This promo photo was made for the 1933 pre-Code musical Footlight Parade, which, as the image suggests, contained some fairly racy scenes. James Cagney is in the center here, with Ruby Keeler at left, two actresses we can't identify, and Lorraine Marshall at right. Movies made in 1933 and before are generally considered pre-Code, but the Hays Code censorship regime actually was created in increments beginning in 1927 before reaching something like final form in 1930. Few people had any interest in enforcing it right away, so it didn't become rigid until 1934, at which point it successfully shackled cinematic expression for thirty years, until Hollywood was driven to imitate the envelope pushing films coming out of Europe. The Code covered anything and everything: drugs, profanity, ridicule of the clergy, defeat of the law, and more, but of course it was primarily designed to block sexual material, which means that in practical terms, Cagney never got to be the center of a sandwich like this in a photo again. 

This publicity photo from Warner Bros. shows six members of the studio’s beauty chorus posing on a ladder that was part of a pirate ship being used in the 1933 Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade. This is not the first time this movie has been mentioned on Pulp Intl. We shared an excellent magazine cover related to it last year. Among the chorus girls who appeared in the film were nineteen-year-old Dorothy Lamour and twenty-two-year-old Ann Sothern, both just beginning their careers. The women above are not identified, but if we had to guess we’d say Lamour could be third from the top.

Above, a January 1935 cover of the French art/cinema magazine Pour Lire a Deux with cover stars James Cagney and Ruby Keeler from the 1933 Warner Brothers musical Footlight Parade, which opened in France in 1934. Inside you get lots and lots of artsy photos, most of them nude, and most of them great. See ten scans below.