Baby Face is the ultimate “Pre-Code” film. The Code was short for “Production Code”—a list of rules written up by pedantic little men working in collusion with the Catholic Church and the reactionary forces of right wing America to strangle out the “vice” in American films. Hollywood all too willingly acquiesced to the Code’s enforcement because the alternative would have been a chaotic mangle of bureaucratic red tape in which state run censorship boards could have conceivably tied up Hollywood product in a mess of legal chaos for any length of time.

The studio moguls would never allow outside organizations to dictate the final cut of their films if they could help it so the alternative was to agree to one official organization that worked with the studios to streamline acts of censorship based on one stupid list of rules that could be referenced for any issue that might strike a nerve with people who had too much time on their hands. Crime could never pay, women could never discuss sex or even pregnancy and never, ever could there be even a hint of homosexuality on screen. This might not be surprising if your exposure to Hollywood films before 1968 is limited to the big celebrated fare—your Wizard of Oz’s and Gone with the Wind’s and such—but there was a brief period before the Code’s enforcement in Hollywood where the age old marketing maxim that “sex sells” was regularly put to the test and was proven to pay in spades.

The Shanghai Gesture is an impressively sordid film noir with the gauzy atmospheric haze of an opium induced nightmare. Director Josef von Sternberg went admirably overboard in depicting his idea of an exotic horror show. As in his most famous film and the one that introduced the world to the Teutonic splendor of Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), Sternberg had a thing for dropping weak-willed characters into dens of iniquity, only to let those poor suckers become enslaved by their obsessions and get taken for every nickel. He seems to enjoy the spectacle of their descent from flawed innocents to vice-addled wrecks. Whereas The Blue Angel was about a priggish professor led into ruination by the low rent charms of Dietrich’s Lola Lola cabaret chanteuse, in The Shanghai Gesture it’s a beautiful young woman (Gene Tierney) who starts out as the privileged daughter of a British developer abroad and ends up a raving gambling and who-knows-what-else-addict. Although the play on which The Shanghai Gesture is based is reportedly far racier and more explicit than the film, Sternberg still finds lots of shadows to explore in the material, resulting in a film slightly less disturbing than The Blue Angel but still a lot stranger than most studio fare of its time.