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Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the era in the American film industry between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the United States Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code) censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become effectively enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.

As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s frequently included sexual innuendos, references to homosexuality, miscegenation, illegal drug use, infidelity, abortion, and profane language, as well as women in their undergarments. Strong women dominated the screen in films such as Anna Christie, Baby Face, Red-Headed Woman, Blonde Venus, Red Dust, and Waterloo Bridge. Gangsters in films like The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface were more heroic than evil. In addition to stronger female characters, films dealt with female subject matters that were not revisited until much later in Hollywood history. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions, and drug use was a topic of several films.

The Pre-Code era featured shorter films, usually running little more than an hour. Many of Hollywood's biggest stars such as Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jean Harlow got their start in the era. But it also contained stars like Ruth Chatterton, Lyle Talbot, and Warren William (the so-called "king of Pre-Code") who excelled during this period but are mostly forgotten today.

Beginning in late 1933, and escalating throughout the first half of 1934, American Catholics launched a campaign against what they deemed the immorality of American cinema. This combined with a potential Government takeover of film censorship, and Social Research seeming to indicate that so-called bad films could promote bad behavior, was enough pressure to force the Studios to capitulate to greater oversight.

Origins and the Code itself

Will H. Hayes was recruited by the Hollywood studios in 1922 to help clean up their image after a series of scandals, especially the Fatty Arbuckle manslaughter trial.

In 1922, after some risque films and a series of off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars, studio executives recruited beacon of rectitude and Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays to help clean up Hollywood's image. Hays, who was later nicknamed the motion picture "Czar," quickly tarnished his sterling image by lying before the U.S. Senate, although the American people seemed unconcerned that Hays was less noble than imagined. Hollywood in the 1920s was expected to be a bit corrupt, and many felt the movie industry had always been morally questionable. Hays was paid the then-lavish sum of $100,000 a year. Hays, Postmaster General under Warren G. Harding and former head of the Republican National Committee, served for 25 years as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), where he "defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing nostrums, and negotiated treaties to cease hostilities." The Supreme Court had already decided in 1915 in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that free speech did not extend to motion pictures, and while there had been token attempts to clean up the movies before, such as when the studios formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry in 1916, little had come of the efforts.

Creation of the Code and its contents

In 1929, a group of Chicago Roman Catholic clergy and lay people, with the assistance of Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord and Martin Quigley, an influential Roman Catholic layman and editor of the prominent Motion Picture Herald, created a code of ethics and practices they hoped the studios would adopt. In February 1930, they met with the heads of several studios, including Irving Thalberg of MGM, who eventually agreed to the stipulations of the code. It was the responsibility of the Studio Relations Committee headed by Jason Joy to supervise film production and advise the studios when changes or cuts were required.

The code was divided into two parts. The first was a set of general principles which mostly concerned morality. The second was a set of particular applications which was essentially an exacting list of forbidden material. Some restrictions, such as the ban on homosexuality or the use of specific curse words, were never directly mentioned but were assumed to be understood without clear demarcation. Miscegenation, better known as the mixing of the races, was directly forbidden. It also directly stated that the notion of an "adults-only policy" would be a dubious and ineffective strategy which would be difficult to enforce. However, it did allow that "maturer minds may easily understand and accept without harm subject matter in plots which does younger people positive harm." If children were supervised and the meaning implied were elliptical, the code allowed the possibility of a "cinematically inspired thought crime."

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This 1932 promotional photo of Joan Blondell was later banned under the then-unenforceable Motion Picture Production Code.

The production code sought not only to determine what could be portrayed on screen, but also to promote traditional values. Sexual relations outside of marriage could not be portrayed as attractive and beautiful, presented in a way that might arouse passion, nor be made to seem right and permissible. All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience. Authority figures had to be treated with respect, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear they were the exception to the rule. The entire document was written with Catholic undertones and held that art must be handled carefully because it could be "morally evil in its effects" and because its moral significance was unquestionable. One of the main motivating factors in adopting the code was to avoid direct government intervention. The Code also contained an addendum commonly referred to as the Advertising Code which regulated advertising copy and imagery.

Enforcement

The men obligated to enforce the code, Colonel Jason S. Joy and Dr. James Wingate of the Studio Relations Committee, were generally ineffective, although there were several instances where Joy negotiated cuts from films, and there were indeed definite – albeit loose – constraints. Complicating matters, the appeals process ultimately put the responsibility for making the final decision in the hands of the studios themselves. One factor in ignoring the code was the fact that some found such censorship prudish, due to the libertine social attitudes of the 1920s and early 1930s. This was a period in which the Victorian era was ridiculed as being naïve and backward. Additionally, the Great Depression of the 1930s led many studios to seek income by any way possible. As films containing racy and violent content resulted in high ticket sales, it seemed reasonable to continue producing such films. Soon, the flouting of the code became an open secret. In 1931, the Hollywood Reporter mocked the code, and Variety followed suit in 1933. In the same year as the Variety article, a noted screenwriter stated that "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's just a memory."

In certain situations, however, films had their content drastically altered. For example, the film adaptation of the popular Mae West play, Diamond Lil was originally to begin production in 1930. However, it was rejected by the Hays office under the new production code. By 1933, the studios were actively seeking constant cash flow due to the Depression, and the project was green-lighted after numerous plot elements were removed or changed. For example, references to white slavery became counterfeiting, Mae West's character was no longer a "kept woman" and her character seduces a police officer as opposed to a Salvation Army missionary, song lyrics were toned down, the film became a comedy as opposed to serious drama, and the title was changed.

Often however, films containing perceived immoral content would have a rushed moral ending in which characters reform their behavior such as the films of Cecil B. DeMille or Mystery of the Wax Museum in which a strong-minded career-focused woman played by Glenda Farrell abruptly decides to quit her job and marry a man who prefers her to "be a lady."

Early sound film era

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Clara Bow, a popular silent film star who made the transition to sound film, lifts her skirt on the poster for the 1929 film The Saturday Night Kid.

Although the liberalization of sexuality in American film had increased throughout the 1920s, the Pre-Code era is either dated to the start of the sound film era, or in 1930 when the Hays Code was first written. New York had become the first state to institute a censorship board in 1921, and Virginia followed suit the following year, with eight individual states having a board by the advent of sound film. But many of these were ineffectual. By the 1920s the New York Stage, a frequent source of subsequent screen material, had topless shows, performances filled with curse words, mature subject matters, and sexually suggestive dialogue. Early in the sound system conversion process, it was obvious that what might be acceptable in New York would be unacceptable in Kansas. Hays constructed a list of the "Don’ts and Be Carefuls" in 1927, which consisted of eleven subjects best avoided and twenty-six to be handled very carefully. But there was still no way to enforce these tenants. Most of the controversy surrounding film standards began to come to a head in 1929.

Cecil B. DeMille more than any other director, was responsible for the increasing discussion of sex in cinema in the 1920s. Starting with 1919's Male and Female he made a series of films dealing with sex, which were highly successful. Films featuring Holltwood's original it girl Clara Bow such as The Saturday Night Kid (released four days before the October 29, 1929 market crash) were marketed in reference to Bow's sexual attractiveness.

Hollywood after the Great Depression

The Great Depression presented a unique time for film making in American history. The economic disaster brought on by the 1929 Stock Market Crash, changed American values and beliefs in various ways. The concepts of rugged individualism, material progress, upward mobility, personal accumulation, and American exceptionalism lost great currency. Due to the constant empty economic reassurances from politicians in the early years of the depression, the American public developed an increasingly jaded attitude. The cynicism, challenging of traditional beliefs, and political controversy of Hollywood films during this period mirrored the attitudes of many of its patrons. Also gone was the carefree and adventurous lifestyle of the 1920s. "After two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the war" F. Scott Fitzgerald commented in 1931.

People waiting for relief checks during the Great Depression. The Depression had a profound influence on Pre-Code Hollywood in both financial and artistic terms.

In the sense noted by Fitzgerald, understanding the moral climate of the early 1930s is complex. Although films experienced an unprecedented level of freedom, and dared to portray things that would be kept hidden for decades later, many in America looked upon the stock market crash as a product of the excesses of the previous decade. In 1931's Dance, Fools, Dance, lurid party scenes featuring 1920s flappers are played to excess and looked upon with amazement and a sense of moral disgust. Joan Crawford ultimately reforms her ways and is saved, less fortunate is William Bakewell who continues on his careless path, which ultimately leads to his self-destruction. In looking back upon the 1920s, events were more and more often seen as occurring in prelude to the market crash.

For the 1930 film Rain or Shine, Milton Ager and Jack Yellin composed the tune "Happy Days Are Here Again" a premature celebration if one ever existed. The song was repeatedly sarcastically by characters in several films such as 1932's Under 18 and 1933's 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. Less comical was the picture of the United States' future presented in Heroes for Sale where a hobo looks into a depressing night and proclaims "It's the end of America." Heroes for Sale was directed by prolific Pre-Code director William Wellman and featured silent film star Richard Barthelmess as a World War I veteran cast onto the streets with a morphine addiction from his Hospital stay. Harsher still was Wild Boys of the Road, in which Frankie Darrow led a group of dispossessed juvenile drifters who were abandoned by destitute parents.

A crowd gathers around American Union Bank in New York City during a bank run early in the Great Depression. The mob mentality displayed in bank runs was portrayed in films like American Madness, where Frank Capra depicted "the thin line between investor confidence and panic in Hoover's America."

Complicating matters for the studios, the advent of Sound film in 1927 necessitated an immense expenditure in costly new equipment (sound stages, film prints, recording booths, movie theater sound systems etc.) not to mention the new-found artistic complications of producing in a radically altered medium. The studios were in a difficult financial position even before the market crash with the conversion to sound combining with some risky purchases of theater chains to push their finances near the breaking point. The economic circumstances led to a loss of nearly half of the weekly attendance numbers in the first few years of the depression. Even so 60 million Americans were still going to the theaters every week.

Apart from the economic realities of the conversion to sound, were the artistic considerations. Early sound films were often noted for being overly verbose. In 1930 Carl Laemmle criticized the wall to wall banter of early sound films, and director Ernst Lubitsch openly wondered what the camera was intended for if the characters were going to narrate all of the onscreen action. The film industry also withstood competition from the home radio, and often characters in films went to great lengths to denigrate the medium. The film industry was not above using the new medium to broadcast commercials for its projects, and occasionally turned radio stars into short feature performers to take advantage of their built-in following.

Seething beneath the surface of American life in the Depression was the fear of the angry mob, portrayed in panicked hysteria in films such as Gabriel Over the White House, The Mayor of Hell, and American Madness. Panoramic long shots of angry hordes, comprising sometimes hundreds of men, rush into action in terrifyingly efficient uniformity. Groups of agitated men either standing in breadlines, loitering in hobo camps, or marching the streets in protest became a prevalent sight during the Great Depression. The Bonus Army protests of World War I veterans on the US Capital, which Hoover turned into a violent fiasco, prompted many of the Hollywood depictions. Although social issues were dealt with more directly in the Pre-Code, Hollywood still ignored the Great Depression to a large extent, as many films sought to ameliorate patrons, rather than incite them.

Trumpeting this stance of social ignorance, Will Hays remarked in 1932:

The function of motion pictures is to ENTERTAIN...This we must keep before us at all times and we must realize constantly the fatality of ever permitting our concern with social values to lead us into the realm of propaganda...the American motion picture...owes no civic obligation greater than the honest presentment of clean entertainment and maintains that in supplying effective entertainment, free of propaganda, we serve a high and self-sufficing purpose.

Social problem films

Hayes and others such as Samuel Goldwyn obviously felt that motion pictures presented a form of escapism that served a palliative effect on American moviegoers. Goldwyn had coined the famous dictum, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union" in the Pre-Code era. However the MPPDA took the opposite stance when questioned about certain so-called "message" films before Congress in 1932, claiming the audiences' desire for realism led to unsavory social, legal, and political issues being portrayed in film.

Warren William, described by Mick LaSalle as "one of the singular joys of the Pre-Code era," played industrialist villains in several Pre-Code films, and his gangster-freeing, lowlife character in The Mouthpiece reflected much of America's views of lawyers at the time.

The length of Pre-Code films was usually little over an hour. But short running time often necessitated tighter material, and didn't affect the impact of message films. Take for instance 1933's Employees' Entrance, of which Jonathan Rosenbaum writes: "As an attack on ruthless capitalism, it goes a lot further than more recent efforts such as Wall Street, and it's amazing how much plot and character are gracefully shoehorned into 75 minutes." The film featured Pre-Code megastar Warren William (later dubbed "the king of Pre-Code"), "at his magnetic worst" playing a vile department store manager who threatens to fire Loretta Young unless she sleeps with him and who also attempts to ruin her husband.

Films which in any way stated a position about a social issue often were quickly labeled either a "propaganda film" or "preachment yarns". In contrast to Goldwyn and MGM's definitively republican stance on social issue films, Warner Brothers, led by New Deal cheerleader Jack L. Warner, was the most prominent maker of these types of pictures and preferred they be called "Americanism stories". Pre-Code historian Thomas Doherty felt that two recurring elements marked the so-called preachment yarns. "The first is the exculpatory preface; the second is the Jazz Age prelude." The preface was essentially a softened version of a disclaimer which intended to calm any in the audience who disagreed with the film's message. The Jazz Age prelude was almost singularly used to cast shame on the boisterous behavior of the previous decade.

Cabin in the Cotton for instance, released in 1932, is a message film about the evils of capitalism. The film takes place in an unspecified southern state where workers are given barely enough to survive and taken advantage of in the form of exorbitant interest rates and high prices by unconscionable landowners. The film is decidedly anti-capitalist, however its preface claims otherwise:

In many parts of the South today, there exists an endless dispute between rich land-owners, known as planters, and the poor cotton pickers, known as "peckerwoods." The planters supply the tenants with the simple requirements of every day life and in return, the tenants work the land year in and year out. A hundred volumes could be written on the rights and wrongs of both parties, but it is not the object of the producers of Cain in the Cotton to take sides. We are only concerned with the effort to picture these conditions.

In the end however, the planters admit their wrongdoing and agree to a more equitable distribution of Capital. The avaricious businessman remained a recurring character in Pre-Code cinema. In 1932's The Match King Warren William played an industrialist based on the Swedish entrepreneur Ivar Kreuger, himself nicknamed "Match King", who attempts to corner the global market on matches. William's vile character. Paul Kroll, commits every crime from robbery, fraud, and murder on his way from a janitorial position to captain of industry. When the market collapses in the 1929 crash, Williams is ruined and commits suicide to avoid imprisonment. Williams again played an unscrupulous businessman in 1932's Skyscraper Souls, this time portraying David Dwight, a wealthy banker. Dwight owns a building named after himself that is larger than the Empire State Building, and fools everyone he knows into poverty so that he may accumulate their wealth. His moral character is equally revolting and he is shot by his secretary, whom he has betrayed at the end of the film.

America's distrust of lawyers during the depression was also a frequent topic of dissection in social problem films such Lawyer Man, State's Attorney, and The Mouthpiece. In films like Paid, innocent characters are turned into criminals by the legal system. Joan Crawford's life is ruined and her romantic interest is executed so that she may live free—even though she is innocent of the crime the district attorney wants to convivt her of. Even religious hypocrisy was not spared in films such as The Miracle Woman starring Barbara Stanwyck and directed by Frank Capra. Stanwyck also portrayed a noble nurse attempting to heal two sick children while surrounded by nefarious characters (including Clark Gable as a child endangering chauffer) in Night Nurse.

Countless films dealt with the economic realities of a country struggling to find its next meal. In Blonde Venus Marlene Dietrich resorts to prostitution to feed her child, and Claudette Colbert's character in It Happened One Night gets her comeuppance for throwing food into the sea. Joan Blondell's character in Big City Blues complains that as a chorus girl, diamonds and pearls used to be common gifts, and now she is content with a corn beef sandwich. And in Union Depot Douglas Fairbanks Jr. puts a luscious meal as the first order of business on his itinerary after coming into money.

Political releases

Not surprisingly given the social circumstances, politically oriented social problem films portrayed politicians as incompetent bumblers, liars, scoundrels, and subjected them to ridicule. In The Dark Horse Warren William is again enlisted, this time to get an imbecile, who is accidentally in the running for Governor, elected. Despite incessant, embarrassing mishaps by the candidate he ultimately wins the election. Washington Merry-Go-Round portrayed the state of a political system stuck in neutral. Columbia Pictures nearly released the film with a scene of the public execution of a politician as the climax before deciding to cut the lynching. Cecil B. DeMille released This Day and Age in 1933 and it stands in stark contrast to his other films of the period. Filmed shortly after DeMille had completed a five month tour of the Soviet Union, This Day and Age takes place in America and features several children torturing a gangster who got away with the murder of a popular local shopkeeper. The children lower the gangster into a vat of rats and when the police arrive, they encourage the kids to continue. The film ends with the children taking the gangster to a local judge and forcing him to conduct a trial in which the outcome is never in doubt.

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In one of the more bizarre Pre-Code films, 1933's Gabriel Over the White House, a US President wakes up from an accident possessed by an angel and then changes American law to make himself dictator. The film was part of what Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty called the "dictator craze". During the early Depression era, many Americans desired politicians who could give them something beyond empty reassurances and hollow promises.

The need for strong leaders who could take charge and steer America out of its crisis is seen in Gabriel Over the White House. A bizarre, surreal film about a benevolent dictator who takes control of the United States. Walter Huston stars as a weak willed, ineffectual president, likely modeled after Hoover, who upon being knocked unconscious is inhabited by an angel. The spirit is similar to Abraham Lincoln, and the president then solves the nation's unemployment crisis and executes a criminal based on Al Capone who has continually flouted the law. Dictators were not just glorified in fiction. Columbia's 1933 film Mussolini Speaks was a 76 minute paen to the Italian Fascist. NBC radio commentator Lowell Thomas narrates the film. After showing some of the progress Italy has made during Il Duce's ten year reign, Thomas opines "This is a time when a dictator comes in handy!" The film was viewed by over 175,000 jubilant people in its first two week at the cavernous Palace Theater in New York.

The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 quelled the public affection for dictators. As the country became more and more enthralled with FDR, who was featured in countless newsreels, it exhibited less desire for alternative forms of government. Many Hollywood films reflected this new optimism. Heroes for Sale, despite being a tremendously bleak and at times anti-American film, ends on a positive note with the New Deal appearing as a sign of hopeful optimism. When Wild Boys on the Road, a 1933 film directed by William Wellman the most prolific Pre-Code director, reaches its conclusion, a dispossessed juvenile delinquent is in court expecting a jail sentence. However the judge lets the boy go free, revealing to him the symbol of the New Deal behind his desk, and tells him "[t]hings are going to be better here now, not only here in New York, but all over the country."

Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, and his regime of anti-Semitic policies had a significant effect on American Pre-Code film making. Although, Hitler had become unpopular in many parts of the United States, Germany was still a voluminous exporter of American films, and the studios wanted to appease the German Government. The ban on Jews and negative portrayals of Germany in the Fatherland, even led to a significant reduction in work for Jews in Hollywood until after World War II. As a result, only two social problem films released by independent film companies addressing the mania in Germany were produced during the Pre-Code era—Are We Civilized? and Hitler's Reign of Terror. In 1933 Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe announced they were working on a picture titled Mad Dog of Europe that was intended to be a full scale attack on Hitler. Jaffe had even quit his job at RKO Pictures to make the film. Hays summoned the pair to his office and told them to cease production as they were creating unwanted problems for the film industry with Germany.

Vice films

Promotion

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The titles of Pre-Code films were often created with a deliberate intent to titillate. Although violent, the 1931 film Safe in Hell was actually a thoroughly modern, thoughtful film in its social views; the most likable characters were African American actors Nina Mae McKinney and Noble Johnson who spoke in a normal manner rather than being forced into "Negro dialect".

As films featuring prurient elements performed well at the box office, Hollywood increased its production of pictures showcasing the seven deadly sins. In 1932, Warner Brothers formed an official policy decreeing that two in five stories should be "hot", and that other films would benefit by "adding something having to do with ginger." Films such as Laughing Sinners, Safe in Hell, The Devil is Driving, Free Love, Merrily We Go to Hell, Laughter in Hell, and The Road to Ruin were provocative in their mere titles. Studios marketed their films, sometimes dishonestly, by coming up with suggestive tag lines and lurid titles, even going so far as to come up with in house contests for thinking up provocative titles for screenplays. Commonly labeled "sex films" by the censors, these pictures offended taste in more categories than just sexuality. Variety estimated that at least 352 of the 440 films released between 1932 and 1933 contained "some sex slant" and that 145 had "questionable sequences" with 45 being "critically sexual". The trade paper summarized that "over 80% of the world's chief picture output was...flavored with bedroom essence."

Publicity photos like this (Ina Claire in a publicity still for the 1932 film The Greeks Had a Word for Them), with a women lying on a bed in her nightgown, posing rapturously, provoked outrage among civic leaders.

Poster and publicity photos were often tantalizing. Woman appeared in poses and garb not even glimpsed in the films themselves. In some cases actresses with small parts in films, or in the case of Dolores Murray in her publicity still for The Common Law, no part at all, appeared barely clothed. Hayes became outraged at the steamy pictures circulating in newspapers around the country. The original Hays Code contained an oft ignored note about advertising imagery, but he wrote an entirely new advertising screed in the style of the ten commandments that contained a set of twelve prohibitions. The first seven regulated imagery. It prohibited; women in undergaments, women raising their skirts, suggestive poses, kissing, necking, and other suggestive material. The last five concerned advertising copy and prohibited misrepresentation of the film's contents, "salacious copy", and the word "courtesan". Soon, studios found their way around the restrictions and published more racy imagery. Ultimately this backfired in 1934 when a billboard in Philadelphia was placed outside Cardinal Thomas Dougherty's home. Severely offended, Dougherty helped launch the motion picture boycott that later facilitated the enforcement of the Code. A commonly repeated theme by those supporting censorship was the notion that the common people needed to be saved from themselves by the more discerning, puritanical, intellectual minority.

Despite the obvious attempts to appeal to red blooded American males, most of the patrons of vice films were female. Variety squarely blamed women for the increase in vice pictures:

Women are responsible for the ever-increasing public taste in sensationalism and sexy stuff. Women who make up the bulk of the picture audiences are also the majority reader of the tabloids, scandal sheets, flashy magazines, and erotic books...the mind of the average man seems wholesome in comparison...Women love dirt, nothing shocks 'em.

Pre-Code female audiences liked to indulge in the carnal lifestyles of mistresses and adulteresses while at the same time taking joy in their usually inevitable downfall in the closing scenes of the picture.

Content

Vice films typically tacked on endings where the most sin-filled characters were either punished or redeemed. Films explored Code-defying subjects in an unapologetic manner with the premise that an end-reel moment could redeem all that had gone before. The concept of marriage was often tested in films such as 1930's The Prodigal where a woman is having affair on her husband with a seedy character, and later falls in love with her brother-in-law. When her mother-in-law steps in at the end of the film its to encourage her husband to to granter her a divorce so she can marry the brother she is obviously in love with. The mother-in-law proclaims the message of the film in a line near the end. "This the twentieth century. Go out into the world and get what happiness you can." In 1930's Madame Satan adultery is explicitly condoned and used as a sign for a wife that she needs to act in a more enticing way to maintain her husband's interest. And in the 1933 film Secrets a husband admits to serial adultery, only this time he repents and the marriage is saved.

Jean Harlow was described in the Encyclopedia of Hollywood as "the reigning sex symbol of the 1930s." Harlow was propelled to stardom in Pre-Code films such as Platinum Blonde, Red Dust, and Red-Headed Woman.

One of the most prominent examples of punishment for immoral transgressions in vice film can be seen in The Story of Temple Drake, based on the William Faulkner novel Sanctuary. In Drake a promiscuous woman is raped and forced into prostitution by a backwoods character, and according to Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty, the film implies that the deeds done to her are in recompense for her immorality. And in the RKO film Christopher Strong, Katherine Hepburn plays an aviatrix who becomes pregnant from an affair with a married man. She commits suicide by flying her plane directly upwards until she breaks the world altitude record, at which she takes off her oxygen mask and plummets to the Earth.

Marlene Dietrich, who was open about her bisexuality, frequently wore men's clothes in public. In a society still markedly against homosexuality, this caused quite an uproar. In 1933 her Studio, Paramount, signed a largely ineffectual document stating that they would not allow women in men's clothes to appear in their films to both quell the backlash and generate some publicity.

Female protagonists in aggressively sexual vice films were usually of two general kinds: the bad girl and the fallen woman. In so called "bad girl" pictures female characters profit from promiscuity and immoral behavior. Jean Harlow, an actress who was by all reports a lighthearted, kind person off the screen, frequently played bad girl characters and dubbed them "sex vultures". Two of the most prominent examples of bad girl films, Red-Headed Woman and Baby Face, featured Harlow and Stanwyck. In Red-Headed Woman Harlow plays a secretary determined to sleep her way into a more luxurious lifestyle, and in Baby Face Stanwyck is an abused runaway determined to use sex to advance herself financially. In Baby Face Stanwyck moves to New York and sleeps her way to the top of Gotham Trust. Her progress is illustrated in a recurring visual metaphor of the movie camera panning ever upward along the front of Gotham Trust's skyscraper. Men are driven mad with lust over her and they commit murder, attempt suicide, and are ruined financially for associating with her before she mends her ways in the final reel. In another departure from post Code films, Stanwyck's sole companion for the duration of the picture is a black woman named Chico she took with her when she ran away from home at age 14. Red-Headed Woman begins with Harlow seducing her boss Bill LeGendre and intentionally breaking up his marriage. During her seductions, he tries to resist and slaps her, at which point she looks at him deliriously and replies "Do it again, I like it! Do it again!" They eventually marry but Harlow seduces a wealthy aged industrialist who is in business with her husband so that she can move to New York. Although this plan succeeds, she is cast aside when she is discovered having an affair with her chauffeur, in essence cheating on her paramour. Harlow shoots LeGendre and when she is last seen in the film, is in France in the back seat of a limousine with an elderly wealthy gentleman being driven along by the same chauffeur. The film was a boon to Harlow's career and has been described as a "trash masterpiece."

Cinema classified as "fallen women" films was often inspired by real life hardships women endured in the 1920s and 1930s in the workplace. The men in power in these pictures frequently sexually harassed the women working for them. Remaining employed often became a question of a woman's virtue. In She Had to Say Yes, a struggling department store offers dates with its female stenographers as an incentive to customers. And Employees' Entrance was marketed with the tag line "See what out of work girls are up against these days."

Homosexuals were portrayed in several Pre-Code films. Although the topic was dealt with much more openly than in the decades that followed, the characterizations of gay and lesbian characters were usually derogatory. Gay male characters were commonly portrayed as speaking with a high tone voice, having a flighty personality, and used as buffoonish supporting characters for comedic purposes. In films like Ladies They Talk About lesbians were portrayed as rough, burly characters, but in DeMille's The Sign of the Cross a female Christian slave is seduced in dance by a statuesque lesbian dancer in front of a Roman prefect. Bisexual actress Marlene Dietrich cultivated a cross gender fan base and started a trend when she began wearing men's suits, a style which was an anachronism for the 1930s. She caused a commotion when she appeared at the premiere of the 1932 Pre-Code film The Sign of the Cross in a tuxedo replete with top hat and cane. The backlash against homosexual characters appearing in films was rapid and fierce. In 1933 Hays declared that all gay male characters would be removed from pictures, and Paramount took advantage of the negative publicity Dietrich generated by signing a largely meaningless agreement stating that they would not portray women in male attire.

Crime films

In the early 1900s America was still primarily a rural country, especially in terms of self-identity. D. W. Griffith’s 1912 film The Musketeers of Pig Alley is one of the earliest American films to feature organized crime. The urban crime genre was mostly ignored until 1927 when the film Underworld, which is recognized as the first gangster movie, became a surprise hit. According to the Encyclopedia of Hollywood, "The film established the fundamental elements of the gangster movie: a hoodlum hero; ominous, night-shrouded city streets; floozies; and a blazing finale in which the cops cut down the protagonist." Other gangster films such as Thunderbolt, Lights of New York, and Doorway to Hell were released to capitalize on Underworld's popularity.

Birth of the Hollywood gangster

No motion picture genre of the Pre-Code era was more incendiary than the gangster film; neither preachment yarns nor vice films so outraged the moral guardians or unnerved the city fathers as the high caliber scenarios that made screen heroes out of stone killers.

——Pre-Code historian Thomas Doherty

James Cagney being arrested in the the trailer for The Public Enemy. The public's fascination with gangster films in the early 1930s was bolstered by the constant newsreel appearances of real-life criminals like Al Capone and John Dillinger, upon whom characters like Cagney's were often based.

In the early 1930s, several real life criminals became celebrities. Two in particular captured the American imagination; Al Capone and John Dillinger. Gangsters like Capone, had transformed the perception of entire towns. Capone gave Chicago its..."reputation as the locus classicus of American gangsterdom, a cityscape where bullet-proof roadsters with tommygun-toting hoodlums on running boards careened around State Street spraying fusillades of slugs into flower shop windows and mowing down the competition in blood-spattered garages." Capone appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1930. He was even offered seven figure sums by two major Hollywood studios to appear in a film but declined. Dillinger became a national celebrity as a bank robber who had eluded arrest and escaped confinement several times. He had become the most celebrated public outlaw since Jesse James. His father appeared in a popular series of newsreels giving police homespun advice on how to catch his son. Dillinger's popularity rose so quickly that Variety joked "if Dillinger remains at large much longer and more such interviews are obtained, there may be some petitions circulated to make him our president." Hays wrote a cablegram to all the studios in March 1934 decreeing that Dillinger should not be portrayed in any motion picture.

The genre entered an entirely new level with the release of the 1932 film Little Caesar, which featured Edward G. Robinson in a career defining performance as gangster Rico Bandello. Caesar, along with The Public Enemy starring James Cagney and Scarface, were incredibly violent films that created a new type of anti-hero. The box-office success of these films precipitated a spate of copycats (mostly by Warner Brothers) in the 1930s.

Generally considered the grandfather of gangster films, in Caesar Robinson as Rico and his close friend Joe Massara (played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) move to Chicago. Joe wants to go straight and meets a woman. Rico, however, seeks a life of crime and joins the gang of Sam Vettori and quickly rises to become boss of the crime family. After becoming concerned his friend will betray him he threatens him, at which point Joe's girlfriend goes to the police. Unable to kill Joe and thus eliminate the witness against he goes into hiding. He is coaxed out by the police who publish that he is a coward to the press. Rico is killed in a blaze of gunfire and as he is dying says "Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?" Originally Robinson was cast in a small role but convinced the film's producer to play the Al Capone inspired lead role. thumb|left|The "grapefruit scene". Cagney shoves half of a grapefruit into his girlfriend's face in The Public Enemy. William Wellman's The Public Enemy was released the following year and features anothers gives a career defining performance, this time James Cagney as Tom Powers. The film is similar to the template set in Caesar in that follows Powers from his rise to his eventual fall in the world of crime. Cagney's Powers is contrasted by his straight laced brother who wants him to go straight and their mother who is at the center of the conflict. Tom Powers is egotistical, amoral, heartless, ruthless, and extremely violent. The most famous scene in the picture is referred to as the "grapfruit scene"; when Cagney is eating breakfast with his girlfriend she angers him and he cruelly shoves half of a grapefruit in her face. Cagney was even more violent towards women in his 1933 gangster film Picture Snatcher, where he knocks out an amorous woman he is not interested in and violently throws into the back seat of his car.

The most violent and controversial Pre-Code gangster film was undoubtedly Scarface. Directed by Howard Hawks and starring Paul Muni as Tony Comante, the film is partially based on the life of Al Capone and incorporates details of Capone's biography into the storyline. When the film starts Comante works for Johnny Lovo but is unhappy being a subordinate and is attracted to Lovo's girlfriend, Poppy. He has a deep love for his promiscuous sister, who he expects to remain virtuous, that has often been deemed incestuous. Lovo warns Comante to leave the North Side alone as it is controlled by a rival mob. Comante ignores this warning and begins a series of executions and extortions that result in a war with the North side gang. Comante then forcefully takes the gang over from Lovo. When Lovo tries to kill him but fails, Comante murders Lovo and Poppy happily become his girl. When Comante finds his missing sister in a hotel room with his closest friend, the coin flipping gangster Guino Rinaldo (played by George Raft), he goes into a rage and kills Rinaldo. After he finds out that they had become married and wanted to surprise Comante he becomes despondent. The film ends with first Comante's sister then Comante being gunned down by police at his home.

The production of Scarface was troubled from the start. The Hays office warned Howard Hughes, the film's producer, not to make the film. When the film was completed in late 1931, the Hays office demanded numerous changes including a conclusion where Comante was captured, tried, convicted, and hung. Hughes sent the film to numerous state censorship boards, saying that he hoped to show that the film was made to combat the "gangster menace". After being unable to get the film past the New York State censor board (then headed by Wingate) even with the changes, Hughes decided to release the film in a version close to its original form.

Scarface provoked outrage mainly because of its unprecedented violence, but also because of its shifts of tone from serious to comedic. Dave Kehr, writing in the Chicago Reader stated that the film blends "comedy and horror in a manner that suggests Chico Marx let loose with a live machine gun." In one particular scene, Comante is inside a cafe while a torrent of machine gun fire from the car of a rival gang is headed his way. His bumbling assistant, following orders from Comante, keeps trying to answer the phone instead of ducking even after the gangsters make several passes by the cafe. And after the barrage is over, Comante picks up one of the newly released tommy guns one of the gangsters dropped and exhibits child like wonder and unrestrained excitement over the new toy. Civic leaders became furious that gangsters like Capone (who was also the blatant inspiration for Little Caesar) were being applauded in movie houses all across America. Some of biographical details that were used for the character in Scarface were so obviously taken from Capone, and the detail so close, that it was impossible not to draw the parallels.

One of the factors that made gangster pictures so subversive was that in the difficult economic times of the Depression there already existed the viewpoint that the only way to get financial success was through crime. Exacerbating the problem, local theater owners advertised gangster pictures with a singular irresponsibility. Theaters displayed tommy guns and blackjacks and real-life murders were tied into promotions. The situation reached such a nexus that the studios had to ask exhibitors to tone down the gimmickry in their promotions.

Prison films

In contrast to the crumbling social system outside their walls, the prison film portrayed a universe where the state was all powerful and orderly. The films also depicted the inhumane conditions in prisons in the early 1930s sparked by the Ohio penitentiary fire on April 21, 1930 in which guards refused to release prisoners from their cells causing 300 deaths. The genre was composed of two archetypes: the prison film and the chain gang film. In the prison film, large hordes of men move about in identical uniforms, resigned to their fate they live by a well defined code. In the chain gang film, Southern prisoners were subjected to a draconion system in the usually blazing outdoors where ruthless captors regularly whipped them .

End of an era

References to sexual promiscuity, drug use, bloody gangster life, and morally ambiguous endings began to draw the ire of various religious groups, some Protestant but mostly a small contingent of Roman Catholic crusaders. Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, apostolic delegate to the Catholic Church in the United States, called upon American Catholics to unite against the surging immorality of the cinema. As a result, in 1933 the Catholic Legion of Decency, later renamed the National Legion of Decency, was established to control and enforce decency standards and boycott films they deemed offensive. Conservative Protestants tended to support much of the crackdown on so-called immorality, particularly in the South, where anything relating to the state of race relations or miscegenation could not be portrayed. Although the Central Conference of American Rabbis joined in the protest, it was an uneasy alliance as there had always been whispers that at least some of the vitriol from the Christian groups occurred because many studio executives were Jewish.

The Payne Fund Studies, which aimed specifically at cinema's effects on children, were also gaining publicity at this time, and became a great concern to Hays. Hays had said pictures might alter "...that sacred thing, the mind of a child...that clean, virgin thing, that unmarked state" and have "the same responsibility, the same care about the thing put on it that the best clergyman or the most inspired teacher would have." Henry James Forman's book Our Movie-Made Children, which became a best-seller, publicized the Payne Fund's results. 1932, there was an increasing movement for Government controls. And in 1934 when Raymond Cannon was privately preparing a bill supporting by both Democrats and Republicans which would introduce Government oversight, the studios decided they had had enough. They re-organized the enforcement procedures giving Hayes and the recently appointed Joseph Breen, head of the newly formed Production Code Administration (PCA), greater control over censorship. Hays had originally hired Breen in 1930 to handle handle Production Code publicity. Joy began working solely for Fox Studios, and Wingate was bypassed in favor of Breen. Hays became in essence a functionary, while Breen handled the business of censoring films. Despite his status as a moral pillar, Breen was a rabid anti-semite, who said that Jews "are, probably, the scum of the earth." Upon Breen's passing in 1965, the trade magazine Variety stated "More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture."

Although the Legion's impact on the more effective enforcement of the code is unquestionable, their influence on the general populace is harder to gauge. A study done by Hayes after the Code was finally fully implemented found that audiences were doing the exact opposite what the Legion had recommended. Each time the Legion protested a film it meant increased ticket sales, not surprisingly Hayes kept these results to himself and they were not revealed until years later. In contrast to big cities however in smaller towns boycotts were more effective and theater owners complained of the harassment they received when they exhibited salacious films.

Many actors and actresses continued their careers apace after the Code was enforced. However, stars like Ruth Chatterton, Lyle Talbot, and Warren William who excelled during this period struggled and are mostly forgotten today. Mae West in particular had a difficult time transferring her bawdy persona over into the new era. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst went to great lengths to denigrate actresses such as West in his papers, further lessening their prospects.

After the Pre-Code era

File:Three on a Match Dvorak Wellman.jpg

Situations such as this, a man about to kiss a woman who is in bed in her nightgown (Warren William and Ann Dvorak from Three on a Match) were one of the things the Production Code took aim at. After 1934, a scene such as this would not be seen in a Hollywood film for decades.

Censors like Martin Quigley and Joseph Breen understood that:

a private industry code, strictly enforced, is more effective than government censorship as a means of imposing religious dogma. It is secret, for one thing, operating at the pre-production stage. The audience never knows what has been trimmed, cut, revised, or never written. For another, it is uniform — not subject to hundreds of different licensing standards. Finally and most important, private censorship can be more sweeping in its demands, because it is not bound by constitutional due process or free-expression rules — in general, these apply to only the government — or by the command of church-state separation ... there is no question that American cinema today is far freer than in the heyday of the Code, when Joe Breen's blue pencil and the Legion of Decency's ever-present boycott threat combined to assure that films adhered to Roman Catholic Church doctrine.

Termed by Breen as "Compensating moral value", the maxim was that "any theme must contain at least sufficient good in the story to compensate for, and to counteract, any evil which relates." Hollywood could present evil behavior, but only if it were eradicated by the end of the film, with the guilty sufficiently punished, or the sinner redeemed.

Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty summarized the practical effects:

Even for moral guardians of Breen's dedication, however, film censorship can be a tricky business. Images must be cut, dialogue overdubbed or deleted, and explicit messages and subtle implications excised from what the argot of film criticism calls the "diegesis". Put simply, the diegesis is the world of the film, the universe inhabited by the characters existing in the landscape of cinema."Diegetic" elements are experienced by the characters in the film and (vicariously) by the spectator; "nondiegetic" elements are apprehended by the spectator alone...The job of the motion picture censor is to patrol the diegesis, keeping an eye and ear out for images, languages, and meanings that should be banished from the world of film...The easiest part of the assignment is to connect the dots and connect what is visually and verbally forbidden by name...More challenging is the work of the textual analysis and narrative rehabilitation that discerns and redirects hidden lessons and moral meanings.

Shirley Temple, a rising star in 1934, was advertised as "an attraction that will serve as an answer to many of the attacks that are being hurled at pictures."

The censors thus expanded their jurisdiction from merely what was seen to what was implied in the spectator's mind. In The Office Wife, a 1930 film featuring Joan Blondell, not only were several of Blondell's disrobing maneuvers strictly forbidden, but the implied image of the actress being naked just off-screen, was too suggestive even though it relied upon the audience using their imaginations. Later, similar scenes were deliberately blurred or rendered indistinct if allowed at all.

After the July 1934 decision by the studios put the power over film censorship firmly in Breen's hands he appeared in a series of newsreel clips promoting the new order of business, assuring Americans that the motion picture industry would be removed of "the vulgar, the cheap, and the tawdry" and that pictures would be made "vital and wholesome entertainment." The first film Breen directly censored in the production stage was the Joan Crawford film Forsaking All Others. All scripts now went through PCA, and several films playing in theaters were ordered withdrawn. Although Independent film producers vowed that they would give "no thought to Mr. Joe Breen or anything he represents," they caved on their stance within one month after making it. The fact remained that the major studios owned most of the successful theaters in the country. In several large cities audiences booed when the Production seal appeared before films.

A coincidental upswing in the fortunes of several studios was publicly explained by Code proponents such as the Motion Picture Herald as proof positive that the code was working. Another fortunate coincidence for Code supporters was the torrent of famous criminals such John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde that were killed by police shortly as the PCA took power. Corpses of the outlaws were shown in newsreel around the country, alongside images of Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly in Alcatraz.Among the unarguably positive aspects of the Code being enforced was undoubtedly the money it saved studios in having to edit, cut, and alter films to get approval from the various state boards and censors. The money saved was in the millions annually. A spate of more wholesome family films featuring performers such as Shirley Temple took off. Stars such as James Cagney redefined their images. Cagney played a series of patriots, and his gangster in 1937's Angels with Dirty Faces purposefully acts like a coward when he is executed so that children who look up to him will cease their admiration. And in the political realm films such Mr. Smith Goes to Washington where James Stewart tries to change the American system from within while reaffirming its core values, stand in stark contrast to decidedly anti-American cinema like Gabriel over the White House where a dictator is needed to cure America's woes.

Many pre-Code movies suffered irreparable damage from the censorship that followed after 1934. When studios attempted to re-issue films from the 1920s and early 1930s, they were forced to make extensive cuts. Many of these films, such as Animal Crackers (1930), Mata Hari (1931), and Love Me Tonight (1932), currently exist in only their censored versions. In the case of Convention City (1933), the entire film reportedly was destroyed because the Breen office refused to budge. In other instances, the studios remade films, such as The Maltese Falcon (1931), which was remade in 1941, because the Breen office refused to allow them to be shown.

DVD releases

Warner Bros. Home Video has released several of their pre-code films on DVD under the Forbidden Hollywood banner. To date, three volumes have been released.

• Volume 1, released on December 5, 2006, includes Baby Face, Red-Headed Woman, and Waterloo Bridge.
• Volume 2, released on March 4, 2008, includes The Divorcee, A Free Soul, Three on a Match, Female, and Night Nurse.
• Volume 3, released on March 24, 2009, includes Other Men's Women, The Purchase Price, Frisco Jenny, Midnight Mary, Heroes for Sale, and Wild Boys of the Road.

Universal Home Video followed suit with Pre-Code Hollywood Collection: Universal Backlot Series. Released on April 7, 2009, the box set includes The Cheat, Merrily We Go to Hell, Hot Saturday, Torch Singer, Murder at the Vanities, and Search for Beauty, together with a copy of the entire Hays Code.

See also

• Busby Berkeley using alternate takes to circumvent censorship

Sources

• Benshoff, Harry M. & Griffin, Sean. America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies. Wiley-Blackwell 2004 ISBN
• Butters, Gerard R. Banned in Kansas: motion picture censorship, 1915-1966. University of Missouri Press 2007
• Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press 1999. ISBN 0-231-11094-4
• LaSalle, Mick. Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. New York: St. Martin's Press 2000 ISBN 0-312-25207-2
• LaSalle, Mick. Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man. New York: Thomas Dunne Books 2002 ISBN 0-312-28311-3
• Lewis, Jen. Hollywood V. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry. NYU Press 2002
• Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood: Social dimensions: technology, regulation and the audience. Taylor & Francis 2004
• Siegel, Scott, & Siegel, Barbara. The Encyclopedia of Hollywood. 2nd edition Checkmark Books 2004. ISBN 0816046220
• Turan, Kenneth. Never Coming to a Theater Near You: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Movie. Public Affairs 2004 ISBN 1586482319
• Jacobs, Lea. The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1991 ISBN 0-520-20790-4

Further reading

• Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. New York: Columbia University Press 2009. ISBN 0231143583
• Vieira, Mark A., Sin in Soft Focus. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2003. ISBN 0-8109-8228-5

External links

• The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930
• Pre-Code Film from Bright Lights Film Journal
• Sexual Classic Films at Filmsite.org
• Pre-Code Film at the UCLA Film & Television Archive
• Turner Classic Movies