Elizabeth Taylor And Montgomery Clift, Hollywood, 1950

Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the era in the American film industry between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (usually labeled, albeit inaccurately after 1934, as the “Hays Code”) censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers. As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, miscegenation, profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence and homosexuality.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, dir. Mike Nichols)

May Sarton, from Journal of a Solitude [ID in alt text]

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN dir. Stanley Donen + Gene Kelly 

"Rawlins this is Mrs. Kilbourne."

"Mrs. Kilbourne, haven´t you a cold? Oh, it must be the telephone. Your voice sounds so youthful."

Merrily We Live ( 1938)

director. Norman Z. McLeod

They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching… they’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…”

PSYCHO (1960) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

1920s + dresses

James Dean visiting a barber shop in New York, 1955.

©️ Dennis Stock

25 year old Orson Welles arriving at the New York premiere of 𝑪𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒛𝒆𝒏 𝑲𝒂𝒏𝒆 (1941).