Years when there was nothing like a dame

Frances Dee fondly remembers her plum role in the 1933 movie “Blood Money.” “She was a kleptomaniac, a nymphomaniac and anything in between,” Dee recalls with a smile.

In “Design for Living,” also from 1933, Miriam Hopkins’ character, Gilda, shares a Paris flat with two men. “It’s true we have a gentlemen’s agreement,” she says on-screen, “but unfortunately I’m no gentleman.”

The free-spirited, unapologetic dames of Hollywood’s “pre-code” era get their due in the sassy documentary “Complicated Women,” tonight at 8 on Turner Classic Movies. The film, directed and co-written by Hugh Munro Neely and narrated by Jane Fonda, is based on movie critic Mick La Salle’s book of the same title.

The network also is screening a 26-film festival of pre-code titles on Tuesdays throughout May, starting tonight at 9 with “The Divorcee” (1930), a classic tale of infidelity and inequality starring Norma Shearer, and continuing with the likes of “A Free Soul,” “Frisco Jenny,” “Night Nurse” and “She Done Him Wrong.”

In the silent era of the 1920s, female characters were divided into ingenues and vamps. From 1934 to 1968, when Hollywood’s so-called Hays Code was enforced, female characters were held to a strict set of rules aimed at protecting the public from any hint of impropriety.

But during a nearly forgotten five-year span, the screen was dominated by women who, as La Salle puts it, “took the stereotypes and made them complicated.”

They could be bad and beautiful. Barbara Stanwyck sleeps her way to the top of one bank in “Baby Face” and masterminds the robbery of another in “Ladies They Talk About,” both from 1933.

The films also could address social issues such as premarital sex, unwed motherhood and illegal abortion with startling realism.

Censorship chilled not only the fun of pre-code Hollywood but also many of its provocative ideas. Laments film historian Mark Vieira, “It kept mature thought from an audience that was ready for it.”