Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934): When Sin Ruled the Movies

by Mark A. Vieira

Film Booking Office’s Human Wreckage (1923) featured graphic scenes of drug use. Goldwyn Pictures’ Three Weeks (1923) had scenes of drunkenness and debauchery in a Ruritanian palace. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Ben-Hur (1925) had nude scenes, and its male star posed nude for publicity portraits. M-G-M’s The Big Parade (1925) had an intertitle that read: “God damn them all!” M-G-M’s The Callahans and the Murphys (1927) had a scene in which an Irish-American matriarch and her sewer-digger son guess the race of an abandoned infant. “Maybe it’s a Jew baby,” suggests her son. Mrs. Callahan looks under the baby’s diaper, then declares, “It ain’t a Jew baby!” An orgy scene in Paramount’s The Wedding March (1928) hinted at “inverted sex practices” with a brief flash of one man kissing another during a drinking bout.