Its lurid reputation wasn’t enough to prepare me for William Cowen’s “Kongo” (1932), the most out-there of a raft of pre-codes released recently by the Warner Archive Collection — the pioneering and ...

It’s only seven little letters, with a hyphen thrown in just for the heck of it, but to people in the know, the phrase “pre-Code” signifies cinematic buried treasure of the most satisfying kind.

"That was the film that brought Mae West to the movies in a big way," said William Patrick Day, a professor of cinema studies and English at Oberlin College. "She had been a vaudeville and Broadway ...