Pre-Code movies (and the interest of audiences) weren't just about sex and violence. The late twenties and early thirties had seen the emergence of the "new woman," and audiences couldn't get enough. Armed with contraception and the vote, these women were discovering their sexuality and their independence in ways that were shaking up the nation. Pre-Code Hollywood was the only time that movies were being written about women that everyone - men and women - were watching (this holds true even today). These movies took a good, square look at what the "new woman" was doing in the world, including the institution of marriage itself. LaSalle's Complicated Women is a wonderful piece of advocacy, both for these films and for the women they depicted (and the actresses, particularly Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo, that played them) . The women themselves really deserve a lot of credit for pushing the boundaries-- the age of directors was still a good twenty years away, and actors really had a lot of influence on the roles and how they were played.

As an object lesson, try watching Norma Shearer back-to-back in The Divorcee and The Women. In the former, when Shearer's character finds out that her husband has cheated on her (but it doesn't mean anything), she retaliates by sleeping with his best friend to prove the point. When he finds out and decides to leave her, she gives him this whallop:

And I thought your heart was breaking like mine. But instead you tell me your man's pride can't stand the gaffe. I don't want to listen. I'm glad I discovered there's more than one man in the world, while I'm young enough and they want me. Believe me, I'm not missing uot on anything from now on. Loose women - great, but not in the home, eh, Ted? Why, the looser they are, the more they get. The best in the world! No responsibility! Well, my dear, I'm going to find out how they do it...From now on, you're the only man in the wolrd my door is closed to!

And this was 1930! Shearer goes on to unrepentantly explore her sexual freedom, in no way coming across as ruined or tainted. She stands her ground, challenging the double-standard of infidelity head-on.

Then watch Shearer in The Women, filmed five years after the enforcement of the Code in 1939. Shearer's husband cheats, and at first she bears up at the suggestion of her mother, for the sake of their daughter. At the urging of her friends, depicted as a bunch of catty, superficial, appearance-obsessed gossips, Shearer confronts the "other woman" in a dressing room. She goes through with the divorce, only to end up miserable (the ex-husband marries the other woman) and alone but "with her pride." Eventually, she uses her womanly wiles to trap the hussy by employing the very gossip she'd eschewed earlier, and the husband takes her back. She no longer needs her pride, she says! She has love!

This film is striking and terribly painful for several reasons. Pre-Code films depict women's friendships as strong and powerful; in The Women, the friends are superficial, selfish, and insincere. It's not wonder The Women was one of Shearer's last roles - she wasn't made for post-Code Hollywood (many other pre-Code actresses didn't make the transition, either). Shearer's performance is so hard to swallow in part because it's obvious that Shearer herself doesn't believe in it - she's at her strongest when she's asserting her independence, not when she's apologizing for her pride. By the time she repents, it feels hollow. The film really feels like a heavy-handed  response to The Divorcee, with the wise, old-fashioned morals of the mother, the tearful young daughter, the cruel stepmother, the lonely and unhappy divorcees. This was all a taste of things to come.

No wonder they stopped making movies about women.

Pre-Code movies are still out there, waiting to be discovered. Many are available on DVD, or as part of the Turner Collection on TCM. Some, like Mata Hari, have been permanently edited by the censors. Others are lost completely, destroyed by the censor boards. One can't help but wonder what movies would have been made if the Code hadn't ruled Hollywood until 1968, when it was replaced by the MPAA. Post-Code Hollywood was a significant step backwards for women, for gays, and for social freedoms in general. As LaSalle says, "to discover these films today is more heartening than just uncovering a trove of amazing movies. It's like finding out you had a host of long-lost aunts and grandmothers, free and fascinating ladies about whom, for reasons of their own, your parents never told you." 

I've always liked the idea of a special Hugo to be awarded (by force, perhaps) to literary authors who write books dripping with themes filleted from mainstream SF and then deny that it's science fiction 'because it's not about robots and spaceships'.
        - Terry Pratchett