Pre-Code Hollywood - End of An Era

End of An Era

Pre-Code films began to draw the ire of various religious groups, some Protestant but mostly a contingent of Roman Catholic crusaders. Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, apostolic delegate to the Catholic Church in the United States, called upon Roman Catholics in the United States to unite against the surging immorality of films. As a result, in 1933 the Catholic Legion of Decency, headed by the Reverend John T. McNicholas (later renamed the National Legion of Decency), was established to control and enforce decency standards and boycott films they deemed offensive. They created a rating system for films that started at "harmless" and ended at "condemned", with the latter denoting a film that was a sin to watch. The Legion spurred several million Roman Catholics across the U.S. to sign up for the boycott, allowing local religious leaders to determine which films to protest. Conservative Protestants tended to support much of the crackdown, particularly in the South, where anything relating to the state of race relations or miscegenation could not be portrayed. Although the Central Conference of American Rabbis joined in the protest, it was an uneasy alliance as there had always been whispers that at least some of the vitriol from the Christian groups occurred because many studio executives were Jewish.

Hays opposed direct censorship, considering it "Un-American". He had stated that although there were some tasteless films in his estimation, working with filmmakers was better than direct oversight, and that, overall, films were not harmful to children. Hays blamed some of the more prurient films on the difficult economic times which exerted "tremendous commercial pressure" on the studios more than a flouting of the code. Catholic groups became enraged with Hays and as early as July 1934 were demanding that he resign from his position, which he did not, although his influence waned and Breen took control, with Hays becoming a functionary.

The Payne Study and Experiment Fund was created in 1927 by Frances Payne Bolton to support a study of the influence of fiction on children. The Payne Fund Studies, a series of eight books published from 1933 to 1935 which detailed five years of research aimed specifically at the cinema's effects on children, were also gaining publicity at this time, and became a great concern to Hays. Hays had said certain pictures might alter "... that sacred thing, the mind of a child ... that clean, virgin thing, that unmarked state" and have "the same responsibility, the same care about the thing put on it that the best clergyman or the most inspired teacher would have." Despite its initial reception, the main findings of the study were largely innocuous. It found that cinema's effect on individuals varied with age and social position, and that pictures reinforced audiences' existing beliefs. The Motion Picture Research Council (MPRC, led by honorary vice president Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR's mother and executive director, the Rev. William H. Short), which funded the study, was not pleased. An "alarmist summary" of the study's results written by Henry James Forman appeared in McCall's, a leading women's magazine of the time, and Forman's book, Our Movie Made Children, which became a best-seller, publicized the Payne Fund's results, emphasizing its more negative aspects.

The social environment created by the publicity of the Payne Fund Studies and religious protests reached such a fever pitch that a member of the Hays Office described it as a "state of war". However, newspapers including The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), New Orleans Times Picayune, Chicago Daily News, Atlanta Journal, Saint Paul Dispatch, the Philadelphia Record and Public Ledger, the Boston American and New York's Daily News, Daily Mirror, and Evening Post all lambasted the studies. When discussing the Supreme Court's 1915 decision, film historian Gregory Black argues that the efforts of reformers might have been lessened had "filmmakers been willing to produce films for specialized audiences (adults only, family, no children)... but the movers and shakers of the industry wanted or needed the largest possible market." The most provocative pictures were the most profitable, with the 25% of the motion picture industry's output that was the most sensational supporting the cleaner 75%.

By 1932, there was an increasing movement for government control. By mid-1934 when Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia called for a Catholic boycott of all films, and Raymond Cannon was privately preparing a congressional bill supported by both Democrats and Republicans which would introduce Government oversight, the studios decided they had had enough. They re-organized the enforcement procedures giving Hays and the recently appointed Joseph I. Breen, a devout Roman Catholic, head of the new Production Code Administration (PCA), greater control over censorship. The studios agreed to disband their appeals committee and to impose a $25,000 fine for producing, distributing, or exhibiting any film without PCA approval. Hays had originally hired Breen, who had worked in public relations, in 1930 to handle Production Code publicity, and the latter was popular among Catholics. Joy began working solely for Fox Studios, and Wingate had been bypassed in favor of Breen in December 1933. Hays became a functionary, while Breen handled the business of censoring films. Breen was a rabid anti-Semite, who was quoted as stating that Jews "are, probably, the scum of the earth." When Breen died in 1965, the trade magazine Variety stated, "More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture."

Although the Legion's impact on the more effective enforcement of the code is unquestionable, its influence on the general populace is harder to gauge. A study done by Hays after the Code was finally fully implemented found that audiences were doing the exact opposite of what the Legion had recommended. Each time the Legion protested a film it meant increased ticket sales; unsurprisingly, Hays kept these results to himself and they were not revealed until many years later. In contrast to big cities, boycotts in smaller towns were more effective and theater owners complained of the harassment they received when they exhibited salacious films.

Many actors and actresses, such as Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck, and Clark Gable, continued their careers apace after the Code was enforced. However, stars like Ruth Chatterton, Lyle Talbot, and Warren William, who excelled during this period, struggled and are mostly forgotten today. Mae West in particular had a difficult time transferring her bawdy persona over into the new era. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst went to great lengths to denigrate actresses such as West (whose name he later banned from all Hearst publications) in his papers, further lessening their prospects.