Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934): When Sin Ruled the Movies

by Mark A. Vieira

A contract writer named Peter Milne had spun a wild yarn about conventioneers in Atlantic City, and Hal Wallis assigned Henry Blanke to produce it. Years later Blanke said to Jack Vizzard: “Me. I was the one. Single-handedly I brought on the whole Code. Yeah. Ask Joe Breen. He’ll tell you. Ask him about Convention City.”

comedy bit about a drunk who was chasing a sheep around the lobby of the hotel, trying to lure it up to his room.” Lord changed the sheep to a goat and moved the chase out of the hotel.

“We must put brassieres on Joan Blondell and make her cover up her breasts because, otherwise, we are going to have these pictures stopped in a lot of places.

One line involved the conventioneers’ product. A Honeywell Rubber Company employee says: “Let’s place our goods in convenient slot machines. You never can tell when an emergency may arise!”

An exhibitor in Mellen, Wisconsin, wrote: “This is another choice bit of meat for the League of Decency. One of my Catholic patrons remarked to my wife: ‘Garbo is playing such a loose woman!’ When will the producers wake up? When it’s too late?” In dioceses across the country, Catholics were talking. In the Midwest, bishops were mobilizing. A Catholic crusade was beginning.

“They tried different things to make Jane look pretty sexy,” recalled Maureen O’Sullivan. “First of all they had the idea of wearing no bra, no brassiere at all, and that she would be always covered with a branch.

There was, however, a nude swimming sequence.

According to historian Rudy Behlmer: “From all evidence, three versions of the sequence eventually went out to separate territories during the film’s initial release. One with Jane clothed in her jungle loin cloth outfit, one with her topless, and one with her in the nude.” Even the territories that didn’t see the nude scene thought that Jane’s costume (which at one point popped open to reveal her groin) was disgraceful.

Norma Shearer’s first film after her return to M-G-M was Riptide, a tasteful trifle about a woman driven to adultery by her husband’s lack of faith in her.

Thalberg. It seems typical of Hollywood morality that a husband as production manager should constantly cast his wife in the role of a loose and immoral woman.

Vincent Hart that Wonder Bar contained “one item which the audience did not seem to relish, the ballroom scene where a man and a woman are shown dancing. Into the scene comes an effeminate-looking youth who taps the dancing man on the shoulder and asks, ‘May I cut in?’ whereupon the man dancing with the girl smiles, leaves her, and the two men dance off together.”

The Catholic crusade began in earnest on April 28, 1934, when the Legion of Decency was incorporated.

This was the same Cardinal Dougherty who in 1927 had thrown The Callahans and the Murphys out of circulation because it mocked Irish Americans.

On May 23, the axe fell. Dougherty declared from the pulpit that Catholics in his diocese were to boycott all motion pictures, and that this was a “positive command, binding all in conscience under pain of sin.”

immediately fell 40 percent. Geoffrey Shurlock remembered: “Harry Warner, who owned the Stanley chain of theaters in Philade...

The stage was set for Joseph Breen’s ascendance.

The meeting’s most important accomplishment was to take the Studio Relations Committee away from the AMPP. It was henceforth answerable only to the MPPDA and could halt a film at the script stage.

It also intended to pull offensive films such as She Done Him Wrong and Convention City from circulation. Theaters could even cancel contracts for films released before July 15, provided the films had been publicly condemned.

Most importantly, the plan gave Breen absolute authority: (1) a film could not be produced if he did not approve its script; (2) it could not be released if he did not give it a seal; and (3) if a company tried to release it without a seal, no MPPDA theater could play it.

Everyone crowded around them anxiously, but they, being Irish, could not resist having a little fun with us.”

Breen moved to the back of the room to await his cue. Quigley took the floor and announced that “The war had been called off.” Effective July 1, the SRC would become the Production Code Administration (PCA).

To strengthen his assaults on “the other guy,” another provision was added to the Code: a $25,000 fine that would be levied against any producer who dared to produce a film without PCA approval or to release a film without the PCA seal.

A Catholic minority had wrested control of a Protestant market from a Jewish-controlled industry.

Search for Beauty was a sexy comedy that surpassed Convention City in humor, irreverence, and sex.

Yet Search for Beauty had gotten past Joseph Breen. Perhaps Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg could, too. In late 1933, they had been completing their sixth film, Catherine the Great.

In September, the Legion of Decency got as far as the first reel, where an eight-year-old girl dreams of three beheadings, a naked woman falling out of an “iron maiden,” three topless women being burned at the stake, and a “human clapper” swinging inside a huge bell. The Legion slapped a “condemned” rating on The Scarlet Empress, but Breen paid no attention.

For the next nineteen years, if the studios wanted to rerelease a film, he made them cut scenes—not from prints, not from fine-grain positives, not from dupe negatives—but from master camera negatives.

Victims of Breen’s extensive, jarring cuts included: All Quiet on the Western Front, Animal Crackers, Morocco, Mata Hari, The Public Enemy, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Shopworn, Horse Feathers, Blessed Event, A Farewell to Arms, Blonde Venus, Love Me Tonight, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Shanghai Express, The Sign of the Cross, The Bowery, The Eagle and the Hawk, King Kong, Counsellor-at-Law, Manhattan Melodrama, Tarzan and His Mate, The Merry Widow, and Viva Villa!

Then came the Miracle case. In May 1952, the US Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision banning Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle, and in the process threw out Mutual Film v. Ohio. As quoted in the May 31, 1952 issue of Boxoffice, Justice Tom Clark wrote: “The importance of motion pictures as an organ of public opinion is not lessened by the fact that they are designed to entertain as well as to inform. Nor should film be subject to censorship because it is an industry conducted for profit, as such a category would also include the press. Finally, the medium’s supposed capacity for evil, if it existed at all, was not sufficient justification for substantially unbridled censorship such as we have seen here.”

It was possible, in the span of a week, to see films from every year of the Golden Era, and to make judgments previously limited to professional critics. It was at this time, for example, that film fans realized that 1932 had yielded a cornucopia of classics: Shanghai Express, Tarzan the Ape Man, Grand Hotel, Love Me Tonight, The Sign of the Cross, Trouble in Paradise, The Mummy, and Red Dust.

When did pre-Code come into the lexicon? In the ’60s and ’70s, when boomers were attending college, America rediscovered its film heritage, and repertory cinemas became popular.

In 1988, he coined the term pre-Code. For the first

Lest we forget, the era made stars of the Marx Brothers, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Kay Francis, Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Robert Montgomery, Katharine Hepburn, Johnny Weissmuller, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Dick Powell, Marlene Dietrich, James Cagney, Constance Bennett, Boris Karloff, Irene Dunne, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Paul Muni, Cary Grant, and Mae West. Their pre-Code films are watchable, and this book will direct you to the best of them. When you see She Done Him Wrong, you can watch for the place where James Wingate cut two stanzas. There is a jump cut.