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The popular imagination often pictures Classic Hollywood as a land of moral certainty, where virtue is always rewarded, sin is inevitably punished, and romantic clinches end politely at the bedroom door. This sanitized vision, however, was not the default state of American cinema. It was the product of a rigid and strictly enforced set of rules known as the Motion Picture Production Code. But before this Code clamped down in mid-1934, there existed a brief, audacious, and wildly entertaining period now known as Pre-Code Hollywood. Roughly spanning from the widespread adoption of sound in 1929 to the summer of 1934,…