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

by Mark A. Vieira

Film Booking Office’s Human Wreckage (1923) featured graphic scenes of drug use. Goldwyn Pictures’ Three Weeks (1923) had scenes of drunkenness and debauchery in a Ruritanian palace. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Ben-Hur (1925) had nude scenes, and its male star posed nude for publicity portraits. M-G-M’s The Big Parade (1925) had an intertitle that read: “God damn them all!” M-G-M’s The Callahans and the Murphys (1927) had a scene in which an Irish-American matriarch and her sewer-digger son guess the race of an abandoned infant. “Maybe it’s a Jew baby,” suggests her son. Mrs. Callahan looks under the baby’s diaper, then declares, “It ain’t a Jew baby!” An orgy scene in Paramount’s The Wedding March (1928) hinted at “inverted sex practices” with a brief flash of one man kissing another during a drinking bout.

A Louisiana exhibitor affirmed: “The church people clamor for clean pictures, but they all come out to see Mae West.”

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!

No one believed that films were art. They had no legal protection.