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THE
REVIEW OF
COMMUNICATION Movies, Morality, and Censorship in
Pre-Code Hollywood
William D. Romanowski
Thomas Doherty. Pre-Code
Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema,
1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xiii + 430
pages. Notes and index. $49.50 (cloth); $19.50 (paper). Thomas Doherty’s Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 explores the short period in film history between the formal institution of the 1930 Production Code and its rigid enforcement by the Production Code Administration (PCA) beginning in July 1934. Part of the fascination with this era is that it offers the investigator the enticing question: What might have happened if the Production Code Administration had not been institutionalized? Doherty argues persuasively that the course Hollywood embarked on in the early years of sound and the Depression was dramatically altered by the institution of the PCA. “[P]re-Code Hollywood cinema points to a road not taken,” he asserts. “More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, [pre-Code films] look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe” (2). And so, in addition to film style and the studio system of production—the two key components of the classical Hollywood cinema as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson describe it in their seminal work, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960—the morality of the movies weighs in as a significant factor. As Doherty observes, “What makes Hollywood's classic age ‘classical’ is not just the film style or the studio system but moral stakes” (5). Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson set the beginning
of the classical Hollywood cinema in 1917; Doherty writes, “[T]he
problem with placing silent cinema under the rubric of classical
Hollywood cinema is that no one watches it.” He contends, “Except to
antiquarians and preservationists, silent cinema has little presence on
the cultural radar screen, its landmark films unrented on video, its
iconic images spotted only as fodder for video collage on MTV” (5). It
is the advent of sound and the cessation of silent film production, he
contends, that offers a better starting point for the classical
Hollywood cinema: “If film style and mode of production yoked to sound
are the prime ingredients of classical Hollywood cinema, then 1930 seems
the logical birth date, especially since it coincides so fortuitously
with the formal adoption of the Production Code” (5). It can be
argued, however, that sound is simply a narrative device added to the
classical Hollywood style of storytelling. And many silent films—the
comedies of Charlie Chaplin for example—are part of the collective
memory, while, as Doherty points out, most pre-Code films remain unknown
among general moviegoers. Staking 1930 as the birth date of the
classical Hollywood cinema is a small point in the book, but a large
claim that warrants attention. While it may be an attempt to heighten
the significance of the pre-Code period, it also tends to obfuscate
patterns of continuity from the 1920s. The apparatus of prior censorship
and manner of moviemaking during the Studio Era evolved from events that
occurred in the previous decade. In Sin In Soft Focus: Pre-Code
Hollywood, Mark A. Vieira uses the same markers to delineate the
pre-Code period, but also points out, “The term ‘pre-Code’ is
slightly misleading. Films of the 1920s abound with risqué elements,
and studio self-regulation began in 1927” (6). Doherty situates pre-Code films in the context of a “backlash” against the “‘modern’ attitude with its elusive standards” (106) and the immorality of the previous decade—“the flappers, speakeasies, and money-grubbing of the Jazz Age” (48)—which social and religious leaders perceived as the cause of the economic and spiritual crisis. In one sense, “The dislocations in American culture opened up new spaces on screen and, before the territory was placed off limits, filmmakers rushed in to test the air,” he writes. “For four short years, though, pre-Code Hollywood entertained, even embraced, visions of immorality and insurrection” (20). In another sense, however, a general sense of societal guilt factored into the inception of the Production Code: “From the vantage of religious leaders and social reformers, the perverse output was a sorry legacy of the wanton excesses of the 1920s, the corrupt past lingering into the devastated present and preventing spiritual renewal” (105). As potent symbols of American life, motion pictures occupied contested terrain; film producers, social scientists, and religious leaders all played a role in this struggle over cultural authority and control of the cultural functions of motion pictures. Clergy and censors protested films they considered immoral or subversive while filmmakers exploited popular social and moral attitudes with risqué and visceral images aiming to enhance box-office appeal during the early years of the Depression. Even though key players in this narrative represent various faith communities, religion is treated as largely peripheral to the main inquiry. There are early suggestions that the faith convictions of participants matter. For example, the “animating rationale” for the Production Code is described as “[d]eeply Catholic in tone and outlook” (7), Will Hays is identified as a Presbyterian elder (6), and Joseph Breen’s anti-Semitism is noted (386). But the varieties and peculiarities of the American religious community are reduced to a lowest common denominator and then subjugated to an overriding concern with politics and economics throughout the remainder of the account. That Jewish studio heads employed a prominent Protestant to head their trade organization and Catholics to write and administer the Production Code suggests that religious dynamics and perspectives are far more central to the discourse of the classical Hollywood cinema than this work allows. It follows that the complexity of prior censorship begins to take shape as a contest between artistic expression and box-office demands on the one hand, and quaint moral and religious factions on the other. While currents and key events in film history are woven into the narrative, the book is primarily an extensive and detailed reference work, cataloging significant films from this period. Each chapter presents general observations followed by a series of detailed descriptions of representative films. Doherty admits, “establishing a sensible fix between film and history is uncommonly difficult,” but finds a number of “links between the unguarded moments of pre-Code Hollywood and the convulsions of American culture” (16). As he points out, in the face of Depression realities, American cultural values, “myths of rugged individualism, upward mobility, material progress, frontier opportunities, and American exceptionalism . . . wilted before a wasted landscape of breadlines and Hoovervilles, forgotten men and fallen women” (16). In contrast to the film industry’s emphatic dictum that “The function of motion pictures is to ENTERTAIN,” (45) as Will Hays put it, some pre-Code films brought political ideology to the screen with “preachment yarns,” stories about “economic dislocation, grinding poverty, government corruption, official incompetence, injustice under the law, and rotten treatment all around” (44). Moral guardians and censor boards were up in arms over “sex films” that featured the “fallen woman or the bad girl” faced with “the threat of sexual violation and the hard necessity of risking virtue to keep a paycheck (131). Gangster films presented vice and violence as “the only possible stage on which to act out the American dream of material success and upward mobility” during the Great Depression (151). His treatment of the “racial adventure film” includes an interesting account of the Tarzan movies. The author grounds this genre in the “lure of miscegenation” (255) and also examines movies portraying Native Americans (Massacre), Asians (The Mask of Fu Manchu), African Americans (The Emperor Jones), concluding with a section on RKO’s King Kong, “the only pre-Code Hollywood picture that lives universally in the American imagination” (289). There is a chapter dealing with horror films, like Dracula, Frankenstein and Murders in the Rue Morgue as representing “social chaos” (296) and popular attitudes toward the elite class, whose presumptuousness was held responsible for bringing “down upon the whole community a supernatural vengeance” (307-8). Doherty shows how “expeditionary films” reflected “broader cultural impulses” (223) by introducing audiences to indigenous peoples in foreign lands, while still affirming the superiority of Western culture by portraying the filmmaker as an adventurer risking life and limb to return with his treasured images of primitive peoples: “Great White Photographer Brings Back Movies From Savage Land For American Moviegoers” (226). He also looks at newsreels, which inhabited the terrain between amusement and screen journalism, and observes that they largely downplayed the realities of the Depression because of an industry ethos that it was “100% entertainment” (214). Giving consideration to audience receptivity as a means of understanding the time, he notes: “Looking at the newsreel images of politicians, businessmen, experts, and evangelists, moviegoers registered support or contempt much as they cheered on the cavalry in a western or hissed the cad in a melodrama” (215). While the tone of this work suggests the author
opposes the infringement of prior censorship on film production, his
conclusion indicates an ambiguity. He observes that “to look back over
the first full century of the moving image, is to suspect that the most
vivid and compelling motion pictures—glorious as art, momentous as
texts—were created under the most severe and narrow-minded censorship
ever inflicted upon American cinema” (345). Even as they continue
today, debates about artistic quality and moral concerns, free
expression and free market, consumer boycott and cultural authority seem
paradoxical at times, animated by range of social and religious concerns
and perspectives. This book makes an important contribution to the
contemporary discourse, which is laced with a growing concern about the
social effects of motion pictures and even threats of federal
censorship. Doherty shows that the pre-Code period is a vital and rich
one for us to examine for what it reveals about the function of the
cinema as a central means of communication in our postmodern, democratic
society. William D. Romanowski is Professor of Communication
Arts and Sciences at Calvin College. Works Cited
Vieira, Mark A. Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999.
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