This text explores the four-year interval between 1930 and 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films, a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. More unbridled, salacious, and just plain bizarre than what came afterward, the films produced between 1930 and 1934 look like classical Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from another universe. The book lays bare what Hollywood under the Production Code did its best to cover up and push off the screen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded - in sum, the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled.