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In response to a series of sex scandals that rocked the movie industry in the early 1920s, the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency implemented a code stipulating that movies stress proper behavior, respect for government, and "Christian values." Based on an extensive survey of original studio records, censorship files, and the Catholic Legion of Decency archives (whose contents are published here for the first time), Hollywood Censored examines how hundreds of films were expurgated to promote a conservative political agenda during the 1930s. By taking an innovative view of how movies were made, and the conditions that made them, Hollywood Censored brings together such chapters as "Movies and Modern Literature," "Beer, Blood and Politics," and "Film Politics and Industry Policy" to form a rare look at America's most famous industry.
- Sales Rank: #476051 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 1994-08-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x 1.10" w x 5.98" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
An eye-opening look at America's first culture war
By M. Bromberg
The early motion picture industry didn't just entertain audiences, it enticed them into movie palaces with spectacle, sex, and (increasingly) lurid tales of sin and seduction. This combination proved so successful that, by the early 1930s, a conservative religious movement emerged with an aim to "clean up" Hollywood's excesses, led by the Catholic Church but supported by preachers, ministers, and spiritual spokesmen nationwide. The Catholic Church's League of Decency became the first cultural crusade against what was perceived as a threat to the national character. Wielding an authority of equal parts religion and politics, the League saw to it that movies were banned outright, content was snipped and clipped, and production scripts were combed over for hints of immorality. Classic novels were re-written for the screen to pass the scrutiny of the hastily-created, reactionary Hays Office. Is this a good thing? There was a backlash among Hollywood writers; Black's recounting of William Faulkner creating the story of "Sanctuary" in three weeks ("the most horrific tale" Faukner could imagine, Black writes, "a morbid tale of rape, murder, sexual impotence and perversion") certainly seems like an outright challenge to the Paramount studio writers and censors, and the rewritten, completed film ("The Story of Temple Drake") turns the story inside out for a relatively less-scandalous ending.
Over the course of years, the Legion of Decency and the Hays Office's Production Code (which functioned as a presumptive industry watchdog) ensured that onscreen crime would not pay and immorality would be punished. Realism in Hollywood films got bleached out, but as the book makes clear the industry preferered to deal with religious moralists, and to police themselves with a nebulous code, rather than face government interference. In that regard America hasn't come very far, as the religious right's contemporary battles over entertainment and the morality of content in movies, TV, and the internet make clear. Recommended.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Organized Catholic Subversion of the Culture Industry
By BookwormX
Soon after movies became popular around the early 1900s, there were persistent attempts from conservative groups and individuals to censor movie content. The first ordinance to regulate the content of movies was enacted in Chicago in 1907, where police officers were assigned to use their own personal discretion to decide which movies were acceptable for the public. Chicago's was the model for movie censorship for the next 50 years. Exploiting a variety of scandals involving famous movie individuals such as Roscoe Arbuckle, director William Desmond Taylor, Wallace Reid, and Mary Pickford, 100 movie censorship bills had been introduced in 37 states by the 1920s, and formal censorship was already established in some states, including Florida.
The movie moguls wanted to project a clean image for Hollywood, so, in 1922 in response to the rising tide of complaints about movie content, they organized as a special-interest group and created a trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). As its public relations agent, the moguls hired the Harding administration's Postmaster General, Will Hays, a strait-laced, conservative Presbyterian to deal with public complaints. Hays was also the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his law firm worked for Peabody Coal where Hays met Joseph I. Breen, Peabody's PR agent (although not mentioned in this book, Hays reportedly admired Breen's success in putting down a major coal miners' strike.) who would later become chief of the movie Production Code Administration in 1934.
By 1929, a group of Catholic laymen and priests were complaining about what they perceived to be the declining moral quality in movies; particularly dangerous, they believed, due to the advent of talking movies (1926 was the final year of totally silent cinema).
It was at this point that right-wing Catholic publisher of movie trade periodicals, Martin Quigley, and Father Daniel Lord, S.J., professor of dramatics at St. Louis University and editor of the widely read The Queen's Work, which preached morality and ethics to Catholic youth, drafted a Catholic movie code. Lord, like so many Catholic intellectuals, deplored the modern trend in drama and literature, especially from American writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, whose literature described a nation driven by political corruption and industrial greed. John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Oneill, and William Faulkner painted unflattering portraits of the U.S. that dealt in increasingly realistic (as opposed to the Catholics' preferred idealistic) terms with modern ideas and social problems, and changing moral standards (some of these names were also listed in the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum). Father Lord wanted his young readers to be wary of such ideas and teachers who advocated them, as well as other Catholic-proscribed topics such as evolution, birth control, abortion, secular education (public schools), and the growth of communism (stemming from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution).
The Lord code was a combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics and pop psychology, an ideological (as opposed to realist) amalgam that would control the content of Hollywood film into the 1950s (it's in Appendix A and online). Fundamentally, the Lord code declared that movies are to be regarded primarily as entertainment and that “Films should be twentieth-century morality plays that illustrated proper behavior to the masses”; for example, films must portray the police as respectable, honest and efficient. Direct quote from the book: “Lord and his colleagues shared a common objective with Protestant film reformers: They all wanted entertainment films to emphasize that the church, the government, and the family were the cornerstones of an orderly society, that success and happiness resulted from respecting and working within this system. Entertainment films, they felt, should reinforce religious teachings that deviant behavior, whether criminal or sexual, cost violators the love and comforts of home, the intimacy of family, the solace of religion, and the protection of law. Films should be twentieth-century morality plays that illustrated proper behavior to the masses.” Father Lord, convinced that movies were undermining church teachings and destroying family life, wanted a partnership among the movie industry, church, and state that would advocate a fair, moral, and orderly society; thus, the political issues and social problems caused by the Depression were not acceptable for the movies, along with the usual complaints about depictions of sex, abortion, marital infidelity, divorce, miscegenation, smoking, drinking, civil strife, labor/management discord, government corruption, injustice, etc. Conservative reformers deemed those matters unfit for the movies. Films that dealt with racial prejudice, lynching, and the myriad of social and political issues confronting America at the beginning of the 1930s were labeled as “propaganda” and “leftist.” Father Lord urged Hays to press producers for more films about American heroes – business and industry leaders, sports figures – and western dramas and religious films that would promote idealized American values. On January 11, 1930 the producers accepted Lord's code, although Hays enforced it leniently until July 1, 1934 when the zealous chief movie censor Joseph Breen took over (significantly, Breen, a devout right-wing Catholic, was rabidly anti-semitic, anti-communist, anti-liberal, anti-organized labor). Thus, 1934 was the year when artistic freedom in movie making changed from relatively liberal into conformity with conservative Catholic values. All parties agreed to keep the new code and its Catholic connections a secret from the public until, ostensibly, a formal announcement could be made. Hays served as the front man for movie censorship while Breen and especially the Catholic connection remain virtually unknown to the public.
In 1933, when the Lord code wasn't being enforced to their satisfaction, Catholics launched a national crusade, the Legion of Decency, which signed millions of Catholics to a pledge to boycott movies judged unacceptable by Catholic authorities, and their boycotts were ultimately successful in forcing the studios to produce movies that would pass the censors.
Unlike protestants, who were not united in one all-powerful group, the Catholic hierarchy could readily organize boycotts and other collective action to impose their will on the movie industry, and this collective organizational capability, in collaboration with Breen, is how Catholics, rather than other groups, became the main organized force behind movie censorship from the mid-1930s onward.
This book's author critiques a few of the movies that significantly reflect alterations from the original book or script to gain Breen's approval: Anna Karenina (1935); The Barbary Coast (1935); The Garden of Allah (1936); The President Vanishes (post-code 1934); Black Fury (1935, about coal mine labor/management problems in an era when coal company towns were ruled like feudal estates); Fury (1936, rubes organize a lynch mob); They Won't Forget (1937); Black Legion (1937, there was an anti-union terrorist group of this name, secretly funded by GM board member, Irenee Dupont); These Three (1936, an exclusive private school operated by two women is driven out of business as a result of their imputed homosexuality); Dead End (1937); Idiot's Delight (1939); Blockade (1938, about the Spanish civil war); It Can't Happen Here (production was halted due to expected bans in Nazi-occupied Europe). In contrast, "Gabriel Over the Whitehouse" is a pre-1934 left-oriented political fantasy in which the president sides with the poverty-stricken common people against big business during the Hoover depression years of 1929-33. In addition, Breen removed Mae West's movies from circulation for the duration of his dictatorship. West was one of the most popular stars of the 1930s and, probably because of her popularity and liberal orientation, she was relentlessly targeted by Breen.
Foreshadowing the McCarthy era of the 1950s, an internal Legion of Decency report in 1938 warned Catholic bishops that the Hollywood “leftists are losing no opportunity to push and ballyhoo films of [a] social nature.” The Legion's list of show business leftists included Clifford Odets, John Howard Lawson, William Dieterle, Paul Muni, James Cagney, Jean Muir, Donald Ogden Stewart, Henry Fonda, Edward Arnold, Ernest Hemingway, and Lewis Milestone. These were some of the same artists who would later be interrogated and/or blacklisted during the McCarthy inquisition (Senator Joseph McCarthy was a right-wing Catholic), which suggests that the Catholic Legion of Decency was probably the behind-the-scenes instigator behind the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklisting and purges of the 1950s. The Legion's 1938 report also branded such Hollywood organizations as the Anti-Nazi League, the Screen Actors' Guild, and the Screen Writers' Guild as communist front organizations. Appendix B has a list of “Films Condemned by the Legion of Decency.” Appendix A has “Working Draft of the Lord-Quigley Code Proposal.” More about the history of movie censorship can be found online (such as “Motion Picture Production Code”), and there are other books about movie censorship, such as “Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration” by Thomas Doherty, which explains how Hays and Breen first met and formed their business relationship.
This is an excellent book for readers who want a left perspective about the culture industry, especially movies. By comparison, movie critiques and reviews from mainstream reviewers are generally superficial and misleading, focusing primarily on the movies' entertainment value, essentially in conformity with Father Lord's expectations. Partly as a result of the knowledge I gained from reading this book, I rarely watch movies anymore.
16 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Romanism and culture: A "B" Movie
By M KIRK-DUGGAN
What enabled one viciously anti-semetic Catholic, Joe Breen, to control an entire industry? This delightful scholarly tome gives a partial answer: the industry wanted to have its product go to the largest possible audience, despite local and national boards of censors. By censoring themselves, they obtained a pugnacious Irish Catholic who could browbeat bishops, state legislators, and others. The only price was to meet this one person's private moral code: to make movies that would not offend 12 year old girls in convent schools. This history of the Production Code Authority, and how it was exercised is par excellence. What gave Breen his power was a confluence of Catholic bankers, vertical integration from studio through distributor to exhibitor, coupled with mandatory booking at the exhibition level. The weakness for the studios was Catholic threats of boycotts at the midwestern exhibitor level where the studios were weakest. This book should be coupled with the author's "Catholic Crusade Against the Movies" and the pictoral "Sin in Soft Focus." An interesting footnote is the KKK response to the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency. Does the revival of Catholic horror of blasphemy, in the so-called Catholic League of the 1990s pose a similar threat? Probably not, since the Fr. Lord's Legion of Decency was focused on Jewish studio heads, and the Catholic League objects to Catholic movie makers and Catholic television writers. The PCA did more than condemn the use of angora sweaters in the finished movies, it forbade any movie that was social in comment or controversial in its politics. Somehow it even managed to offend William Randolph Hearst, a honor usually reserved to Orson Wells and "Rosebud."
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