The Sex Goddess in American Film, 1930–1965: Jean Harlow, Mae Wes ...

At the time, during the pre–Joseph Breen enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, this emphasis on a woman's sexuality represented the early and relatively more relaxed attitudes toward regulating onscreen depictions of women's sexuality.² While much has been written about censorship and the Code's effects on depicting bad women's sexuality on screen, little has been written about what these images of hyper-feminine sexuality actually may mean. The over-determined positioning of Kitty, the blonde sex goddess/gold digger, in a luxurious satin-clothed bed directly yokes hyper-feminine women's sexuality to capitalistic fantasies about, and desirings for, an easy gain of extreme wealth and luxury that precludes all necessity of usual capitalistic ideas of labor. The idea of sex, then, as it is embodied in the image of gold digger, becomes a site of both filmic and economic desire, wherein the image of the gold digger cinematically seduces the viewer into fantasies of leisure and wealth.³ Additionally, these sexual and economic hyper-feminine images are further gendered and racialized by the more traditional cultural ideas of American “superior” racial characteristics: the hyper-feminine bodies of white, Anglo-Saxon, blonde women of Northern European descent.⁴

While I will return to Dinner at Eight later in this discussion, at this point it is interesting to mention that, as the gold-digger films progress throughout the decade of the 1930s, with the deepening of the Depression, as well as the enforcement of the Code, the film industry shifts the connotations of the gold digger's iconicity, more often exchanging its good moral connotation to bad, from glittering symbol of economic hope to that of subversive, manipulative prostitute. While certainly earlier silent-era films, such as A Woman There Was, starring Theda Bara, and Pandora's Box with Louise Brooks, as well as others, depicted prostitution and bad women, they were a different kind of bad: a vamp, or predatory female, who seemed to care less about realizing capitalist wealth than they did, siren-like, seducing witless men to their doom.⁵