Westerner,” in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Robert Warshow. New York: Atheneum, 1977), 35-54.

11 Most of Jason Joy’s letters have been collated and are now in the public domain online: https://digitalcollections.oscars.org/digital/collection/p15759coll30/id/20790/

12 Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 78.

13 Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 99.

14 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 103-104.

15 Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 112.

16 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 103.

17 MPPDA Digital Archive, https://mppda.flinders.edu.au/records/786

18 Trotti in Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 112.

19 Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 115.

20 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 2.

21 Vieira, Forbidden Hollywood, 204.

22 MPPDA Digital Archive https://mppda.flinders.edu.au/people/254

23 Changes in Dialogue and Cuts on “Baby Face,” page 1, MPA Baby Face file, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections, Beverly Hills, CA, in https://www.iseeadarktheater.com/baby-face

24 https://censorshipinfilm.wordpress.com/resources/production-code-1934/.

25 Forbidden Hollywood. Pre-Code Era, Warner Bros., 2020: ten films.

26 Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 80-81.

27 These “Changes in Dialogue and Cuts on ‘Baby Face’” are to be found on page 4 of the MPA Baby Face file.

28 https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=CTR19340712-01.2.12&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN--------.

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1
Caption Jan and her gangster lover (Clark Gable): revealing evening gowns & full control of one’s own body A Free Soul, Clarence Brown, 1931
URL http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/docannexe/image/1132/img-1.png
File image/png, 25k
Title Figure 2 and 3
URL http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/docannexe/image/1132/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 16k
Caption The gold digger’s art of composition in Conway’s Red-headed Woman (1932) Red-headed Woman, Jack Conway, 1932
URL http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/docannexe/image/1132/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 20k
Title Figure 4
Caption The mechanic of erotics: Lil playacting and constantly adjusting and reframing her life story [6:54] to be “in the big leagues” [16:57] Red-headed Woman, Jack Conway, 1932
URL http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/docannexe/image/1132/img-4.jpg
File image/jpeg, 16k
Title Figure 5 and 6
URL http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/docannexe/image/1132/img-5.jpg
File image/jpeg, 12k
Caption The tilt-up suggestive of Lil’s irresistible rise as she sleeps her way to the top Red-headed Woman, Jack Conway, 1932
URL http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/docannexe/image/1132/img-6.jpg
File image/jpeg, 14k
Title Figure 7
Caption The inconsistent amendments and improbable reversals of Baby Face’s finale: Lil’s redemption and punishment and the contrived formation of the couple. The looming backlash of the Lord-Hays’ Code Baby Face, Alfred E. Green, 1933
URL http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/docannexe/image/1132/img-7.jpg
File image/jpeg, 11k
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References

Electronic reference

Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, “‘Fallen’ Women in a corrupt man’s world in Pre-Code Hollywood”Film journal [Online], 10 | 2024, Online since 01 December 2024, connection on 09 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/1132; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/130ue

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About the author

Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris

Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris is Professor of Film and TV Series Studies and (African) American Literature at University Paris Nanterre, France. Her books and articles mostly focus on contemporary, but also Pre-Code American Cinema and screen adaptations, as well as on English-speaking TV Series. She has published over 80 articles and 10 books and recently coedited Dark Recesses in the House of Hammer with G. Menegaldo & M. Boissonneau (Peter Lang, New York, 2022) which received the PCA Best Edited Collection Award in 2023. She is currently teaching Film and Television Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2024)

By this author

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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