Up To Code

ED AYERS: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN BALOGH: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER ONUF: And I’m Peter Onuf. We’re talking today about the history of censorship in the United States. We’ve already heard a lot about the government’s role in censoring the public, from jailing journalist in the 1790’s, to prying into mail a century later. We’re going to turn now to one industry’s attempt to censor itself.

ED AYERS: In the 1920s and early ’30s, Hollywood producers weren’t exactly shy about using sex to sell tickets. Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University, says a classic example of silver screen scandal is the 1932 Jean Harlow film, Red Headed Woman.

THOMAS DOHERTY: And when she sleeps her way to the top and is not punished for it all.

JEAN HARLOW: I’m on my way up to the boss’s house with his mail.

WOMAN: Why didn’t his secretary do it?

JEAN HARLOW: Don’t be dumb. His wife’s in Cleveland.

THOMAS DOHERTY: And at the end of the film, you see her in Paris with this sugar daddy in the backseat of a Rolls Royce. She’s got a mink on. And as the camera pulls back from them, you see her wink in the mirror at the chauffeur, who smiles.

ED AYERS: That ending might not raise eyebrows today. But movies featuring sex and violence, chafed many collars in the American Catholic Church. Church leaders formed the National Legion of Decency in 1933 and commanded that their flock boycott theaters.

Hollywood producers recognized the threat to their bottom line. So they worked with two Catholic leaders to create a production code to guide their films.

BRIAN BALOGH: The code wasn’t just a list of words you couldn’t say, like the FCC’s list that prevents us from saying [BLEEP] and [BLEEP] over the airways. Instead it was a 5,000 word guideline for how to produce moral stories.

It’s principles of plot demanded that no plot or theme should definitely side with evil and against good. This meant that instead of the main character in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men getting away with murder, he faces the arm of the law.

The Hollywood Production Code went into effect in 1934. Thomas Doherty says, the job of implementing it fell to one man.

THOMAS DOHERTY: An iron hammer, and the guy who does this really, sort of one of the most important people in the history of American censorship, is a guy named Joseph I. Breen. He’s the guy on the scene in Hollywood, head of the Production Code Administration. And you got to get through Joe Breen or your film does not get a production code seal. And that means it does not get distributed in the 16,000 theaters in America.

BRIAN BALOGH: Wow, pretty important guy. So what did he look like? And how did he roll

THOMAS DOHERTY: He was your basic Victorian Irishman. Came from Philadelphia, very stern guy, very strict Catholic, but nobody’s fool. Every screenwriter in Hollywood knew that you put like five lines into your script, hoping you could negotiate and get one of them by. But the lines would have to be elusive, have to sort of not be explicitly sexual.

And maybe the best known example is from the film Casablanca, which to me has sort of the most romantic elusive lines all of classical Hollywood cinema.

BRIAN BALOGH: I know where you’re going . You’re going to a specific place, right?

INGRID BERGMAN: What about us?

HUMPHREY BOGART: We’ll always have Paris.

THOMAS DOHERTY: Just think of that line. He’s clearly not talking about that time he had with Ingrid Bergman at the Eiffel Tower watching that great view.

BRIAN BALOGH: Well, I’m just assuming that, you know, if you’re a director, producer in Hollywood, you hate this guy.

THOMAS DOHERTY: No, because everybody in Hollywood new that Joe Breen was far preferable to a hundred local censors from Atlanta or Nashville, Philadelphia, you name it, censorship boards in states across America. Those guys were really whacked. With Joe Breen, you could have lunch. You could sit down. You had one guy to deal with who was reasonable.

And you had the Production Code. It’s sort of like a constitution. We can all argue about its meaning. So if there are precedents for something, you could come to Joe Breen and say, well you passed it two years ago in this film. Where if you went to– Nashville had notorious censor named Lloyd T. Benford, just a vile racist.

And he would clip out or not allow to be shown in Nashville any film that had African Americans and whites having a nice relationship, even children. So things like the Little Rascals movies, he wouldn’t allow to be shown because they showed interracial harmony. So if the choice is between Lloyd T. Benford and Joe Breen, it’s kind of obvious.

BRIAN BALOGH: And did Joe Breen inoculate films against the Benfords of the world? In other words, did local censors get a second bite of the apple.

THOMAS DOHERTY: They could. But when Breen comes on, these local and state censorship boards start losing a lot of their power. Because if you look at the box office from, say ’33 to ’34, there’s a slide in the early ’30s during the pre-code era. And then in 1934, this slide reverses itself. And ’34, you start seeing this uptick in box office.

And so the moguls say, ah, we put the code in in ’34. People seem to be responding at the box office window. The production code is working.

BRIAN BALOGH: Now, Tom, you study film for a living. Is that your explanation of why audiences increase?

THOMAS DOHERTY: I think there was something to it. And part of this is just because of the tone of the Great Depression, where in an age of real political and economic chaos and uncertainty, people seem to crave in popular art the sense of security and the sense of morality. And the modern notions we have a free expression, people in the 1920s and ’30s, by and large, didn’t feel that way. They accepted kind of social control from their church, from their state, from their family, that I think most Americans–

BRIAN BALOGH: From the town fathers.

THOMAS DOHERTY: Oh, that’s actually a good phrase, because one of the things that made the local exhibitors so desirous of a production code is like the Sheriff’s wife would corner you in the lobby and say, how can you show such immoral films? And if they can make a lot of money with, say, Shirley Temple rather than Mae West, and nobody’s calling them a smut merchant, I mean, they’re going to pick Shirley Temple every day.

BRIAN BALOGH: You know, Breen retired from the Production Code Administration in 1954. And believe it or not, I’ve been to a film or two since then. And they’re very different than the films you’re describing. What happened?

THOMAS DOHERTY: Well, what happened is America changed. That America no longer demanded from its popular culture moral order. And I think the other thing that happened– and this has to do with the war– is that we no longer ceded those kind of decisions too public authorities, whether they’re from the state or from the church, that Americans decided, well, I can decide what movie I want to go to myself.

And to me, the film that shows this more than any other motion picture is a film from 1960. And if any of your listeners are old enough to happen to have seen it in the theater, I would wager they remember where they were and what theater they saw this film in, because it’s such a primal movie memory for that generation. And the film, of course, is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[SCREAMING]

THOMAS DOHERTY: After you see Psycho it’s like the Production Code’s over. The sex, the violence, the lack of moral order. I mean, that’s the film that even though there is nominally a code still in effect, it’s– it’s over after Psycho.

[THEME MUSIC FROM PSYCHO PLAYING]

BRIAN BALOGH: Thomas Doherty is professor of American studies at Brandeis University. He’s the author of Hollywood Censor, Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration.