These Talkies Star Complicated Women You Might Well Recognize

In that all-too-brief period in Hollywood between the silent era and the summer of 1934, when the puritanical Production Code Administration began to put a stranglehold on the industry, the women of the silver screen came into their own.

Sure, this was the stretch of time that saw the rise of legendary leading ladies like Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Marlene Dietrich. But female star power in pre-Code Hollywood went far beyond these big names.

Take it from “Dames, Janes, Dolls and Canaries,” a fine series starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art that offers a small but rich sampling of pre-Code titles, several rarely screened. This selection, programmed by the writer and film historian Farran Smith Nehme, showcases the abundance of actresses whose singular presences helped stake out complex understandings of womanhood in unexpectedly modern ways.

Pre-Code films have a reputation for being salacious. That was not exactly a product of progressive ideals but a business tactic meant to draw in Depression-era audiences with sheer titillation.

Hobart Henley’s mesmerizing 1932 ensemble film, “Night World,” is filled with leggy chorus girls, broom-closet makeouts, scandal and murder, while King Vidor’s “Bird of Paradise” from the same year, an adventure romance with a deliriously racist understanding of Pacific native culture, features an extended underwater scene in which a nude Dolores del Río swims away from her white beau.

Yet in “Night World,” Mae Clarke, who plays a dancer with a knack for nursing drunkards back to health, cuts through the hedonism and anarchy with her grounded intelligence and low-key charm. And del Río — a Mexican actress regularly handed the role of forcefully sexual foreigner during her time in Hollywood — brings to her island princess a vibrancy and solemn romanticism that deepens an otherwise two-dimensional part.

Pre-Code actresses no longer played merely vamps or ingénues, those twin feminine archetypes that dominated the silent era. And without the kind of Production Code meddling that would eventually regulate and censor, among other things, the expression of female desire and sexuality, their characters were often ahead of their time, undermining the notion that American movies have gotten progressively more open-minded since then. The women of pre-Code Hollywood were not only more sexually liberated than their Code-bound successors, they were also unapologetically independent and skeptical or outright dismissive of norms and institutions like marriage in ways that went unpunished.

Frank Borzage’s 1931 drama “Bad Girl,” for instance, opens with a bait and switch. We see Dorothy (Sally Eilers) in a white gown, nervously clutching a bouquet as a wedding march swells in the distance. But as the procession makes its way through a bustling dining room, we realize Dorothy’s not a jittery bride but a first-time model selling the fantasy of matrimony to an audience of starry-eyed gals and leering bachelors.

“The law makes us a bunch of puppets on strings, like Punch and Judy,” says Ruth (Mae Clarke again) in James Whale’s 1932 “The Impatient Maiden.” Ruth is an assistant to a divorce lawyer who regularly witnesses marriages fraught with abuse, abandonment and betrayal. (This is in no small part because of the country’s economic precarity, a reality that factors into a number of films in this series.)

A practical gal nevertheless filled with quiet yearning, Ruth suggests a reasonable course of action when she falls for Lew Ayres’s Dr. Brown: wait to tie the knot until his medical practice takes off. Scandal and hardship ensue when Dr. Brown rejects Ruth’s proposition, yet we sense that the root of the lovers’ problems lies not in a woman’s apprehension about marriage, but in the inert ideals that cloud the minds of men.

Other films in the series take marriage lightly, to self-affirming and playfully joyous effect.

In “One Hour With You” (1932), a musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch with the assistance of George Cukor, the stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald play a married couple, Andre and Colette, who are first seen canoodling in a park — a place regularly reserved for illicit lovers. Colette’s bestie, a bona fide homewrecker named Mitzi (a delightfully lusty Genevieve Tobin), takes a liking to Andre, prompting a night of infidelity from both sides that is conclusively brushed under the rug when the couple decide they love each other too much to let such trivial pursuits ruin them. As for Mitzi, she responds to her own husband’s divorce request with suave nonchalance, driving off with a risqué self-portrait in tow.

Particularly touching are the moments in these films when women stand up for each other in the face of gendered moralizing.

In “Bad Girl,” when Dorothy meets her future husband and stays at his place until 4 a.m., she’s kicked out of the apartment she shares with her brother, Floyd. But she never actually suffers for her indiscretions: Floyd’s headstrong girlfriend, Edna (Minna Gombell), a single mother struggling to balance work and child care, promptly dumps Floyd for his grossly patriarchal ideas and takes Dorothy under her wing.

Before the Code stamped down on portrayals of interracial couples and the kinds of roles available to the (very few) actors of color employed by Hollywood, films like “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933) could be made. For audiences at the time, the interracial romance between Barbara Stanwyck’s missionary character and a Chinese warlord contained shocking levels of intimacy — no matter that Nils Asther, a Swedish actor, played General Yen. That said, the more remarkable aspect of this undeniably prejudiced film is the casting of the Japanese actress Toshia Mori in her biggest and most dynamic role during her brief stint in the United States.

Of the 19 films in the series, one, “The Wild Party” (1929), is directed by a woman, Dorothy Arzner. She instills a frenzied portrait of life at a women’s college with daringly subversive qualities.

The film functions as a meditation on women’s freedom in a world suddenly significantly more accommodating to their interests, yet still plagued by the misogynistic violence and double standards that force them into ugly ultimatums. Clara Bow, a silent star making her talkie debut here, plays Stella Ames, a popular student with a penchant for partying and blowing off class. When Stella and her pals head to a bar in fur coats and sequined leotards, drunken men assault them; the women are not shown in a manner that suggests they were “asking for it.” Their boisterous camaraderie is too endearing, so the scene reads as a bleak reminder that for all the liberties allowed women, male entitlement remains a major obstacle.

Though the forbidden romance between Stella and an anthropology professor eventually takes center stage, Arzner underscores the relationship between her heroine and the women around her, like a bookworm roommate Stella protects through an act of self-sacrifice. And for all her faults, Stella — cocky and cool yet vulnerable — emerges as a fiercely complicated woman, one not entirely out of place among the characters of today.

“Dames, Janes, Dolls and Canaries” runs through Feb. 19 at the Museum of Modern Art. For more information, go to moma.org.