Mae West’s liberated view of female sexuality gave impetus to the new guidelines for industry censorship known as the Hays Production Code – which, for many film historians, is the very reason Screwball Comedy exists. The genre was born as a reaction to the Code, finding ever more inventive ways to subvert it. Featuring a very young Cary Grant – a Screwball Comedy regular – it is the film that propelled both him and West to fame.

Caroline Cassin is an Assistant Programmer at the British Film Institute and hosts the monthly pre-Code cinema series, Women & Cocaine, at the Cinema Museum in London.