In silent films, female characters were divided into the categories of ingenue and vamp; and in the years when the Hollywood Production Code ran rampant (1934-68), women in movies behaved according to a strict set of rules guaranteed to protect the public against any suggestion of impropriety. But for five glorious years (1929-34), post-sound but pre-Code, the screen was dominated by what author/critic Mick LaSalle has termed "Complicated Women - the title of his book and a new documentary. Independent and uninhibited, these pre-Code women shared a penchant for scanty clothing and an appreciation of the power provided by their own sexuality. These "complicated women" were tough cookies.

In her Oscar®-winning role in The Divorcee (1930), Norma Shearer plays Jerry, a man's woman with a male name and a male viewpoint. When her husband cheats, she evens the score with a one-night stand with his best friend before announcing to hubby: "From now on, you're the only man in the world that my door is closed to." Claudette Colbert, told in Torch Singer (1933) that she's "hard," snaps back, "Sure I am. Just like glass. So hard nothing could cut it but diamonds. Come around with a fistful sometime."

Maybe the hardest of all is Barbara Stanwyck in the luridly entertaining Baby Face (1933). Coming from a brutal upbringing where she was pimped (and possibly molested) by her own father, Stanwyck's Lily Powers literally sleeps her way to the top, moving upward from floor to floor of a banking corporation and never looking back at the trail of male victims she leaves behind.

On the lighter side of pre-Code naughtiness is Mae West, who stretched the limits of what was allowed in movies with such vehicles as I'm No Angel (1933), in which she drawls her usual double entendres as a circus performer who lives with one man but dallies with several others including Cary Grant.

Relaxed standards of the day allowed Jean Harlow to play a happy-go-lucky prostitute who gets the man (Clark Gable) in the jungle romance Red Dust (1932), while prancing about in various stages of undress and going au naturel for a dip in a rain barrel.