Pre-Code Hollywood - After The Pre-Code Era

After The Pre-Code Era

Censors like Martin Quigley and Joseph Breen understood that:

a private industry code, strictly enforced, is more effective than government censorship as a means of imposing religious dogma. It is secret, for one thing, operating at the pre-production stage. The audience never knows what has been trimmed, cut, revised, or never written. For another, it is uniform—not subject to hundreds of different licensing standards. Finally and most important, private censorship can be more sweeping in its demands, because it is not bound by constitutional due process or free-expression rules—in general, these apply to only the government—or by the command of church-state separation ... there is no question that American cinema today is far freer than in the heyday of the Code, when Joe Breen's blue pencil and the Legion of Decency's ever-present boycott threat combined to assure that films adhered to Catholic Church doctrine.

Termed by Breen as "Compensating moral value", the maxim was that "any theme must contain at least sufficient good in the story to compensate for, and to counteract, any evil which relates." Hollywood could present evil behavior, but only if it were eradicated by the end of the film, "with the guilty punished, and the sinner redeemed".

Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty summarized the practical effects:

Even for moral guardians of Breen's dedication, however, film censorship can be a tricky business. Images must be cut, dialogue overdubbed or deleted, and explicit messages and subtle implications excised from what the argot of film criticism calls the "diegesis". Put simply, the diegesis is the world of the film, the universe inhabited by the characters existing in the landscape of cinema. "Diegetic" elements are experienced by the characters in the film and (vicariously) by the spectator; "nondiegetic" elements are apprehended by the spectator alone.... The job of the motion picture censor is to patrol the diegesis, keeping an eye and ear out for images, languages, and meanings that should be banished from the world of film.... The easiest part of the assignment is to connect the dots and connect what is visually and verbally forbidden by name. ... More challenging is the work of the textual analysis and narrative rehabilitation that discerns and redirects hidden lessons and moral meanings.

The censors thus expanded their jurisdiction from what was seen to what was implied in the spectator's mind. In The Office Wife (1930), which features Joan Blondell, several of Blondell's disrobing maneuvers were strictly forbidden and the implied image of the actress being naked just off-screen was deemed too suggestive even though it relied upon the audience using their imaginations, so post-Code releases of the film had scenes which were blurred or rendered indistinct, if allowed at all.

After the July 1934 decision by the studios put the power over film censorship in Breen's hands he appeared in a series of newsreel clips promoting the new order of business, assuring Americans that the motion picture industry would be removed of "the vulgar, the cheap, and the tawdry" and that pictures would be made "vital and wholesome entertainment". All scripts now went through PCA, and several films playing in theaters were ordered withdrawn. The first film Breen censored in the production stage was the Joan Crawford film, Forsaking All Others. Although Independent film producers vowed they would give "no thought to Mr. Joe Breen or anything he represents", they caved on their stance within one month of making it. The fact remained that the major studios owned most of the successful theaters in the country. And studio heads such as Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures had already agreed to stop making indecent films. In several large cities audiences booed when the Production seal appeared before films. The Catholic Church was pleased, however, and in 1936, Pope Pius XI stated that the U.S. film industry "has recognized and accepts its responsibility before society." The Legion condemned zero films produced by the MPPDA between 1936 and 1943.

A coincidental upswing in the fortunes of several studios was publicly explained by Code proponents such as the Motion Picture Herald as proof positive that the code was working. Another fortunate coincidence for Code supporters was the torrent of famous criminals such as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde that were killed by police shortly after the PCA took power. Corpses of the outlaws were shown in newsreels around the country, alongside clips of Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly in Alcatraz. Among the unarguably positive aspects of the Code being enforced was the money it saved studios in having to edit, cut, and alter films to get approval from the various state boards and censors. The money saved was in the millions annually. A spate of more wholesome family films featuring performers such as Shirley Temple took off. Stars such as James Cagney redefined their images. Cagney played a series of patriots, and his gangster in 1937's Angels with Dirty Faces purposefully acts like a coward when he is executed so that children who look up to him will cease their admiration. Breen in essence neutered Groucho Marx, removing most of his jokes which directly referenced sex, although some sexual references slipped through unnoticed in the Marx Brothers post-Code pictures. In the political realm, films such Mr. Smith Goes to Washington where James Stewart tries to change the American system from within while reaffirming its core values, stand in stark contrast to Gabriel over the White House where a dictator is needed to cure America's woes.

Some Pre-Code movies suffered irreparable damage from censorship after 1934. When studios attempted to re-issue films from the 1920s and early 1930s, they were forced to make extensive cuts. Films such as Animal Crackers (1930), Mata Hari (1931), Arrowsmith (1931), and A Farewell to Arms (1932) exist only in their censored versions. Many other films survived intact because they were too controversial to be re-released, such as The Maltese Falcon (1931), which was remade a decade later with the same name, and thus never had their master negatives edited. In the case of Convention City (1933), the entire film was destroyed because the Breen Office refused to budge.