For the Retrospective of the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, the festival will showcase a program of 27 comedies featuring three different American actresses under the title “No Angels – Mae West, Rosalind Russell & Carole Lombard”. The films were chosen with a focus on the strict morality rules of the Motion Picture Production Code, which were increasingly enforced after 1934. Officially adopted in 1930 and dubbed the “Hays Code”, it was a voluntary system by which the Hollywood Studios agreed to uphold moral standards in filmmaking to avoid the censors’ knife. But the Hays Office soon became an even stricter arbiter than the actual censorship office of what could and couldn’t be shown on screen. The code prohibited explicit depictions of sex and promiscuity, as well as the use of profanity. Yet during that period, these three women succeeded in shaping their own film roles, finding their own style, and subtly subverting the Hays Code rules.
