The Production Code
After the coming of sound, Hollywood motion pictures began increasingly to push the boundaries of acceptable content, putting the studios in a bind. On the one hand, films built around salacious topics sold tickets; on the other hand, powerful forces were intent on ensuring that the movies were used for “moral” purposes. Between 1930, after most studios began reshaping their output to sound pictures, and 1934, when censorship came to Hollywood, there was what has come to be known as the Pre-Code Era.
The “Code” refers to the Hollywood Motion Picture Production Code, which is a system of censorship that was instituted and enforced beginning partway through 1934, and which lasted until 1966. The Production Code is the reason that, when you watch Classic Hollywood films, you don’t hear the characters curse. It’s why there are no explicit sex scenes or any moments of nudity. It’s also why men and women, even married couples, tend to sleep in separate, single beds, rather than share one. The violence is restrained, largely avoiding blood and excessive gore.
The Production Code was a system of self-censorship that the movie business instituted on its own. In the early 1930s, the studios were afraid that if they did not make an effort to restrain on-screen content, they would suffer mass boycotts at the hands of The Catholic Church, which was leading a charge against what they saw as moral degradation in the movies. Essentially, the Church, which was extremely powerful in urban areas where many of the studios had ownership stakes in movie houses that played their films, could tell their parishioners to stop going to the movies, and there was a reasonable chance that such a direction could impact the bottom line. The studio heads were also afraid that the federal government would institute a system of censorship if they did nothing, so rather than submit to federal regulation, they decided to create and enforce a system of their own. Out of this precarious moment, with the economic pressures of the Great Depression taking their toll on the studios’ revenues, the Production Code was born.
You should read the Production Code. You can find it here.
It worked differently from the contemporary ratings system (PG, PG-13, R, etc.) that you are likely familiar with. Today, filmmakers have some sense of how their films will be rated while they make them, but the rating is a label applied after the film is made and reviewed by the ratings board. The filmmakers can accept the rating they’re given (an R, say), or they can make changes to the film in order to get a rating they would prefer (making trims to shots of a moment of violence, for instance, to secure a PG-13). Now, the ratings system today is far from perfect, as critics have pointed out. There is a documentary on the subject called This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006, Dick) that points out the ways in which the ratings board is more lenient on violence than it is on sexuality, and critiques its double standards for heterosexual and homosexual relationships.
The Production Code was written chiefly by a man named Will Hays in 1930, but it was enforced for much of its existence (after 1934) by Joseph Breen (pictured below), a wealthy man heavily involved in the Catholic Church. Not only did the Catholic Church bring about strong pressure on the studios to regulate their film content, but they also had a big hand in shaping the way the censorship regulations were written and then administered. The films that would be released during the thirty-year reign of the Production Code would reflect a strongly Catholic morality (“deeply Catholic in tone and outlook,” according to Thomas Doherty), in which the righteous are praised and the evil are condemned. If you want to understand how the Production Code worked, the easiest way is to watch a Classic Hollywood movie and think about who is rewarded and who is punished. For example: if a character commits a crime at some point in the film, you can be sure that by the end, that character will be punished, either with incarceration or death, depending on the severity of the crime undertaken. Though not illegal, adultery becomes a similarly punishable offense because it was considered “immoral.” In the Code, it was labeled a “subject [that] should be avoided.” In films from the Production Code era, those who commit adultery ended up worse off than they began; they did not always die (though sometimes they did), but usually suffered some kind of cosmic punishment. This dynamic illustrates the degree to which the Production Code was a system of censorship built on a vision of morality. In punishing the guilty, films made during the Production Code era meant to inspire audiences to believe in systems of law and order, and that anyone who violated the rules of society would eventually be sanctioned for doing so. However, these rules also reflect the worldview of the people who wrote them. Its guiding principle was: “No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.”
Pre-Code films, on the other hand, are wild. According to Doherty, these films “entertained, even embraced, visions of immorality and insurrection.” It feels a little like the inmates running the asylum from about 1930-1934. Now, these Pre-Code era films aren’t the free-for-alls we have today, but for movies made in the Classic Hollywood era, they are strikingly intense in their content, themes, and depictions of characters. Take an example: the film Jewel Robbery (1932, Dieterle), pictured below, is a humorous romp about the romance between a charming thief (William Powell) and a society woman (Kay Francis). It contains an extended, farcical sequence in the earlygoing during which the thief rips off a jewelry store while alternately flirting with the society woman, who has had the misfortune to drop by during the heist. In order to pacify the store’s employees so he can steal the valuable jewels in peace, the thief supplies them with some “funny cigarettes.” The employees puff on the cigarettes and suddenly become docile, agreeable, and do an awful lot of uncontrollable giggling. The thief has gotten them very, very high. Though the word “marijuana” is never mentioned, it is quite clear that they are smoking it. A scene like this would be impossible in the Production Code era, which had strict rules about the depiction of illegal drug use – it didn’t allow filmmakers to show it at all.
There are a number of Pre-Code films that could stand in as clear violations of the rules that would eventually be adopted, but few demonstrate them as well as Three on a Match (1932, LeRoy). The film is about three women who knew each other as girls and see their fates diverge as they grow into adulthood. One of the women, Vivian Revere (Ann Dvorak) grows tired of her domestic life and her child and decides to depart for Europe, where she will drink whatever she wants and have sex with whomever she wants. In the film’s final act, some gangsters (including Humphrey Bogart in an early role) kidnap her and her son and hold them for ransom. Watch this clip of her final moments on screen.
|
|
This section is a perfect distillation of the Pre-Code era. Not only is the production design cluttered and messy, the camera lingering over the shredded papers and broken eggs on the ground, but the scene itself feels disgusting and dingy. The gangsters have kept Vivian pacified by giving her doses of heroin (“Because of its evil consequences, the drug traffic should never be presented in any form”), which motivates her airy performance and disheveled look, certainly in contrast to the way a number of Code-era films would depict women. In addition, Vivian’s abandonment of her child—her noble suicide—is a violation of the positive look the Code wanted to cast on women’s maternal responsibilities. The gangsters are discussing the necessity of murdering the child (the knife, a theoretical murder weapon, is prominently displayed in one image), which violates the Code’s prohibition on putting children in violent danger (kidnapping would be allowed, as long as “the person kidnapped is not a child”). Vivian’s suicide is quite graphically rendered, with a sudden crash out of the window, followed by a shot from overhead of her body falling several stories through the shade and eventually hitting the sidewalk below. The on-the-ground shots of her lifeless body are likewise quite violent, with shards of glass and debris all around her and blood gushing from her forehead. The Code would demand that “Brutal killings should not be presented in detail.” The Production Code would seek to suppress nearly everything that takes place in this sequence.
Many Pre-Code films foreground issues of sexuality, especially notable for their female characters, who openly express interest in and willingness to use sex to get what they want. Baby Face (1933, Green) is one of the signature examples of this phenomenon in the Pre-Code era; Thomas Doherty describes it as “a woman’s vertical movement up the economic ladder via horizontal means.” Barbara Stanwyck’s Lily Powers relies on sexuality to get what she wants, beginning and ending a series of affairs at the Gotham Trust Bank where she goes to work upon arriving in New York City. Lily is a highly sexual person, but also detaches sexuality from romantic love, which is one of the hallmarks of the Pre-Code era. Films like Baby Face convinced the studio heads that they needed to enforce the Production Code—their perceived lack of morality was seen as potentially threatening. Mostly, that comes in the attitude, more than any overt depiction of sexuality. Baby Face doesn’t really have sex scenes, and there isn’t any nudity; but, Lily’s flagrant use of sex to climb the corporate ladder is provocative in its frankness.
In the commentary at right, you can see an example of the approach to sexuality in Baby Face. It features a scene midway through Lily’s journey to the top, in which a worker catches her and another man in the women’s bathroom, is pretty confrontational, despite its relative tameness. It doesn’t actually show anything, but it doesn’t really need to. The provocation is the shock that this is happening at all.
|
|
One of director William Wellman’s most impactful pre-code films is Heroes for Sale (1933), which draws upon a then-contemporary social issue—the fate of what came to be known as The Bonus Army, a group of organized World War I veterans who, facing extraordinary difficulties in reentering society after their service ended and hammered by the Depression, marched on Washington in an effort to claim a benefit promised to them but not delivered until 1936, sixteen years after the conclusion of the war.
In Heroes for Sale, authority is hopelessly corrupt. Though many pre-code films offered healthy doses of sexuality and depravity, Heroes for Sale delivers much more on their general skepticism of the moral certitude of American society. It offers a dark vision of Depression-era America. Above all, the Production Code sought to regulate ideas, and its intention was to restrict the ability of filmmakers in Hollywood to inspire audiences to embrace potentially disruptive ideas, including those related to sex, law and order, government, and the class system.
Watch the commentary at right on a scene from Heroes For Sale , a film with a- jaundiced view of American institutions. In the scene, director William A. Wellman dramatizes the violence that broke out between Bonus Army Veterans, who are angry about the federal government’s failure to fulfill its promise to provide pensions, and the active duty military, staging a chaotic riot that offers a deeply pessimistic vision of the American government. In the scene, you’ll get a sense of the class anger that occasionally shone through during the Pre-Code era.
|
|
clip quiz - the pre-code era
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
SIGN OF THE CROSS (1933, DeMille)
Depictions of sexuality and nudity were heavily governed by the Production Code. How would this scene from the pre-code film Sign of the Cross make the censors nervous? |
|
THE DOORWAY TO HELL (1930, Mayo)
Gangster films flourished in the pre-code era not least because of their violence. What is particularly violent about this sequence from the gangster film The Doorway to Hell, and why do you think the censors would want to clamp down on it? |
|
I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932, LeRoy)
Pre-code movies often ended on particularly dark notes. What is the mood of this final scene from I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang? |
|
WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD (1933, Wellman)
The pre-code era overlapped with the earliest and toughest years of The Great Depression. How does this scene from Wild Boys of the Road illustrate that historical moment? |
|
Merrily we go to hell and the Pre-Code Era
The very title of director Dorothy Arzner’s 1932 pre-code drama Merrily We Go To Hell is a provocation seemingly designed to stick a thumb in the eye of the would-be enforcers of the then-dormant Production Code. Just a few years later, after the coming of Code enforcement in 1934, Arzner would no doubt have had to change the title of the film, which would have been seen as a celebratory endorsement of a certain carefree attitude towards the consequences of one’s actions. The heavily Catholic morality of the Production Code would not really have allowed anyone to think about Hell in a joyful way. It was a pit of fire—not a drunken party.
But in 1932, the Code was still largely unenforced, a laxity which allowed films like this one, a portrait of two hopeless alcoholics—during the last years of Prohibition, mind you, when alcohol sales were illegal across the country—who find each other, get married, hit the rocks, come to an arrangement that allows them to remain married while seeing other people, and are finally reunited in terrible tragedy. The film marks the tumultuous early years of the Great Depression while also catching the devil-may-care spirit of the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, when social rules were being undermined left and right.
Despite Prohibition of alcohol having been the law of the land for more than a decade at the time of Merrily We Go To Hell’s release, very few people across the country actually agreed that alcohol should be made totally illegal, and they took from this injustice the idea of general social rebellion; in other words, if those in authority were saying that alcohol was so terrible, and you knew it really wasn’t, then what else where those authority figures telling you not to do? The film not only depicts the desperate desire for freedom from social constraints, it also finds in society’s restrictions a kind of deep, overwhelming sadness.
The main characters are Jerry (Fredric March) and Joan (Sylvia Sidney), whose troubled marriage is the throughline for the film’s sense of deep dissatisfaction with the way things are. Merrily We Go To Hell is not just the movie’s title, but its fatalistic motto, which speaks to the pervasive attitude of temporariness in 1932; nothing seemed certain after the onset of the Depression, so Jerry and Joan raise a glass and toast the good times with the knowledge they could disappear the next day. Unfortunately, their increasingly self-destructive behavior makes that toast a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A montage of Jerry’s bar-hopping celebration of his intent to marry Joan shows just how debaucherous his behavior can be; at the same time, the movie refuses to totally condemn Jerry for his carousing. That’s a major difference in the pre-code era—films don’t have to sit in moral judgment of what their characters do or don’t do. Pre-code movies like this one tend to let you make up your own mind.
The film does this through its narrative, but also its use of visuals. For instance, during the wedding ceremony, Jerry and Joan stand in the background, with a cross positioned in the foreground. We’ve already seen Jerry’s drunkenness become a burden to Joan, as he lay blacked out in the back of a car instead of attending their engagement party. Though Jerry and Joan are united in marriage, the overt use of religious iconography in this shot suggests that it’s possible their marriage isn’t exactly going to be holy matrimony. A movie made in the code enforcement era would never suggest this—to the Catholic morality of that document, marriage was always a good thing.
The major concern of the middle part of the film after Jerry and Joan settle into relatively unhappy marriage is Jerry’s blooming success as a playwright, which is then disturbed by his passionate obsession for the actress Claire Hempstead (Adrianne Allen), an old flame with whom he is reunited when she agrees to star in his play. His desire pulls him away from his wife, which sends her into an alcoholic spiral of her own. At a critical moment, Joan has the chance to stop Jerry from going to Claire, but she dares him to do it instead. Thus, the fidelity of their marriage is broken, and they spin into a hedonistic cycle of free sex with other people. As Joan says, “We’re living in a modern world, and there’s no place for old-fashioned wives.” She’s allowing Jerry to continue openly with Claire, but she’s telling him she’s going to step out on her own, as well. In many pre-code films, the female characters use sexuality as a weapon to achieve a kind of equality—Joan just wants to be able to live a consequence-free life, as her husband does.
The tragedy that reunites Jerry and Joan is morally chaotic; Joan is pregnant (though the fact that the two of them have been in an open marriage for a lengthy period of time means that the baby’s parentage is certainly up for debate), but loses the baby and nearly dies herself. When Jerry finds out, he returns to her, visiting Joan in the hospital and vowing to swear off alcohol forever if he can have her back.
These two characters have hurt each other terribly throughout the entire film; their courtship was plagued by miscommunication and misinterpretation, and their marriage was only intermittently happy before devolving into total emotional chaos brought about by addiction. Jerry and Joan both make terrible decisions that should set them up for moral punishment—at least, it would under Code enforcement. Here, the film lets them off the hook. It acknowledges they are human beings who make mistakes and are imperfect, but sensitively depicts Jerry’s alcoholism as a disease that he cannot really control rather than a moral failing, and Joan’s own descent into alcoholism as a last ditch effort to either understand her husband more deeply or dull the pain of a brutal life. In the end, they’re given a chance at redemption. Whether they succeed or not, the film believes in their capacity for change. Under Code enforcement, the decisions they make throughout the film would set them up for punishment, not rewards.
Though this period of cinema history lasted only a few short years, it is profoundly important because it illustrates an alternative path that Hollywood films could have taken, had they not been forced to adopt the rules of the Production Code. Eventually, when the Production Code was abolished in 1966, the behaviors it had worked so hard to suppress roared onto the screen during the late 1960s and 1970s, a period of extraordinary films that pushed the envelope for on-screen content, themes, and characters. The Pre-Code period feels lawless in retrospect, and their provocative approach to depicting characters are extremely interesting. They demonstrate that Hollywood films were perfectly capable of acknowledging, and even engaging directly with subjects that would eventually be prohibited. There are those who argue that the Production Code was ultimately good for Classic Hollywood because it required filmmakers to learn how to be subtle; after all, writing down a list of forbidden ideas did not wipe those ideas off the face of the earth. Instead, it sent them underground, and during the Production Code era, filmmakers worked to subvert the strictures of the Code, resting on implication and suggestion rather than outright depiction. According to Thomas Doherty, “the Code gave Hollywood the framework to thrive economically and ripen artistically, and that Hollywood in turn gave the Code provenance over a cultural commodity of great price—the visible images and manifest values of American motion pictures.” It is impossible to say definitively whether the Code was good or bad for Hollywood, but examining the films of the Pre-Code era helps establish valuable context for the next thirty years of American film history, much of which was a reaction to this brief period.