Red-Headed Woman

This 1932 picture is among the most provocative things Hollywood released before the Production Code was seriously enforced. Jean Harlow's Lil pries her boss Bill away from his wife, marries him, then takes up with a far richer man and forces society to receive her. MGM first tried F. Scott Fitzgerald on the adaptation of Katharine Brush's novel before handing it to Anita Loos, who turned the material into comedy rather than a moral warning. The ending, which declines to punish, alarmed the censors of the day; the film was banned in the United Kingdom and is regularly named among the pictures that hardened the Code. Who it's for: viewers curious about the outer edge of pre-Code Hollywood and Harlow's comic timing. Who it's not for: anyone who needs the woman at the centre to be held to account, because the film pointedly refuses.