Blonde Venus was released in 1932, when the Depression was taking a fearful and historically unprecedented toll on jobs and savings and lives of working- and middle-class white people--not just socially marginalized minorities. The social-welfare safety net was years away. Roaring Twenties confidence and ballyhoo had vanished (Tallack 86-87). Ironically, at a time when women were being obliged to enter the work force (or attempt it) to survive, they were seen as invading forbidden territory and robbing men of jobs (Humphries passim).
Blonde Venus treats all of these cultural dynamics thematiccally and in the mise-en-scène by way of a narrative structure that has been described as an aesthetic of camp (Martin citing Sontag 285). The idea of Blonde Venus as camp doubtless owes something to the juxtaposition of elements of sentimental melodrama (good wife Helen falls into prostitution to finance her husband Ned's life-saving operation only to have him banish her) and over-the-top comic episodes (Helen stripping out of a gorilla suit, donning an out-to-here platinum 'fro, and famously singing "Hot Voodoo"--the hot-jazz title alone explains a lot). Also consistent with camp is the fact that the film was made during "the so-called pre-Code era" (Doherty 2).
Unlike all studio system feature films released after July 1934, pre-Code Hollywood did not adhere to the strict regulations on matters of sex, vice, violence, and moral meaning. . . . For four years, the Code commandments were violated with impunity and inventiveness (Doherty 2).
Censors at the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, whose code gave them input if not authority, pushed von Sternberg into three major rewrites because "compensating moral values" did not sufficiently punish Helen's adultery. Yet the film retained (for example) "Hot Voodoo," an opening scene with Helen and other nude chorus girls cavorting in a rural German river, and crass parley--in...