There is an unspoken assumption among some connoisseurs of American
pre-Code cinema that the shocking freedom these films enjoyed was
somehow linked to a progressive attitude toward social mores. The
willingness of filmmakers and studios to take on such "forbidden"
subjects as drug addiction, abortion, sexually liberated women, racial
issues, and what have you might suggest that the filmmakers and the
studios were in the forefront of social and moral progress. This is a
mistaken assumption. While it is true that the Hays Code absolutely was a
mechanism for conservative social engineering, that doesn't mean that
every film that flouted it was on board with an opposing viewpoint.
Sometimes, filmmakers used their freedom to demonize that very freedom.
No one could have accused a filmmaker like, say Cecil B. DeMille of
being socially liberal, and it was one of his films that more or less
brought about the end of the pre-Code era. Films like Female, Baby Face, Call Her Savage, or Torch Singer
were all retrograde critiques of the sexual liberation of women hiding
behind their sexual frankness and racy imagery, with many of their
"liberated" heroines repenting and eventually settling for their more
"natural" roles as wives or mothers. While this narrative was often
played ironically with its fingers crossed behind its back, sometimes it
was in deadly earnest. One such deadly earnest version is found in A Free Soul
from MGM in 1931, directed by Clarence Brown. It's a film whose only
brush with irony is its title. No one in the film is free and that's the
way the filmmakers like it.
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