10 Pre-Code Hollywood Movies Made Before the Censors Arrived

For four years, Hollywood had a rulebook and ignored it. The Production Code was adopted in March 1930. Nobody enforced it until July 1934. The films made in between are called Pre-Code, and they are wilder than most people expect.

Gold diggers won. Gangsters got the best lines. Married women took lovers and did not die for it. Then Joseph Breen took over the Production Code Administration and the party ended overnight.

Here are ten Pre-Code Hollywood movies that show what the studios did while nobody was looking. Ranked by how directly each film pushed the censors to act, counting down to the one that changed everything.

10) The Divorcee (1930)

The Divorcee won Norma Shearer an Oscar for playing a wife who answers her husband’s affair with one of her own and is never punished for it.

• Release Date: 19 April 1930
• Director: Robert Z. Leonard
• Stars: Norma Shearer, Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel, Robert Montgomery
• Box Office: A hit for MGM, figures not published
• Runtime: 84 minutes
• Awards: Best Actress (Norma Shearer). Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writing
• Type of Pre-Code Content: Adultery without punishment
• Fun Fact: Irving Thalberg, the MGM boss and Shearer’s husband, wanted Joan Crawford for the part. He thought his wife lacked sex appeal. Shearer booked a private session with photographer George Hurrell, put the pictures on his desk, and got the role.

Pre-Code example:

Jerry finds out her husband Ted has been cheating. He tells her it “doesn’t mean a thing.” So she spends the night with his best friend and tells Ted the same words back.

The film was adapted from Ursula Parrott’s novel Ex-Wife, which was so frank that MGM would not use the title. Shearer plays a woman who applies her husband’s rules to herself and watches him fall apart.

She does not die. She does not go to prison. She takes a string of lovers, decides she still loves Ted, and finds him in Paris on New Year’s Eve. The film released a month after the Code was adopted and treated its central idea, that women could play by men’s rules, as a comedy of manners rather than a crime.

Why It Matters: Under the enforced Code, adultery had to be shown as wrong and paid for. The Divorcee won an Oscar for a woman who did neither. It is the cleanest demonstration of what the next four years would look like.

9) The Sign of the Cross (1932)

The Sign of the Cross put nudity, a milk bath and arena torture inside a Bible epic, and DeMille got it past every censor by calling it a story of Christian martyrdom.

• Release Date: 30 November 1932
• Director: Cecil B. DeMille
• Stars: Fredric March, Elissa Landi, Claudette Colbert, Charles Laughton
• Box Office: A financial hit on a budget of around $1 million
• Runtime: 125 minutes
• Awards: Nominated for Best Cinematography (Karl Struss)
• Type of Pre-Code Content: Nudity, sexual violence, arena gore, all wrapped in a Bible story
• Fun Fact: Colbert’s famous bath used Klim powdered milk, not the asses’ milk the publicity claimed. Under studio lights it soured and curdled during the shoot.

Pre-Code example:

DeMille’s trick was to make a religious epic and fill it with everything the Code forbade. Colbert plays Empress Poppaea and bathes naked in milk. A dancer performs the “Dance of the Naked Moon” to tempt a Christian girl. Laughton plays Nero as openly camp. The arena sequence shows naked women tied to stakes, attacked by crocodiles and a gorilla.

The film was sold as a Christian story about martyrdom. Church groups praised the ending. They were less keen on the road there.

When Paramount reissued the film in 1938 the Dance of the Naked Moon was cut. The 1944 reissue added a Second World War prologue and trimmed more. The original was not restored until decades later.

Why It Matters: Pre-Code did not only mean gangsters and gold diggers. It meant studios could push sex and violence as far as the box office allowed, so long as the framing looked respectable. The Code’s later “compensating moral values” rule was written for films like this.

8) Tarzan and His Mate (1934)

Tarzan and His Mate contains a fully nude underwater swim, and it was the first major film the new Production Code Administration ordered cut.

• Release Date: 16 April 1934
• Director: Cedric Gibbons
• Stars: Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan, Neil Hamilton, Paul Cavanagh
• Box Office: $2.2 million in worldwide rentals on a budget of about $1.28 million
• Runtime: 104 minutes
• Awards: National Film Registry (2003)
• Type of Pre-Code Content: Full nudity
• Fun Fact: The film was banned in Nazi Germany for showing “a Nordic man in brutal surroundings.”

Pre-Code example:

Jane’s costume is a two-piece that would not be seen again in a Tarzan film for decades. That is the tame part.

The famous scene is an underwater swim. Tarzan pulls Jane into a river and her dress comes off. What follows is a long underwater ballet, shot in a tank, with Olympic swimmer Josephine McKim doubling for O’Sullivan. MGM shot three versions for different markets: one with Jane clothed, one topless, one fully nude.

The film came out three months before the Production Code Administration opened. Once it did, Breen’s office ordered the nude shots cut from every print. The uncut footage sat in a vault until 1986.

Why It Matters: This was the first major film the new PCA reached back and censored. It shows the line between Pre-Code and Code was not a date on a calendar. It was a man with a pair of scissors and the authority to use them. Tarzan also opens our list of movies that broke the Hays Code.

7) Design for Living (1933)

Design for Living is a comedy about a woman who lives with two men at once. It passed in 1933 and was refused a certificate for reissue in 1934.

• Release Date: 29 December 1933
• Director: Ernst Lubitsch
• Stars: Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins
• Box Office: One of the ten highest-grossing films of 1933
• Runtime: 91 minutes
• Awards: None
• Type of Pre-Code Content: A three-way relationship played for laughs
• Fun Fact: Ben Hecht threw out almost all of Noël Coward’s play. Coward said afterwards that three of his lines survived, “such original ones as ‘Pass the mustard.'”

Pre-Code example:

Gilda meets two struggling artists on a train to Paris and cannot choose. So she does not. She moves in with both, on a “gentleman’s agreement” that there will be no sex. The agreement lasts as long as it takes for one of them to leave the room.

Lubitsch never shows anything. He does not need to. The film ends with Gilda walking out on a dull marriage to go back to both men, and the gentleman’s agreement is renewed with a wink.

The Hays Office passed it in 1933. The Legion of Decency condemned it. When Paramount asked to reissue it in 1934, the new PCA refused a certificate.

Why It Matters: Lubitsch built a career on implying what he could not show, and that skill became the survival kit for every director who worked under the enforced Code. Design for Living is the last time he did not have to.

6) Red-Headed Woman (1932)

Red-Headed Woman is the gold digger film where the gold digger wins: Jean Harlow wrecks a marriage, shoots her husband and ends the film richer than she started.

• Release Date: 25 June 1932
• Director: Jack Conway
• Stars: Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Una Merkel
• Box Office: A hit for MGM, figures not published
• Runtime: 79 minutes
• Awards: None
• Type of Pre-Code Content: A gold digger who wins
• Fun Fact: F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the first draft. MGM fired him and gave the job to Anita Loos, who made it a comedy.

Pre-Code example:

Lil Andrews is a secretary in small-town Ohio. She wants her married boss, so she takes him. She breaks up his marriage, marries him, cheats on him with a richer man, cheats on that man with his chauffeur, and shoots her husband when he tries to leave.

The last scene is set two years later. Lil is at a racetrack in Paris on the arm of an elderly French millionaire. Her chauffeur is driving. She has got away with all of it.

The Hays Office demanded 17 cuts. Britain banned the film outright. Harlow dyed her platinum hair red for the part and the first line of the film is “So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?”

Why It Matters: The enforced Code’s first rule was that wrongdoing must be punished. Red-Headed Woman ends with the wrongdoer richer, happier and unrepentant. It is the film the Code was written to prevent.

5) The Public Enemy (1931)

The Public Enemy made James Cagney a star by making a bootlegger the most charismatic man on screen, which is exactly what the Code would later forbid.

• Release Date: 23 April 1931
• Director: William A. Wellman
• Stars: James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell, Mae Clarke
• Box Office: $464,000 domestic on a budget of $151,000
• Runtime: 83 minutes
• Awards: Nominated for Best Story. National Film Registry (1998)
• Type of Pre-Code Content: Glamorised crime, violence against women
• Fun Fact: Cagney’s tooth was broken for real when Donald Cook hit him in the fight scene. He stayed in character.

Pre-Code example:

Tom Powers starts as a kid stealing from department stores and ends as a bootlegger who runs Chicago. The film follows him with something close to admiration. He is funny, fast and better dressed than anyone else on screen.

The grapefruit scene is the one everyone remembers. Tom’s girlfriend Kitty nags him at breakfast. He picks up half a grapefruit and pushes it into her face. Wellman said he added the scene because he had wanted to do it to his own wife.

Warner Bros. knew what it had. The film opens with a title card saying its purpose is to “honestly depict an environment” rather than glorify criminals. It closes with another one saying “civilization is on her knees.” Nobody watching Cagney believed either. A Times Square cinema ran it 24 hours a day.

When the film was reissued in 1941 under the Code, three scenes were cut. One showed an effeminate tailor measuring Tom. One showed a woman serving him breakfast in bed. They were not restored until decades later.

Why It Matters: The Code said crime must never be made to look attractive. The Public Enemy made Cagney a star by doing exactly that. It also shows the studios’ favourite Pre-Code trick: bolt a moral warning on the front and the back, then put whatever you like in the middle.

4) I’m No Angel (1933)

I’m No Angel was Paramount’s biggest hit of 1933, and film historians name Mae West’s innuendo in it as a direct cause of the 1934 crackdown.

• Release Date: 6 October 1933
• Director: Wesley Ruggles
• Stars: Mae West, Cary Grant
• Box Office: $2.25 million in rentals on a budget of about $225,000
• Runtime: 87 minutes
• Awards: None
• Type of Pre-Code Content: Sexual innuendo as the whole point of the film
• Fun Fact: It was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favourite film.

Pre-Code example:

Mae West wrote her own scripts and every line was a double meaning. Tira is a lion tamer and burlesque dancer who works her way through rich men and sues one for breach of promise when he leaves her. She wins the case by cross-examining her ex-lovers herself.

“When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.” “Beulah, peel me a grape.” Both lines are from this film. So is the courtroom scene where she takes the jury apart one man at a time.

I’m No Angel was Paramount’s biggest hit of 1933 and is credited with keeping the studio out of bankruptcy. It also drove the moral campaigners to fury. Film historians name West as a direct cause of the crackdown that came nine months later.

Why It Matters: West proved that sex sold better than anything else the studios had. That was the problem. If the studios would not stop on their own, someone would make them.

3) Freaks (1932)

Freaks cast real sideshow performers, was cut by a third after test audiences fled, and was banned in Britain for 30 years.

• Release Date: 12 February 1932
• Director: Tod Browning
• Stars: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles
• Box Office: $341,000 worldwide against a budget of over $300,000. MGM lost $164,000
• Runtime: 64 minutes (cut from 90)
• Awards: National Film Registry (1994)
• Type of Pre-Code Content: Real sideshow performers, a castration, a revenge sequence MGM could not stomach
• Fun Fact: The Ramones wrote “Pinhead” after seeing the wedding banquet scene. “Gabba gabba hey” comes from the film’s chant of “gooble gobble.”

Pre-Code example:

Browning had worked in travelling carnivals before he made films, and he cast real sideshow performers: conjoined twins, a man with no limbs, the “pinheads” Schlitzie and Zip and Pip. A trapeze artist marries the dwarf Hans for his inheritance and tries to poison him. The other performers find out.

The final sequence, in the rain, under the wagons, with the performers crawling through mud with knives, is still one of the most unsettling in American film. In the original cut, the trapeze artist’s lover is castrated. Test audiences walked out. One woman reportedly threatened to sue MGM, claiming the film caused a miscarriage.

MGM cut a third of the film, lost money on it, and sold the rights to an exploitation distributor for $50,000. Britain banned it for 30 years. It only found its audience in the 1960s.

Why It Matters: The Code’s rules on “repellent subjects” and “brutality” were shaped by reactions to films like this. Freaks is also the clearest case of a Pre-Code film that the studio itself censored before any outside body could.

2) Scarface (1932)

Scarface had the highest body count of any film to that point, and Howard Hughes fought the Hays Office for a year rather than soften it.

• Release Date: 9 April 1932
• Director: Howard Hawks
• Stars: Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, George Raft, Karen Morley, Boris Karloff
• Box Office: About $600,000, probably short of break-even
• Runtime: 95 minutes
• Awards: National Film Registry (1994). AFI’s sixth-best gangster film
• Type of Pre-Code Content: The highest body count of any film to that point, an incestuous subtext, a hero the audience roots for
• Fun Fact: Ben Hecht wrote the script in 11 days. George Raft’s coin-flipping gangster was parodied by Raft himself in Some Like It Hot, 27 years later.

Pre-Code example:

Tony Camonte shoots his way to the top of Chicago. He wants his boss’s girl and gets her. He wants his sister and never quite admits it. The body count was the highest of any film to that point.

Producer Howard Hughes fought the Hays Office for a year. The Hays Office wanted a moralising prologue, a new subtitle (“The Shame of a Nation”), and a different ending where Tony is tried and hanged instead of dying in a hail of bullets. Hughes shot the new ending with a double, because Muni refused to do it. Then he released the original version anyway in states that would allow it.

Several state boards banned the film. Hughes told them to sue him. Hawks later claimed Al Capone liked the film so much he kept his own print.

Why It Matters: Scarface is the Pre-Code fight in miniature. The Hays Office had rules but no power. A producer with money could simply refuse. Two years later, that stopped being true.

1) Baby Face (1933)

Baby Face is the film that ended Pre-Code Hollywood: a woman sleeps her way up a bank floor by floor, New York’s censor board rejected it outright, and within a year the studios agreed to enforce the Code.

• Release Date: 1 July 1933
• Director: Alfred E. Green
• Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, John Wayne
• Box Office: $452,000 domestic on a budget of $187,000
• Runtime: 76 minutes (71 in the censored cut)
• Awards: National Film Registry (2005)
• Type of Pre-Code Content: A woman who sleeps her way up a bank, floor by floor
• Fun Fact: The uncut version was thought lost for 70 years. It turned up in 2004 in a Library of Congress vault in Dayton, Ohio.

Pre-Code example:

Lily Powers works in her father’s speakeasy in a Pennsylvania steel town. He has been selling her to customers since she was fourteen. When he dies, a cobbler who reads Nietzsche tells her to use men the way they have used her.

She takes a train to New York and walks into the Gotham Trust bank. The film’s most famous device is a camera that pans up the outside of the building, one floor at a time, as Lily seduces her way from the personnel office to the executive suite. John Wayne, aged 25, is one of the first men she leaves behind.

The New York censor board rejected the film outright in April 1933. Warner Bros. reshot the ending so Lily loses everything, cut a boxcar seduction scene, and rewrote the cobbler so he warns her against her plan instead of encouraging it. That is the version audiences saw for seven decades.

Even the cut version was too much. The Hays Office suggested Warner Bros. pull the film entirely. When the Legion of Decency began its campaign a year later, Baby Face was one of the films it pointed to.

Why It Matters: If one film ended Pre-Code Hollywood, this is it. Baby Face was the case the censors made. Within a year of its release, the studios agreed to enforce the Code, Joseph Breen took charge, and a scene like the bank pan was not possible again until the 1960s.

What is Pre-Code Hollywood?

Pre-Code Hollywood movies are the American studio films made between March 1930 and July 1934, before the Production Code was enforced.

The Motion Picture Production Code was written in 1930 by a Jesuit priest, Father Daniel Lord, and a Catholic publisher, Martin Quigley. The studios adopted it on 31 March 1930 to head off government censorship. Then they carried on as before. The office meant to enforce it, the Studio Relations Committee, could suggest changes but could not force them. By 1931 a screenwriter told The Hollywood Reporter the Code “is not even a joke any more; it’s just a memory.”

The Depression made things worse. Cinema attendance fell and studios chased audiences with whatever sold. Sex and crime sold.

In 1934 the Catholic Legion of Decency organised boycotts and millions of Catholics signed pledges to avoid immoral films. The studios blinked. On 13 June 1934 they created the Production Code Administration under Joseph Breen, a Catholic layman with no interest in compromise. From July 1934, no film could be released by a major studio without a PCA seal. That seal was the law of Hollywood until 1968.

Why Pre-Code Hollywood movies matter

They show what American cinema looked like before it was told what it could not say.

Between 1934 and the late 1950s, married couples slept in twin beds, criminals always died, and a woman who had sex outside marriage was punished by the last reel. Pre-Code films had none of those rules. Watch them and the Code era looks different: not the natural state of old Hollywood, but a 30-year interruption.

They also matter as a record of what audiences wanted. Every film on this list was made because the previous one made money. The censors did not win because the public was on their side. They won because they organised.

My own view is that Pre-Code Hollywood gets over-romanticised. Half the films on this list are clumsy and a couple are cruel. What they have that the Code era lost is not quality. It is honesty about what people wanted to see, and a studio system that had not yet learned to lie about it.

How filmmakers used the gap

Three tricks come up again and again in Pre-Code Hollywood movies.

The moral bookend. Open with a title card condemning the subject. Close with a line about the wages of sin. Put the film you actually want to make in between. The Public Enemy and Scarface both do this.

The respectable frame. Tell a Bible story or a literary adaptation and fill it with what you could not show otherwise. The Sign of the Cross is the model.

The comedy shield. Play sex as a joke and censors find it harder to object. Mae West and Lubitsch both understood that a laugh gets past a board a serious scene cannot.

All three tricks survived the Code. They just got more subtle. Directors who had learned to hide things in plain sight during Pre-Code, Hawks, Lubitsch, Wellman, spent the next 30 years hiding them better. Our guide to intertextuality in movies covers what happened when that instinct met the modern blockbuster.

FAQs about Pre-Code Hollywood

The Final Cut on Pre-Code Hollywood

Four years. That is all it was. A gap between a rulebook being written and someone deciding to use it.

The Pre-Code Hollywood movies made in that gap are not better than what came after. Casablanca and Double Indemnity were Code films. But they are freer, and watching them tells you what the Code took away and what directors spent three decades learning to smuggle back in.

Start with Baby Face. Then watch Scarface and ask yourself why Al Capone wanted a copy. Then read our guide to the Hays Code rules and see how much of what you just watched was about to become illegal.