DEEP DIVE: Pre-Code Hollywood, Pt. I — Flesh and Desire
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This is a watch at home, discuss in person event, Part I of a two-part series looking at Hollywood just before the Production Code was enforced.
In the early 1930s, films operated in a brief window without strict moral oversight, and what came through the screen was unusually frank: sex without apology, ambition without punishment, desire without disguise. These films weren’t trying to shock. They were responding to a world that already felt unstable, unequal, and unconvinced by moral certainty.
In this first chapter, Pre-Code Hollywood is physical and unsentimental. Red Dust lets desire sit in the open air—sweaty, casual, and transactional. Baby Face treats sex as leverage in a rigged system. Tarzan and His Mate strips things down even further, imagining intimacy outside social order altogether.
What links these films isn’t provocation for its own sake, but a refusal to tidy things up. Desire drives behavior. Power shapes outcomes. Consequences are uneven. Part I focuses on that moment of clarity—before Hollywood decided it was safer not to look so closely.
We will meet to discuss our thoughts on Monday, January 26, at Odell Brewing Sloan's Lake. Please try to watch all three before attending.
Here is the list of films with instructions on how to find them.
RED DUST (1932, Victor Fleming, USA)
Red Dust drops us into a sweltering rubber plantation where desire has nothing to hide. Clark Gable and Jean Harlow don’t circle each other so much as collide—flirting, arguing, sleeping together with an ease that feels almost documentary. Sex isn’t coded as romance or transgression here; it’s casual, physical, and deeply tied to power and class. What makes the film feel startling even now is how little it moralizes. People want what they want, act on it, and live with the mess. The heat isn’t just atmospheric—it’s the pressure that strips away pretense, leaving behavior exposed and uncorrected.
BABY FACE (1933, Alfred E. Green, USA)
Baby Face follows Barbara Stanwyck as a woman who looks at the world she’s been handed and decides to use the only leverage available to her. Moving from a speakeasy to a Manhattan office tower, she sleeps her way up the corporate ladder without apology or self-deception. The film doesn’t dress this up as romance or tragedy—it treats sex as strategy, ambition as survival. What’s unsettling isn’t her behavior, but how efficiently the system rewards it. Baby Face doesn’t ask whether she’s moral. It asks why the world is built so that this works—and who it’s really meant to protect.
TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934, Cedric Gibbons, Jack Conway, USA)
Tarzan and His Mate imagines a world where sex and intimacy exist without shame or explanation. Tarzan and Jane live together openly, touch constantly, and move through the jungle as a couple without marriage, rules, or apology. The famous underwater swimming sequence—lyrical, nude, and unmistakably erotic—doesn’t feel designed to provoke so much as to state a fact: bodies exist, and desire isn’t a problem to be solved. What gives the film its charge is the contrast between that freedom and the intruding outsiders who bring contracts, ownership, and “civilization” with them. The jungle isn’t framed as savage—it’s the visitors who look uncomfortable, grasping, and out of place.
AI summary
By Meetup
Watch-at-home, in-person discussion for film enthusiasts exploring Pre-Code Hollywood through three 1930s films, focusing on desire, power, and consequences.
AI summary
By Meetup
Watch-at-home, in-person discussion for film enthusiasts exploring Pre-Code Hollywood through three 1930s films, focusing on desire, power, and consequences.