Two films shed light on production code's impact

What happens to a creative medium when frankness is forbidden? The movies turned out by the American film industry between 1934 and the rise of the counterculture three decades later offer countless examples, two of which can be seen Sunday night at the Harvard Film Archive. (Yes, it's Oscar night, but this is why God made TiVo.) The double bill "Before and After the Code" is an evening of peppy onscreen dialectic, showing what Hollywood cinema was like before the Motion Picture Production Code effectively censored what could be said and seen in commercial movies and how bizarrely contorted films could get afterward .

The deck is stacked, of course, but enjoyably so. "Counsellor at Law" (1933) comes with a script adapted by Broadway's Elmer Rice from his play and is directed by William Wyler , one of the greats; it stars John Barrymore as an up-from-the-streets Jewish lawyer serving the interests of the Astors and Vanderbilts. "Turnabout" (1940 ) is a B-level farce from the lowly Hal Roach studio, with minor stars in the leads and a roster of fallen talent (Mary Astor, Adolphe Menjou , Donald Meek ) in support.

The differences are still instructive and almost always a hoot. Both are workplace stories -- if they were made today, "Counsellor" would be a one-hour TV drama and "Turnabout" a sitcom. What's most striking about the earlier film is the class consciousness that permeates every frame. George Simon (Barrymore) came over from Europe in steerage and his Mama (Clara Langsner ) still has a Yiddish accent, but he passes for WASP in his Empire State Building offices, and the tension is driving him mad.

Simon handles the elite 400's divorce cases and gets heiresses off when they shoot their husbands, but the appearance in his office of a young man (Vincent Sherman ) beaten by the police for giving a Marxist speech in Union Square brings the lawyer up short. The Manhattan in "Counsellor at Law" is a lethal melting pot where secretaries step over the bodies of businessmen jumpers during their lunch breaks, and everyone is allowed to soar or fall on their own merits. The movie includes all their voices with a brazenness that seems miraculous nearly 75 years later.

By contrast, no one in "Turnabout" has a particular ethnicity except for the comic-Negro elevator man played with popping eyes by Ray Turner . The leads are all vaguely Protestant and all suspiciously chipper, yet this dopey farce somehow backs itself into cross-dressing, gender reversal, and gay camp while insisting that everything's in good, butch fun.

Tim (John Hubbard ) and Sally Willows (Carole Landis ) are a married odd-couple: He's an obnoxiously dynamic advertising executive who rises at 6, she's a lady-who-lunches who prefers sleeping until 10. They make a wish on a statue of a guru to trade places -- yes, that old gag -- and wake up wearing each other's PJ s and (here's where it gets weird) each other's voices.

Sally goes to Tim's job in his body, which means Hubbard gets to simper and moue and skip around with a purse; a scene in which "Tim" pals around with a client played by the ever-swishy Franklin Pangborn is a milestone in coded screen homosexuality. "Sally," meanwhile, is climbing up flagpoles to fix aerials, sitting like a man, and looking more than twice at the French maid (Yolande Mollot ).

How much of this sunny-side-up subversion is even conscious? It may depend on the individual player and the individual audience member; "Turnabout" is so childish in all other regards that it could be just an aberration of Hollywood kink. Or perhaps not; Hubbard does have quite the gleam in his eye. Should we be thankful for the code that made such warped entertainment possible, or scornful of what silliness repression can wreak? Better to marvel the movie exists at all and to look to our own culture for what can and can't be said.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more about movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies.