The Oomph girl Ann sheridan
ping
I believe that includes the infamous scene of Groucho Marx in the white lab coat while a woman has her feet stuck in both pockets, with the interesting bits facing him...
“Pre-code melodramas don’t come more lurid than “The Cheat,” a 1931 remake of a notorious Cecil B. DeMille silent by theater legend George Abbott. Wild child Tallulah Bankhead plays an innocent Long Island maiden who gets branded by a kimono-loving fetishist (Irving Pichel) when she fails to live up to a sexual bargain.”
According to my grandmother Tallulah Bankhead is some relation to us by one of great-grandma’s sisters who married into their family.
The Oomph girl Ann sheridan
Ah....Hollyweird.
The watchdogs finally stepped down and Hollyweird went from being the dream factory to the nightmare factory. (To paraphrase Ronaldus Magnus)
I wouldn’t say they were financially struggling. Warner Brothers openly had a lot of “edgey” adult comedies and crime dramas. They had hits. They had stars.
King Kong made millions in the Great Depression. People had money. And spent it on junk.
Just because people were poor doesn’t mean that Hollywood suffered.
And Hollywood “cleaned up” its act because it was a city of sin. The characters on screen challenged social norms. But behind the scenes, studio executives would have casting calls for midwestern gals that would end in booze fueled parties that would end in rape and murder.
Better to tone down what was ON screen to divert the attention from what those behind the scenes were doing.
And just because the majors obeyed the Hays Code, didn’t mean that movies had cleaned up. There was the original indie film market then...
Dwayne Esper, Don Sonney, Kroger Babb... these men made Adults Only films with nudity, doping, crime, murder, and even the birth of a baby.
And when the Legion of Decency went after Kroger Babb’s films, he made an exploitation film about the evils of gambling in the bingo racket.