If we asked you to think of an old-timey black-and-white movie, odds are you'd think of something earnest and family friendly, like It's a Wonderful Life or, at worst, a Three Stooges routine. You know, back in the innocent old-timey era when the most shocking thing you could see on a screen was some "guy smacked with a shovel" slapstick. Back when people cared about family values, damn it.
Yeah, it's funny how we rewrite history to make the present look worse. Because in reality, there's shit from your great-grandfather's day that would instantly get nailed with an NC-17 rating today:
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The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) Contains More Cocaine Than All of Modern Hollywood
Triangle Film Corporation
The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is a Sherlock Holmes spoof starring "scientific detective" Coke Ennyday, and it has one punchline and one punchline only: Ennyday does a metric shit-ton of cocaine. The opening shot of this 1916 film shows him wearing a bandolier of needles, and it only gets less subtle from there:
Triangle Film Corporation
He's sitting next to a jar labeled "COCAINE." No, seriously.
Our hero casually shoots up three times before the two-and-a-half-minute mark, because 1916 was a magical time when Hollywood had no rules and you could still score a coke prescription if your doctor was cool.
Triangle Film Corporation