Ruth Chatterton
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Ruth Chatterton was an American stage, film, and television actress, aviator and novelist. She was at her most popular in the early to mid-1930s, and in the same era gained prominence as an aviator, o
Ruth Chatterton in 1930
Ullrich Haupt and Chatterton in Madame X (1929)
Chatterton in the trailer for Female (1933)
Ruth Chatterton ad from The Film Daily, 1932
Pre-Code Hollywood
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Pre-Code Hollywood was an era in the American film industry that occurred between the widespread adoption of sound in film in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code c
Ruth Chatterton
…female star of the year, behind only Norma Shearer, in a poll conducted by the West Coast film exhibitors. In 1933, Chatterton starred in the successful Pre-Code comedy-drama Female, in which she plays the head of an automobile factory who uses handsome men in her employ for sex and then drops them. When she…
In this 1931 publicity photo, Dorothy Mackaill plays a secretary-turned-prostitute in Safe in Hell, a pre-Code Warner Bros. Pictures film.
Pre-Code films such as The Public Enemy (1931) were able to feature criminal, anti-hero protagonists.
Will H. Hays was recruited by the studios in 1922 to help clean up their "Sin City" image after a series of scandals, especially the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle manslaughter trial.
This 1932 promotional photo of Joan Blondell was later banned under the then-unenforceable Motion Picture Production Code.