SummaryBy around 1930, the movies were a very ‘wet’ medium. The attractive picture they presented of drinking as part of a cosmopolitan, affluent lifestyle reflected and popularized a generational revolt against ‘Victorian morality’. In a kind of ‘pornography of drinking’, filmmakers reacted to code restrictions on showing drinking with increasingly bold teases, until some movies around 1930 appear to have been made with the idea that the audience will pay to watch people, and particularly women, drinking. After Repeal (1933), the movies continue to show much drinking, but without the self‐conscious symbolization of the preceding years. The movies amplified as they carried the new understanding