Sin in soft focus: pre-code Hollywood

Sin Soft Focus showcases a scintillating era in film history — “pre-Code Hollywood” — that boldly creative period in the early 1930s when defiant producers flouted the restrictions of the censors, who tried but failed — to ban everything from sex, profanity, and excessive violence to racial mingling, drugs, and even “lustful kissing.” Lavishly illustrated with film stills, many of them rare, the book captures the stunning artistry and bravura of the era’s controversial films. Here are Joan Crawford, Clara Bow, and Marlene Dietrich portraying powerful women of questionable character; here too are James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Paul Muni rising to fame as gangsters, gamblers, and debauched criminals. The first book to treat the pre-Code films as a discrete body of work, this lively volume is both substantive and appealing.