Complicated Consciences
Anne Morse on Women & Morals in Pre-Code Films
Here was sex without victimhood, sophistication without chastity. Here was a bold, modern woman with no apologies,” wrote the film critic Mick LaSalle of Norma Shearer’s role in the 1930 film, The Divorcée. “They’re well dressed, well paid, and sexually gratified . . . they sleep with whomever they want, max out their credit cards and never have to worry about play-dates or carpools,” wrote Newsweek of the women of the television series Sex and the City.
Seventy years, a motion-picture code, and a million miles of celluloid separate the films of Norma Shearer and the episodes of Sex and the City. Yet critics praise their actresses for the same dubious quality: a willingness to portray promiscuous female passion.
Anything Goes
Norma Shearer both led and personified a brief, “anything goes” Hollywood era, the five years leading up to the enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code in mid-1934. Critics celebrate the “pre-Code” era, as it came to be known, as a kind of golden era of movie-making because it allowed women to “explore their sexuality” on film.
“Between 1929 and 1934, women in American cinema were modern!” exulted LaSalle in Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. “They took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality . . . and, in general, acted the way many think women only acted after 1968” (the year the Code hit the cutting room floor).
Added Jane Fonda, narrator of a recent Turner Classic Movies documentary called Complicated Women, “For five sexy and fun-filled years beginning in 1929, movies were glamorous, sophisticated, and startlingly frank. Women . . . brought to the screen a fresh, sometimes raunchy, and always exciting freedom” that became “an affirmation of a new morality. They set the tone for the twentieth century—and it seemed like nothing could stop them.”
Most important of all, these cinematic creatures were allowed to violate on-screen social mores with impunity; they suffered no consequences imposed by society’s prudes and kill-joys. (This appears to be a big part of why modern critics like these films: They gloried in telling clergymen, city fathers, and concerned mothers to take their stifling morality and . . . well, you know.)
But watch a few of these pre-Code films, as I recently did, and you’ll discover something interesting. While pre-Code heroines do indeed escape societal punishment for “exploring their sexuality” (which evidently they cannot do within marriage), they often do suffer from what philosopher J. Budziszewski calls “the revenge of conscience.”
For instance, in Baby Face (1933), Barbara Stanwyck sleeps her way to the top, ultimately marrying the company president for his money. Pre-Code fans delight in the fact that Stanwyck “empowers” herself through sex. But Stanwyck herself recognizes that she has, in the process, bartered away a big chunk of her own soul. When her husband, facing bankruptcy and ruin, implores her to return half a million dollars in jewels and cash, she defiantly refuses. She has, Stanwyck explains, paid too high a price for them.
Faithless Lessons
Anne Morse is a senior writer at the Wilberforce Forum in Reston, Virginia, and lives in Unity, Maryland, with her husband and two sons. She writes frequently about cultural issues.
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