THE MOVIES AND THE CHURCHES

Guardians of Morality

From the days of the early nickelodeon, conservatives and protectors of morals had been concerned about motion pictures and their impact on their viewers, particularly the young. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Chicago, New York, and later other cities established local censorship boards to review films to ensure that their content did not corrupt the morals of the young. A variety of censoring boards with a variety of views came into being, but none was able to impose a national standard on the movie industry.

The Hays Office

This situation threatened to change when a series of scandals, including rape, murder, drug use, and general sexual misconduct, swept through Hollywood in the early 1920s. In the face of demands for some sort of government regulation, in 1922 the industry created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), later the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and hired Postmaster General Will Hays to serve as its head in an effort to block attempts to establish a national censorship agency. It was assumed that this Presbyterian elder and member of the Warren Harding administration was familiar enough with sin to be able to know it when he saw it on the screen. The Hays Office, as it was called, established and published a code for the industry in an attempt to avoid offending the general public and so managed to blunt the demand for government censorship.

Back to Sex and Violence

But by the 1930s concern over the impact of films on morals returned, as Hollywood, feeling the pinch of the Depression and responding to the new potential of talking films, produced a series of films that treated violent and sexual themes with an unusual directness. There were gangster films with criminal protagonists reveling in excess in the first reels and receiving their just desserts only at the end. Also, movies such as The Story of Temple Drake (1933), based on William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary (1931), dealt with rape and prostitution in a sensational manner. Mae West, who had long recognized the effectiveness of notoriety in advancing her stage career, became a symbol of this development when she moved to Hollywood and made a series of comedies filled with double entendres and frankly sexual situations. Rising concern about the content and effect of movies was widened when in 1933 Henry James Forman published Our Movie Made Children, based on a twelve-volume study of movies and their audiences sponsored by the Payne Fund. Forman's study indicted movies for weakening traditional moral standards and thus contributing to the problem of unruly youths of the decade. Something, he said, should be done.

The Breen Office

While Protestant groups, churches, and publications protested declining moral standards, they were too fragmented to mount an effective attack on what they perceived as Hollywood's moral vacuum. The Roman Catholic Church, however, devised means of raising the moral standards of the movie industry, partly through the influence of Joseph I. Breen, an assistant to Hays, who became head of the MPPDA's Production Code Administration in 1934. Breen was finally able to impose the regulations agreed upon in the Production Code, which had been adopted but generally ignored four years earlier. Now the Breen Office, as it was called, saw to it that the regulations were enforced.

The Code

The Production Code demanded cautious treatment of a variety of topics, including crime, sex, vulgarity, obscenity, profanity, dances, and repellent subjects such as brutality, apparent cruelty to children or animals, and the sale of women. Evil was always to be presented in a negative light and good in a positive light. Crime and sin were always to come to a bad end before the close. The code banned outright the depiction of white slavery, the use of drugs or the drug traffic, sexual "perversion," sexual relations between blacks and whites, and nudity. Religion and its ministers were always to be shown in a positive light.

The Legion of Decency

The Breen Office was able to impose its standards in large part because of the power of a new organization, the Legion of Decency, created in 1934 by the American Catholic bishops. Members of the legion, mostly Catholic, pledged "to remain away from all motion pictures, except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality." Through this threatened boycott the legion was able to deny to a significant section of the moviegoing public those films it deemed objectionable. The legion worked out a four-part category system for films as a guide for its estimated six million members. A-I was "Morally Unobjectionable for General Patronage"; A-II was "Morally Unobjectionable for Adults"; B films were "Morally Objectionable in Part for AH"; and C movies were "Disapproved" for all members of the legion. Children who belonged to the legion could attend A-II movies if their parents or guardians permitted. Joining the Legion of Decency became a regular part of Catholic behavior for nearly thirty years, offering an effective weapon to the power of the Breen Office in Hollywood.

Effects of Breen and the Legion

With the Breen Office reviewing content in Hollywood and the Legion of Decency certifying the morality of films actually brought into distribution, cries for censorship quickly died. The film industry monitored itself and adhered with little expressed grumbling to the Production Code standards. Consequently, the Legion of Decency found little to condemn. From February 1936 to November 1937, for instance, it reviewed 1,271 titles. Of these, 1,160 were rated A-I or A-II, and only thirteen were rated C—all of them European or independent productions. The restrictions were so effective that in 1939 there was general concern whether Rhett Butler could end his marriage with Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind with the widely known dialogue from Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel. In response to her question about what would become of her if he left, Butler responds, "Frankly … I don't give a damn." To the relief of many and the consternation of a few, the Breen Office permitted Clark Gable as Butler to say the startling phrase. Some things were too sacred for meddling.