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³ The case for “pre-Code Hollywood” was made by Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1994; first published 1975, 175–9Google Scholar, and more recently by Doherty, Thomas, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. A critique of such formulations is provided by Maltby, Richard, “More Sinned against than Sinning: The Fabrications of ‘Pre-Code Cinema,’” Senses of Cinema, 29 (2003)Google Scholar, online journal. See also Jacobs, Lea, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman film, 1928–1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁴ A formula is a “combination or synthesis of specific cultural conventions with a more universal story form or archetype.” Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 6Google Scholar.

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¹³ The American Film Institute lists only one film with a gold digger theme in 1929 (Gold Diggers of Broadway), but as the Depression deepened the number increased: six in 1930, nine in 1931, 10 in 1932, and 14 in 1933. The AFI listing is not comprehensive, but it indicates the trend. The prominence of the gold digger in the early 1930s was also evident in popular music. Scheurer, Timothy E., “Goddesses and Golddiggers: Images of Women in Popular Music of the 1930s,” Journal of Popular Culture, 24 (1990), 23–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³¹ Sonnet, Esther, “Ladies Love Brutes: Reclaiming Female Pleasures in the Lost History of Hollywood Gangster Cycles, 1929–1931,” in Grieveson, Lee, Sonnet, Esther, and Stanfield, Peter (eds.), Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 93–119, 98Google Scholar.

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³³ McLaren, 175–81.

³⁴ Curry, Ramona, Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 78–79Google Scholar.

³⁵ Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 82–83.

³⁶ We only hear about her return to the industrial town. We do not see it because Stanwyck was unavailable to film additional scenes. Jacobs states that, in most of the gold digger films in which the gold digger is triumphant, the ending is at odds with the more typical romantic or sentimental classical happy end, but her own analysis of the films shows that happy endings with gold diggers who have retained their cynicism were the exception rather than the rule. Jacobs, 52–84, 132–49.

³⁷ On the differences among gold diggers in Gold Diggers of 1933 see Babington, Bruce and Evans, Peter Williams, Blue Skies and Silver Linings: Aspects of the Hollywood Musical (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 59–64Google Scholar.

³⁸ The pre-Code films of Mae West were exceptional insofar as there was as much emphasis on the sexual pleasure she received from men, expressed in her verbal ripostes, and from presenting herself as sexual spectacle as from the material benefits that she received from her exploitation of sexuality.

³⁹ Jacobs, 113–18.

⁴⁰ Sklar, Movie-Made America; Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood.

⁴¹ Maltby, “More Sinned against than Sinning.”

⁴² Maltby.

⁴³ Brauer, Ralph A., “When the Lights Went Out: Hollywood, the Depression, and the Thirties,” in Marsden, Michale T., Nachbar, Johen G., and Grogg, Sam L. Jr. (eds.), Movies as Artifacts: Cultural Criticism of Popular Film (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 25–43, 29Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Smedley, Nick, A Divided World: Hollywood Cinema and Emigré Directors in the Era of Roosevelt and Hitler, 1933–1948 (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), 47Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Maltby. See also Jacobs; and Vasey, Ruth, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), especially 131–32Google Scholar.