These are some of the most beloved films in the history of American cinema.
But they all share something else in common:
They were all censored by the Catholic Church.
In fact, for decades, there’s a good chance you didn’t see anything in a Hollywood movie
unless the Catholic Church wanted you to.
Hollywood in the late ’20s was chock-full of films about pirates, lovers, and monsters.
But not everybody was happy about that,
most notably Catholics,
some of whom were alarmed by what they viewed as the crumbling
morality in motion pictures.
Two devout Catholics, a publisher named Martin Quigley and a Jesuit priest named Father Daniel Lord
(that’s his real name),
decided to do something about it.
In 1929, they wrote the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of proposed moral guidelines for
movies.
It prohibited such things as nudity, indecent dancing, and ridiculing religion while requiring
the promotion of Roman Catholic values where good triumphs over evil and immoral behavior
is punished.
There were also slightly less folksy provisions like barring romance between different races
as well as “white slavery.”
Yikes.
When the big five studios — Warner Brothers, Paramount, MGM, Fox, and RKO — received
the guidelines, they agreed to them.
Why would Hollywood ever willingly sign on to censorship like this?
We always have to remember that movies had no 1st Amendment rights during this time.
And that meant that any state or municipality, or, by extension, the federal government,
could censor motion pictures.
This is Thomas Doherty.
And these are his slippers.
And there are real fears in Hollywood that Roosevelt’s New Deal government, which is
proliferating government agencies with great abandon, is going to create a federal censorship
agency to censor American movies.
Studios chose to adopt it voluntarily hoping that it would deter government interference.
But then in 1930, the Great Depression hit.
Following the economic downturn, movie attendance tanked and studios scrambled to do whatever
it took to sell more tickets.
And what sells tickets?
Sex.
Violence.
And big-ass goblets of booze.
So for a period of four years from 1930 to 1934, Hollywood studio films were pretty f***ing
crazy.
The Roman Catholics especially get very upset by this, and in late 1933 and early 1934,
they begin organizing something called the Legion of Decency.
What sounds like the lamest superhero franchise ever actually released publications of all
studio movies with their accompanying rating —
A being morally unobjectionable, B being morally objectionable in part, and C being the dreaded
condemned.
The legion had something called the Legion Pledge, and you have 20 million Catholics
at Mass and at Knights of Columbus meetings would stand up, raise their hand, and pledge
on their immortal soul that they would not attend motion pictures that the church deemed
unworthy and unholy.
To avoid a devastating boycott, Hollywood created the Production Code Administration
to enforce the guidelines and appointed devout Catholic Joseph Breen as its head.
Here’s Edward Herrmann playing him in The Aviator.
I can state categorically that I have never seen anything quite so unacceptable.
The Breen office would get a script from a studio, and he would go through them line
by line to make sure that nothing was said or implied or visualized that defied the Production
Code.
For instance, here’s a couple of their notes on the Jimmy Stewart film It’s a Wonderful
Life:
Page 21: While it will be acceptable to indicate Gower as having recourse to drink because
of his disturbing emotional problem, we must ask that he not be shown at any time offensively
drunk here or throughout the scenes.
This is important.
Page 37: The action of Harry slapping Annie on the fanny is unacceptable.
Page 38: This reference to impotency is unacceptable.
The Breen office approved every aspect of a film, every image, every line of dialogue,
ad mattes, marketing, costumes, and it really makes him one of the most powerful men in
Hollywood history.
And by extension made his office one of the most influential in Hollywood.
If you look in the credits of every Hollywood film from 1934 to 1954, you can see the PCA
logo.
Without it, your movie didn’t stand a chance.
The PCA got to say which movies the studios could make.
And since the studios owned many of the theaters in the country, most audiences only had access
to Production Code films.
You could almost call this arrangement a monopoly.
And some people did.
Nine people, to be exact.
US v. Paramount Pictures was a landmark antitrust court case in 1948 in which the Supreme Court
said this kind of monopoly was illegal and forced the studios to sell their theaters.
Since the studios could no longer control what was shown, it opened up the floodgates
for independent and European films, neither of which needed to abide by the code.
The PCA quietly existed until 1967, when the Motion Picture Association of America took
over and American film switched over to a ratings system.
So I always see the code as something that’s not good or bad but something that is inevitable,
and it allowed them to create a lot of great art.
I mean, if you look at the movies made under the Production Code, we're talking about,
what, hundreds of marvelous creative works of art that people still look at today.