Entertainment

CODE OF MISCONDUCT

BEFORE the censors cracked down in mid-1934, Hollywood unleashed a flood of sexy, taboo-busting movies to lure audiences during the Great Depression.

Six elusive titles — most have never been shown on TV — turn up in “The Pre-Code Hollywood Collection,” out tomorrow, which vividly shows just how far the financially struggling studios were willing to push the envelope.

Paramount especially seems to have gone out of its way to flout the Production Code Administration (PCA), whose myriad prohibitions weren’t seriously enforced until Catholic groups threatened a boycott.

Drug references were banned, yet the musical mystery “Murder at the Vanities” contains a major production number titled “Sweet Marihuana.”

Cary Grant breaks all sorts of PCA rules in a pair of films from the beginning of his career. In “Merrily We Go to Hell” — by Hollywood’s only female director of the era, Dorothy Arzner — Grant does the horizontal mambo with heiress Sylvia Sidney, whose husband, alcoholic playwright Fredric March, is having an affair of his own.

In the aptly named “Hot Saturday,” playboy Grant ruins small-town girl Nancy Carroll’s reputation by keeping her out until 2 a.m., so she tries to trick her childhood sweetheart into marrying her before he finds out. Adding to the interest: The sweetheart is played by Randolph Scott, reputedly Grant’s off-screen romantic interest at the time.

Claudette Colbert plays an unwed mother — another code no-no –in “Torch Singer,” in which she tries to find the child she gave up for adoption by singing on a kids’ radio show.

Pre-code melodramas don’t come more lurid than “The Cheat,” a 1931 remake of a notorious Cecil B. DeMille silent by theater legend George Abbott. Wild child Tallulah Bankhead plays an innocent Long Island maiden who gets branded by a kimono-loving fetishist (Irving Pichel) when she fails to live up to a sexual bargain.

For sheer filthiness, few pre-code comedies top the jaw-dropping and super-obscure “Search for Beauty,” starring Ida Lupino and Buster Crabbe as Olympic swimmers tricked into fronting a skin magazine by sleazy Robert Armstrong and James Gleason.

At their behest, Lupino and Crabbe also conduct an international male and female beauty contest, with the winners secretly slated to work at a health club-cum-brothel.

Paramount ran an actual beauty contest to cast these roles and promote the movie. Among the winners who turn up on screen is Miss Texas herself, Ann Sheridan, whom Warner Bros. later dubbed the “Oomph Girl.”

More at blogs.nypost.com/movies.