Waterloo Bridge makes a great counterpoint to Red-Headed Woman, available together on one of the fantastic TCM Forbidden Hollywood discs. They’re two very different films that begin to illustrate the range of issues and styles at play in pre-Code cinema. But it’s a particularly good follow-up for me, when I was beginning to wonder if I have been effectively capturing why I love this era in film. I’m afraid my entries read as litanies of dirty deeds and naughty inferences — and generally, these aspects are too delicious to resist the urge to simply catalogue. All that’s here in the usual measure: backstage undressing, sheer brassieres, undisguised prostitution. But the pre-Codes had more going for them that post-Codes lost sight of than simple shock value and an alternately adult and sophomoric sense of freedom. Pre-Codes also have the unique ability to present ideas and lives in realistic, humane and honest ways. Where Red-Headed Woman scandalizes and entertains, Waterloo Bridge affects the viewer on unnerving emotional levels. Both are equally valid, and represent just a couple facets of the deep and fascinating landscape of this period.

Mae Clarke plays Myra with mesmerizing intensity, her histrionics and hand-wringing always grounded in the truth of a moment. Her work is nuanced and expressive; the viewer can sense the changes in mood and outlook that flash across her face as the balance of power and information shift continually over the course of her scenes. Myra is an out-of-work chorus girl in wartime London who has been forced to walk the streets to pay her rent. Waterloo Bridge is the famed spot to pick up soldiers on leave, and it’s where she finds Douglass Montgomery’s Roy, an innocent and fair-minded young man, growing up quickly after all he’s seen. The film’s satellite characters cover the full spectrum of society and sympathy, each wielding some degree of control over the couple’s fate. When lovestruck Roy proposes, everyone — from her pal Kitty’s practical appeal to self-preservation (“Who says it’s stealing? Marriage is legal, ain’t it?”) to her would-be mother-in-law’s equally frank and level reasoning that it can never happen — prevails upon Myra to do the right thing, until the weight of her secret nearly drives her insane.

Myra’s situation is one that could never have been dealt with sympathetically under the full enforcement of the Hays Code. Here, Myra is presented as a woman with no means of survival but prostitution, who accepts this as true even as she deeply loathes herself for it. Her conflict is absolutely genuine. And her struggle is with a society that implicitly accepts it, but can never accept her: in rejecting her, Roy’s mother is kind, but matter-of-fact. A woman with her past cannot marry into his family. It’s simple, it’s true, it’s heartbreaking. Contrast this with attempts to cover the same ground a few years later: prostitution was addressed in cryptic terms (“clip joint,” “party girl”) and women were either carefully reformed or soundly punished for their undoubtedly vile and sinful occupation. Myra Deauville, Lily Powers, Jerry Martin and the rest were by contrast real women, whose horrific predicaments could shock more deeply than an unexpected glimpse of a nipple. These same women would soon all but disappear from movie screens for decades: although powerful and delightful roles would continue to serve leading women in Hollywood, only in brief and subversive glimpses would they continue to resemble real women.