Big Business Girl (1931)

(On Cable TV, April 2022) If you’re looking for a defining trope of the pre-Code era, it’s difficult to find better than ambitious, sexually independent women. Not yet restrained by the enforced tut-tutting of the Production Code, early-1930s female characters were free to use their intelligence and sex appeal in order to get what they wanted. Big Business Girl bakes in that concept right in its title, as the story follows a young university graduate (played by an equally young Loretta Young) as she threads a fine line between seducing business clients and keeping the affection of her romantic partner. It’s not that progressive by today’s standards (she’s far too subservient to her man’s wishes), but it’s often better than much of the later decades of neutered Production Code nonsense. Joan Blondell briefly pops up, but this is Young’s show and she does rather well even if the film itself doesn’t quite measure up to other independent-women pictures of the same time. Still, Big Business Girl is just salacious enough to be interesting to watch, and it does exemplify, even in a muted way, why the brief years of Pre-Code Hollywood still resonate better with today’s audiences than later films unable to make even semi-daring points.