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January 19 - January 24, 2020
In 1929, the film industry had just made the transition from silent cinema to sound films.
In March 1930, representatives of every studio signed the agreement. This “Production Code” should have kept forbidden elements off the screen, but the Great Depression arrived, emptying theaters. To lure patrons back, producers began to violate the agreement.
Films like Search for Beauty and The Scarlet Empress did not merely include suggestive scenes; these films were about sex. Their plots hinged on seduction. They showed naked women and even naked men.
The market was mostly Protestant. The industry was mostly Jewish-run. Yet a Midwest Catholic minority gained control.
Catholics saw the soul of a nation in danger, and they acted.
From all available evidence, the term “pre-Code” was first applied by a repertory film programmer named Bruce Goldstein in the late 1980s.
but there was even a hubbub over this sentence: “I’m going to have a baby.” Some audiences found it too raw.
They were condemned by the Catholic press and by the Legion of Decency.
and even a theater manager, who in the small towns, had a personal relationship with his patrons. If those patrons were offended by a film they saw in his theater, they were uncomfortable when they were leaving the theater. They looked down. They looked away. They did not want to confront the manager. But he knew. And even though he had not made the film in question, he felt responsible. He was showing it. Stories like these convey the history of pre-Code Hollywood in a new way. Film history should never be written without a human context.
The stars of 1920 included William S. Hart, Lillian Gish, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Wallace Reid, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charles Chaplin.
In 1915 the Supreme Court ruled in Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that moving pictures were not protected by the First Amendment.
Moving pictures were merchandise; thus, the court upheld the right of prior censorship, and more censor boards opened.
They found their man in Will H. Hays. He was the postmaster general, a Presbyterian elder, and had managed the Republican convention to elect Warren G. Harding. NAMPI offered Hays a yearly salary of $115,000. On March 5, 1922, he left the post office and became the “czar” of the movies.
He saw to it that Rita McGoldrick of the IFCA used her weekly radio broadcast to both rate new films and praise his improvement of them. There was much to improve.
Prohibition on the one hand and prosperity on the other created an “Era of Wonderful Nonsense.”
“and unless Metro can tone down Irving Thalberg (who, though fine in other respects, has a leaning toward the suggestive because of his showmanship),
Many state censors were civil servants who had happened onto a good thing. They were paid $200 a month by the state to watch movies all day and then cut them, reedit them, and even write new intertitles, with no regard for continuity or aesthetics. Paying censor fees was viewed as an unpleasant but necessary cost of doing business, so the creation of censorable scenes continued.
On October 6, 1927, a film called The Jazz Singer was premiered by Warner Bros., one of the smaller companies. For the first time in a feature film, dialogue was spoken on the screen. “Wait a minute,” said Al Jolson. “Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” A Broadway audience gasped and then shouted. Talking pictures had arrived.
A study reported in 2001 by the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture confirmed that letters to the editor are a reliable measure of public opinion.
The MPPDA was increasingly known as the “Hays Office,” both in Hollywood and New York. (Will Hays made no effort to correct this.)
Father FitzGeorge Dinneen, the Jesuit pastor of St. Ignatius,
She was married to Irving Thalberg, the young executive who had made her a star. Thalberg was in his own category, a soft-spoken, cerebral producer who read books for pleasure, not because the studio might want to film them. He was a visionary, one of the few producers who was equally adept at handling financial matters and making creative decisions, and, in less than a decade he had become the sage of the system.
By the fall, the studios had stopped making silent films.
This was the sequel to 1926’s What Price Glory? which had made folk heroes of two rambunctious marines, Flagg (Victor MacLaglen) and Quirt (Edmund Lowe). Having disposed of World War I in the silent film, director Raoul Walsh now had these rough-and-tumble characters ransack the audible world for female companionship.
The Cock-Eyed World had dirty songs, racist slurs, and caricatures (bestial Russians, dopey Swedes, nervous Jews, effeminate Central Americans), horizontal love scenes, a heroine who is obviously wearing no panties, and dialogue straight out of a locker room. “Her old lady came home! I had to get it on the run.” “I’m bringing you the lay of the land.”
One loud voice was that of Martin Quigley, a Catholic layperson
deal with Dinneen’s righteous indignation,
Pettijohn was a Protestant married to a Catholic, raising his children as Catholics. He suggested that the cardinal could call the shots if the
Pettijohn’s overtures led Dinneen to speak with Martin Quigley.
In October, Dinneen and Quigley invited Daniel Lord to join their brainstorming sessions. They also invited one Joseph Ignatius Breen, a militantly devout Catholic and a father of six who was working as a public relations man for the Peabody Coal Company.
In years to come, Daniel Lord would refer to 1929 as “pre-Code.”
The “major majors” were M-G-M, Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO Radio, and Fox Film.
The “minor majors” were Universal, Columbia, and United Artists.
Needing something more alluring, he asked Will Hays if “the Big U” could film John Colton’s stage shocker, The Shanghai Gesture. This story of miscegenation, white slavery, opium addiction, and genocide had been proscribed by the Formula, so Hays said no to Laemmle and then said yes to a dozen films of lesser pedigree and greater tawdriness, all the while placating the advocates of censorship.
male student wrote: “The Love Parade is a silly, indecent, and disreputable production. I could hardly blame the students for ‘razzing’ the show as they do.” Yet it was a hit. It made stars of MacDonald and Chevalier and brought the “Lubitsch touch” into the sound era.
Walter Wanger,
Greta Garbo was the last star (other than Charles Chaplin) to make the transition to sound. For her first talkie, Irving Thalberg chose Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 play Anna Christie.
When New York audiences braved the February 1930 chill to hear Garbo speak from the screen for the first time, they didn’t notice the “bup” on the sound track—the sound of a splice where three profane words had been replaced with “I hate them! I hate them!”
“I am talking only about the morality of entertainment,” said Lord. “People go to the theatres; they sit there passively—accept and receive—with the result that they go out from that entertainment either very much improved or very much deteriorated; and that depends almost entirely upon the character of the entertainment.”
Thalberg had written: “We do not create types of entertainment. We merely present them. The motion picture does not present the audience with tastes and manners and views and morals; it reflects those they already have. People see in it a reflection of their own average thoughts and attitudes. If the reflection is much lower or higher than their own plane, they reject it. The motion picture is literally bound to the mental and moral level of its vast audience.”
You’ve got a larger audience! You’ve got an audience which pays 35¢, 50¢, as against a Broadway audience, which has to pay $4.00.
“But what if, in the course of the story, that question has been left open, and there have been times when wrong has been right? When you are looking at Clara Bow get away with a lot of things, it has an evil effect, even though at the end you show retribution, because, you see, all of the time the audience has been in love with that woman.”
The draft of the General Principles had a loophole that allowed restricted material if “a special effort shall be made to include compensating moral values.”
Hays immediately annulled the marriage, hiding the Catholic Reasons from the MPPDA Board, who might not want the press to know that a Jewish-American industry was being influenced by an Irish-Catholic constituency.
In a state of shock, Jerry finds herself testing the limits of 1930 convention: she sleeps with Ted’s best friend, Don (Robert Montgomery). Then she tells Ted: “I’ve balanced our accounts.”
Quigley to an early presentation of his picture Hell’s Angels.” The screening took place not at a major studio but at an independent outfit called Metropolitan Studios. This was Hughes. In a city of egotistical moguls, he was different. He was not Jewish, self-made, or sociable. He was twenty-four, had millions of dollars, and nobody was going to tell him how to spend it.
Hell’s Angels was well attended, but its $2.8 million budget precluded a profit. Still, it established Hughes as a studio head and made Harlow a celebrity.
Just Imagine was a “science fiction musical.” In it, 1980 Manhattan is an unpleasant place, its denizens known only by numbers and not allowed to procreate naturally. Three young men escape to Mars, where they encounter the Martian Queen, Looloo (Joyzelle Joyner), and her brutish bodyguard, Loko (Ivan Linow). Loko approaches earthling Single 0 (El Brendel) and caresses his face. Pointing first to Looloo, then to Loko, Single 0 exclaims to his comrades, “She’s not the queen! He is!” The SRC’s John V. Wilson wrote, “Some of the censors may want
Herbert Hoover called it the “noble experiment.”
In 1929, Chicago newspaperman W. R. Burnett visited the scene of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. “It was a slaughterhouse,” he recalled. “Blood all over the wall and guys lying around on the floor. I got one look at it and I said, ‘Uh, uh.’ I didn’t want any of that.” He thought about the type of person who would become a gangland boss. “I was reaching for a gutter Macbeth,” said Burnett. “A figure that could rise to prominence under the most hazardous conditions, the picture of overriding ambition.” The result was his best-selling novel, Little Caesar.
