“Pre-Code” does not mean Hollywood had no censorship rules. The Production Code existed before 1934. What changed that year was enforcement: the Production Code Administration began requiring approval before films could receive a seal for broad release.
The years just before that crackdown produced movies full of sexual innuendo, kept women, gangsters, corrupt businessmen, interracial tension, and morally complicated endings. Mae West built films around authorship and erotic command. Jean Harlow could play women whose ambitions were not softened into apology.
The fun of exploring the period is that it resists the stereotype of old movies as automatically prim. A 1932 studio comedy can feel more candid than a movie made a decade later.
The Code did not remove adult subjects, but it changed how they could be represented. Suggestion, euphemism, visual metaphor, and narrative punishment became more important tools.