A feisty rebuke to the then-recently inaugurated Production Code measures, Dames follows a tenacious crew of Broadway radicals, led by Dick Powell and Joan Blondell, as they develop an enormous production called “Sweet and Hot” to the great dismay of a legion of prissy moralists working tooth and nail to halt its realization. Viewed today, it is easy to wonder how the thin narrative, so transparently a flimsy decoy for the film’s metatextual arguments, was able to hoodwink censors. Berkeley’s musical numbers in this film are some of his most inspired. “The Girl at the Ironing Board” is a silly, riotous vision of laundresses lusting after semi-animate long johns, with the subtext of “clean” women embracing “dirty” imaginations mined for maximum erotic innuendo. “I Only Have Eyes For You” envisions the face of Ruby Keeler magnifying and multiplying in the mind of Powell, a bit that transforms sexual desire into something dizzying and delirious. Even more provocative is the titular number, an id explosion about as blunt in its exaltation of female form and sexuality as ever conceived in Hollywood.