Pre-Hayes Code movies were no where near as open with gore, nudity, or profanity as they are today, but they definitely do contain it. The 1930 film Morocco featured actress Marlene Dietrich dressed up in drag and kissing another woman, which at the time was pretty scandalous, but it also made the movie a big hit and Paramount a lot of money. Actress Mae West is another example of what existed in Hollywood during the Pre-Hayes code as she exhibited quite a bit of sex appeal and double entendre lines relating to sex (think of her as a prototype for Roger Moore era Bond Girls).
Because mass communication was still in its infancy, much of middle America (i.e. between the west coast and east coast) was largely unaware of this growing exhibition of art and it all kind of came crashing around them all at once. This also wasn't helped by tabloid papers that make ours today look like The Wall Street Journal. Combined with papers notably owned by William Randolph Hearst, overly sensationalized stories were written about the Godless and evil atrocities that were committed in Hollywood which helped skewer public perception and ruined the lives of some actors, most notably Fatty Arbuckle.
With people making mountains out of mole hills, the MPAA was initiated to start policing Hollywood before the government could do it for them which destroyed the careers of some individuals, such as Mae West. It also made it hard for Hollywood to adapt to the changing culture of the 1960's in the same way that music and literature could. Not helped by the reckless spending of money on lavish effect driven spectacle bombs like Cleopatra in an attempt to compete with television which made investors unwilling to invest money, the Hayes Code really was what made Hollywood almost all but collapse at the tail end of the 1960's.
With the inability to criticize religion or religious figures, as well as being unable to show gangsters doing their business, it made it really hard to work around it in a way that wouldn't violate the code. This caused film makers and studios to challenge the code, and in the 1964 film The Pawnbroker was the first film to feature female nudity since the Hayes Code took power almost 30-years prior. With that, other films started to experiment with what they could get away with and with the massive success of the film Easy Rider, "New Hollywood" was born. Also with the financial collapse at the end of the 1970's, Hollywood executives were far more lenient with what they would let their directors do, which is why you saw such a drastic change in tone and explicit material between the two decades.
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