June 13, 1934—Censorship in American movies, long honored more in the breach than in fact, took hold for real with the establishment of the Production Code Administration to oversee what was morally acceptable for the public. For the next generation, film studios would struggle over how to get their products past this unit.
American film, born as a medium in the Progressive Era, often implicitly dealt with matters that obsessed the larger national culture—sources of crime, the role of women, political corruption, divorce. At the same time, they reflected the most popular extant form of American entertainment—vaudeville—with often bawdy humor and risqué sexual situations. Many reformers, terrified by the ills brought by immigrants, believed nickelodeons were breeding grounds for vice, and sought to shut them down.
By the early 1920s, Hollywood hired Will Hays, former postmaster-general in the Harding Administration, to ward office the rising ride of complaints and earn good will with a GOP-controlled administration and Congress. Hays was, in fact, an amiable fellow who, moguls discovered, could be influenced many times to see things their way.
The early years of the talkies exerted new pressure on the Hays Office. The country was living through turbulent social change: a Prohibition regime increasingly defined, a financial system rocked to its foundations, and—as a byproduct of this—the rise of tough, sexually liberated young women who dared to live independently.
By 1934, things came to a head. FDR’s activist Democratic administration was considering regulating movies, as part of the amusement trades, under the National Industrial Recovery Act. In addition to fearing interference with their business practices, film industry moguls also worried that the government would regulate content.
At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church in America was raising the alarm about morality in film. American film was witnessing legal authority disrespected (I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang), violence perpetrated (upteen mobster movies from Cagney and Edward G. Robinson), and sex (Hedy Lamarr’s notorious Ecstasy). The Legion of Decency, formed in that year, threatened a boycott of Hollywood.
Though the Legion was led by Catholics, its petitions were open to Protestants and Jews, and enough of the latter two groups had joined by mid-year that the Legion could claim two million members. On June 13, the Board of Directors of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association met in New York and unanimously passed a resolution setting up the Production Code Administration.
For the next 20 years, until his retirement, the PCA was headed by Joseph Breen, a former journalist and publicity director. It was his duty to enforce a strict code that outlawed depictions of profanity, excessive violence, illegal drugs, and risqué sexual elements on screen.
During this time, Breen—a prototypical Irish Puritan—blue-penciled films of all kinds, from big to low budget. His regime gave producers, directors, and screenwriters hives. Saying no is never popular, and there is no doubt that the code in place during those years made some content so watered-down that audiences had serious problems figuring out characters’ motivations.
(For examples of these, see A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which past histories of Tennessee Williams’ protagonists can’t be understood without realizing that homosexuality is being alluded to). It created a black-and-white moral universe that simply doesn’t exist in the real world.
And yet, I can only manage two cheers for the end of Breen’s undoubted moral hectoring. The need to pass muster with his office induced filmmakers to employ elaborate visual metaphors that served as highly creative means of conveying the idea that sex and violence were taking place.
In A Place in the Sun, for instance, George Stevens hints unmistakably at what is going on with Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters with a gramophone that continues playing…and playing…and playing, as the camera moves away from the two in a clinch. In Oliver Twist, David Lean does not show the final moments of Bill Sykes murdering Nancy, but conveys the terror through the dog desperately whining and scratching to get in the room where the murder is taking place.
The end of the production code in the 1960s—not long after Breen’s own demise, in 1965—also meant that Hollywood starlets would be increasingly objectified. When women had to keep their clothes on, they needed to be something other than sex objects—given dialogue that stressed their other roles in life. It became harder and harder to imagine them in these roles with the rise of more sexually explicit movies. With desirability an increasing job requirement for leading ladies, many felt no choice but to submit to plastic surgery.
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