Pre-Code Hollywood

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"Pre-Code" redirects here. For other uses, see Pre-code (disambiguation).
Films made in the Pre-Code era frequently presented people in sexually suggestive or provocative situations, and did not hesitate to display women in scanty attire. In this publicity photo, Dorothy Mackaill plays a secretary-turned-prostitute in Safe in Hell, a 1931 Warner Bros. film directed by William Wellman.

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



Origins of the Code[edit]

Will H. Hays was recruited by the Hollywood studios in 1922 to help clean up their image after a series of scandals, especially the Roscoe Arbuckle manslaughter trial.[3]

In 1922, after some risqué films and a series of off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars, the studios enlisted beacon of rectitude and Presbyterian elder William H. "Will" Hays to rehabilitate Hollywood's image. Hays, later nicknamed the motion picture "Czar", was paid the then-lavish sum of $100,000 a year (equivalent to more than $1.4 million in 2014 dollars).[4][5][6] Hays, Postmaster General under Warren G. Harding and former head of the Republican National Committee,[3] 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."[7] The move mimicked the decision Major League Baseball had made in hiring judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as League Commissioner the previous year to quell questions about the integrity of baseball in wake of the 1919 World Series gambling scandal; The New York Times called Hays the "screen Landis".[4]


Creation of the Code and its contents[edit]







On February 19, 1930, Variety published the entire contents of the Code and predicted that state film censorship boards would soon become obsolete.[21] However, the men obligated to enforce the code, Jason Joy, who was the head of the Committee until 1932, and his successor, Dr. James Wingate, were generally ineffective.[15][22] The very first film the office reviewed, The Blue Angel, which was passed by Joy without revision, was considered indecent by a California censor.[23] Although there were several instances where Joy negotiated cuts from films, and there were indeed definite—albeit loose—constraints, a significant amount of lurid material made it to the screen.[24]



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.[14] Soon, the flouting of the code became an open secret. In 1931, the Hollywood Reporter mocked the code, and Variety followed suit in 1933.[15] 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."[15]

Early sound film era[edit]

Although the liberalization of sexuality in American film had increased during the 1920s,[28] the Pre-Code era is either dated to the start of the sound film era, or more generally to March 1930 when the Hays Code was first written.[1][29] Over the protests of NAMPI,[30] New York became the first state to take advantage of the Supreme Court's decision in Mutual film vs. Ohio by instituting a censorship board in 1921. Virginia followed suit the following year,[31] and eight individual states had a board by the advent of sound film.[32][33]

Many of these boards were ineffectual. By the 1920s, the New York stage, a frequent source of subsequent screen material, had topless shows; performances were filled with curse words, mature subject matter, and sexually suggestive dialogue.[34] Early during the sound system conversion process, it became apparent that what might be acceptable in New York would not be so in Kansas.[34] In 1927, Hays suggested studio executives form a committee to discuss film censorship. Irving G. Thalberg of Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Sol Wurtzel of Fox, and E. H. Allen of Paramount responded by collaborating on a list they called the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls", based on items that were challenged by local censor boards, and which consisted of eleven subjects best avoided, and twenty-six to be handled very carefully. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the list, and Hays created the SRC to oversee its implementation.[35][36] But there was still no way to enforce these tenets.[4] The controversy surrounding film standards came to a head in 1929.[1][37]

Director Cecil B. DeMille was responsible for the increasing discussion of sex in cinema in the 1920s.[38][39] Starting with Male and Female (1919), he made a series of films that examined sex and were highly successful.[38] Films featuring Hollywood's original "It girl" Clara Bow such as The Saturday Night Kid (released four days before the October 29, 1929, market crash) highlighted Bow's sexual attractiveness.[40] 1920s stars such as Bow, Gloria Swanson, and Norma Talmadge freely displayed their sexuality in a straightforward fashion.[41]

Hollywood during the Great Depression[edit]

People waiting for relief checks during the Great Depression, Calipatria, California, 1937. The Depression had a profound influence on Pre-Code Hollywood in both financial and artistic terms.

The Great Depression presented a unique time for film-making in the United States. The economic disaster brought on by the Stock Market crash of 1929 changed American values and beliefs in various ways. Themes of American exceptionalism and traditional concepts of personal achievement, self-reliance, and the overcoming of odds lost great currency.[42] Due to the constant empty economic reassurances from politicians in the early years of the Depression, the American public developed an increasingly jaded attitude.[43]

The cynicism, challenging of traditional beliefs, and political controversy of Hollywood films during this period mirrored the attitudes of many of their patrons.[44] Also gone was the carefree and adventurous lifestyle of the 1920s.[45] "After two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the war", F. Scott Fitzgerald commented in 1931.[46] 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 several decades, many in America looked upon the stock market crash as a product of the excesses of the previous decade.[47] In looking back upon the 1920s, events were increasingly seen as occurring in prelude to the market crash.[48] In Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), lurid party scenes featuring 1920s flappers are played to excess. Joan Crawford ultimately reforms her ways and is saved; less fortunate is William Bakewell, who continues on the careless path that leads to his ultimate self-destruction.[48]

For Rain or Shine (1930), Milton Ager and Jack Yellin composed "Happy Days Are Here Again". The song was repeated sarcastically by characters in several films such as Under 18 (1932) and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1933). Less comical was the picture of the United States' future presented in Heroes for Sale that same year (1933), in which a hobo looks into a depressing night and proclaims, "It's the end of America".[49]

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. In Wild Boys of the Road (1933), the young man played by Frankie Darrow leads a group of dispossessed juvenile drifters who frequently brawl with the police.[50] Such gangs were common; around 250,000 youths traveled the country by hopping trains or hitchhiking in search of better economic circumstances in the early 1930s.[51]



Apart from the economic realities of the conversion to sound, were the artistic considerations. Early sound films were often noted for being too verbose.[2][55] In 1930, Carl Laemmle criticized the wall-to-wall banter of sound pictures, and director Ernst Lubitsch wondered what the camera was intended for if characters were going to narrate all the onscreen action.[55] The film industry also withstood competition from the home radio, and often characters in films went to great lengths to belittle the medium.[56] The film industry was not above using the new medium to broadcast commercials for its projects however, and occasionally turned radio stars into short feature performers to take advantage of their built-in following.[57]

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 (1933), The Mayor of Hell (1933), and American Madness (1932).[52] Massive wide 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.[52] The Bonus Army protests of World War I veterans on the capital in Washington, D.C., on which Hoover unleashed a brutal crackdown, prompted many of the Hollywood depictions. Although social issues were examined more directly in the Pre-Code era, Hollywood still largely ignored the Great Depression, as many films sought to ameliorate patrons, rather than incite them.[58]

Hays remarked in 1932:[59]


Social problem films[edit]

Hays and others, such as Samuel Goldwyn, obviously felt that motion pictures presented a form of escapism that served a palliative effect on American moviegoers.[60] Goldwyn had coined the famous dictum, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union" in the Pre-Code era.[60] 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 certain unsavory social, legal, and political issues being portrayed in film.[61]

Warren William, described by Mick LaSalle as "one of the singular joys of the Pre-Code era,"[62] played industrialist villains in several Pre-Code films, and his gangster-freeing, lowlife character in The Mouthpiece (1932) reflected much of America's views of lawyers at the time.[63]








Countless films dealt with the economic realities of a country struggling to find its next meal. In Blonde Venus (1932), Marlene Dietrich's character resorts to prostitution to feed her child, and Claudette Colbert's character in It Happened One Night (1934) gets her comeuppance for throwing a tray of food onto the floor by later finding herself without food or financial resources.[78] Joan Blondell's character in Big City Blues (1932) reflects that as a chorus girl she regularly received diamonds and pearls as gifts, but now must content herself with a corned beef sandwich.[78] In Union Depot (1932), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. puts a luscious meal as the first order of business on his itinerary after coming into money.[79]

Political releases[edit]

In one of the more bizarre pre-Code films, Gabriel Over the White House (1933), a U.S. 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 the 1930s trade papers dubbed the "dictator craze". During the early Depression era, many Americans desired politicians who could give them something beyond empty reassurances and hollow promises.[80]






Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany and his regime's anti-Semitic policies significantly affected American Pre-Code film-making. Although Hitler had become unpopular in many parts of the United States, Germany was still a voluminous importer of American films and the studios wanted to appease the German government.[95] 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 the end of World War II. As a result, only two social problem films released by independent film companies addressed the mania in Germany during the Pre-Code era (Are We Civilized? and Hitler's Reign of Terror).[96]


A famous shot from the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. Scenes where criminals aimed guns at the camera were considered inappropriate by the New York state censor board in the 1920s and usually removed.

Crime films[edit]

Main article: Pre-Code crime films


The Hays Office had never officially recommended banning violence in any form in the 1920s—unlike profanity, the drug trade or prostitution—but advised that it be handled carefully.[8] New York's censor board was more thorough than that of any other state, missing only around 50 of the country's 1,000 to 1,300 annual releases.[107] In 1927–28 the violent scenes removed were all of those in which a gun was pointed at the camera, some instances in which guns were pointed "at or into the body of another character", many shots where machine guns were featured, scenes where criminals shot at law enforcement officers, some scenes involving stabbing or knife brandishing (audiences considered stabbings more disturbing than shootings), most whippings, several involving choking, torture, or electrocution, and any scenes which could be considered educational in their depiction of crime methods. Sadistic violence and reaction shots showing the faces of individuals on the receiving end of violence were considered especially sensitive areas.[108] The Code later recommended against scenes showing robbery, theft, safe-cracking, arson, "the use of firearms", "dynamiting of trains, machines, and buildings", and "brutal killings", on the basis that they would be rejected by local censors.[36]

Birth of the Hollywood gangster[edit]


—Pre-Code historian Thomas P. Doherty
Paul Muni in the trailer for Scarface. 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 Muni's were often based.



Rico (Edward G. Robinson) confronts Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) when Joe decides to give up the gangster lifestyle in Little Caesar.

Generally considered the grandfather of gangster films,[117] in Little Caesar, Robinson as Rico and his close friend Joe Massara (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. He rises to the rank of 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 bring himself to kill Joe and eliminate the witness against him, Rico 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; his last words are "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?"[118] Robinson was initially cast in a small role but persuaded the film's producer to let him play the lead.[119] Wingate, who then headed New York's censorship board, told Hays that he was flooded with complaints from people who saw kids in theaters nationwide "applaud the gang leader as a hero."[120] The success of Little Caesar inspired Fox's The Secret Six (1931) and Quick Millions (1931), and Paramount's City Streets (1931), but the next big Hollywood gangster would come from Warners.[121]

William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931), released by Warner Brothers, features another career-defining performance, this time James Cagney as Tom Powers. The film is similar to the template set in Little Caesar in that it follows Powers from his rise to his eventual fall in the world of crime. The film was partially based on the real life of Chicago gangster Dion O'Banion.[122] Cagney's character is contrasted with his puritanical brother who wants him to go straight; their mother is at the center of the conflict. Tom Powers is egotistical, amoral, heartless, ruthless, and extremely violent.[123] The best-remembered scene in the picture is referred to as the "grapefruit scene": when Cagney's girlfriend (Mae Clark) angers him during breakfast, he shoves half a grapefruit in her face.[123] Instead of scenes from the film, its trailer contained a voiceover warning of the picture's intensity and showed a gun being fired directly at the camera.[124]

The infamous "grapefruit scene" in Public Enemy, with James Cagney and Mae Clarke.

Cagney was even more violent towards women in the gangster film Picture Snatcher (1933): in one scene, he knocks out an amorous woman whose feelings he does not reciprocate and violently throws her into the backseat of his car.[125] In April 1931, the same month as the release of The Public Enemy, Hays recruited former police chief August Vollmer to conduct a study on the effect gangster pictures had on children. After he had finished his work, Vollmer stated that gangster films were innocuous and even overly favorable in depicting the police.[126] Although Hays used the results to defend the film industry,[126] the New York State censorship board was not impressed, and from 1930 through 1932, removed 2,200 crime scenes from pictures.[127]

Some critics have named Scarface (1932) as the most incendiary Pre-Code gangster film.[128][129] Directed by Howard Hawks and starring Muni as Tony Camonte, the film is partially based on the life of Al Capone and incorporates details of Capone's biography into the storyline.[128] The film begins with Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) working for Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), but he's dissatisfied with being a subordinate and he's also attracted to Lovo's girlfriend Poppy (Karen Morley). He has an unhealthily controlling relationship with his sister Francesca (Ann Dvorak) -- whom he expects to remain chaste—that many critics have described as incestuous.[130] Lovo warns Camonte to leave the North Side alone as it is controlled by a rival mob, but he ignores this warning and launches a series of executions and extortions that result in a war with the North Side gang. Camonte then forcefully takes the gang over from Lovo, who tries unsuccessfully to kill him for this. Camonte's attempt to kill Lovo is more successful, and Poppy happily becomes his girl. When Camonte finds Francesca in a hotel room with his closest friend, coin-flipping gangster Guino Rinaldo (George Raft), he kills Rinaldo in a rage. Afterward, he becomes despondent when he learns that the couple had wanted to surprise him with the news that they had gotten married.[131]

Both Osgood Perkins and Paul Muni light a match for Karen Morley's cigarette in the trailer for Scarface. Morley chooses Muni's light, in effect spurning her boyfriend for the fast rising gangster.

The production of Scarface was troubled from the start. The Hays office warned producer Howard Hughes not to make the film;[132] when it was completed in late 1931, the Hays office demanded numerous changes including a conclusion where Comante was captured, tried, convicted, and hanged[133] and that the film carry the subtitle Shame of a Nation.[127] 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".[125] After he was unable to get the film past the New York State censor board (then headed by Wingate)[125] even after the changes, Hughes sued the New York board and won, allowing him to release the film in a version close to its intended form.[133][134] When other local censors refused to release the edited version, the Hays Office sent Jason Joy around to them to assure them that the cycle of gangster films of this nature was ending.[135]

Scarface provoked outrage mainly because of its unprecedented violence, but also for its shifts of tone from serious to comedic.[136] 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."[130] In one scene, Camonte is inside a cafe while a torrent of machine-gun fire from the car of a rival gang is headed his way; when the barrage is over, Camonte picks up one of the newly-released tommy guns the gangsters dropped and exhibits childlike wonder and unrestrained excitement over the new toy.[125] Civic leaders became furious that gangsters like Capone (who was also the blatant inspiration for Little Caesar)[119] were being applauded in movie houses all across America.[101] The screenplay, adapted by Ben Hecht who was a journalist in Chicago, contained biographical details for Muni's character in Scarface that were so obviously taken from Capone, and the detail so close, that it was impossible not to draw the parallels.[128]

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.[137] The Kansas City Times argued that although adults may not be particularly affected, these films were "misleading, contaminating, and often demoralizing to children and youth."[138] Exacerbating the problem, some cinema theater owners advertised gangster pictures with a singular irresponsibility. Real-life murders were tied into promotions and "theater lobbies displayed tommy guns and blackjacks".[139] The situation reached such a nexus that the studios had to ask exhibitors to tone down the gimmickry in their promotions.[139]

Prison films[edit]

In contrast to the crumbling social system outside their walls, the prison film portrayed a universe where the state is orderly and all powerful.[140] Sparked by the real-life Ohio penitentiary fire on April 21, 1930 in which guards refused to release prisoners from their cells, causing 300 deaths, the films depicted the inhumane conditions inside prisons in the early 1930s.[140] The genre was composed of two archetypes: the prison film and the chain gang film.[141] In the prison film, large hordes of men move about in identical uniforms, resigned to their fate, they live by a well defined code.[142] In the chain gang film, Southern prisoners were subjected to a draconian system of discipline in the blazing outdoors where they were treated terribly by their ruthless captors.[140] The prototype of the prison genre was The Big House (1930).[143] I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is considered by most critics to be the seminal film of the chain gang genre. Although the chain gang film Hell's Highway had beaten Fugitive to the screen two months earlier, it exerted nowhere the influence.[144]

In The Big House, Robert Montgomery plays a squirmy inmate who is sentences to six years after committing vehicular manslaughter while under the influence. His cell mates are a murderer played by Wallace Beery and a forger played by Chester Morris. The picture features future staples of the prison genre such as solitary confinement, informers, riots, visitations, an escape, and the codes of prison life. The protagonist, Montgomery, ends up being a loathsome character, a coward who will sell anyone in the prison out to get an early release.[145] The film was banned in Ohio, the site of the deadly prison riots that inspired it.[146] Numbered Men, The Criminal Code, Shadow of the Law, Convict's Code, and others, from no less than seven studios, followed.[147] However, prison films mainly appealed to men, and had weak box office performances as a result.[146] Studios also produced children's prison films which addressed the juvenile delinquency problems of America in the Depression. The Mayor of Hell for instance, featured kids killing a murderously abusive reform school overseer without retribution.[148]

Chain gang films[edit]

Paul Muni prepares to have his ankle shackles bent via sledge hammer by the prisoner in the background in I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Based on the autobiographical memoirs of Robert E. Burns, who was himself a fugitive at the time of the picture's release, the film was a powerful agent for social change.


Although based on reality, Chain Gang changes the facts slightly to appeal to Depression era audiences by making Allen's return home one to a country that is struggling economically, even though Burns returned to the roaring twenties.[152] The film's bleak, anti-establishment ending shocked audiences.[153] Laughter in Hell, a 1933 film directed by Edward L. Cahn and starring Pat O'Brien, was inspired in part by I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.[154] O'Brien plays a railroad engineer who kills his wife and her lover in a jealous rage, and is sent to prison. The dead man's brother ends up being the warden of the prison and torments O'Brien's character. O'Brien and several others revolt, killing the warden and escaping with his new lover (Gloria Stuart).[155][156] The film, rediscovered in 2012,[157] drew controversy for its lynching scene in which several black men were hung. Reports vary if the blacks were hung alongside other white men, or by themselves. The New Age (an African American weekly newspaper) film critic praised the filmmakers for being courageous enough to depict the atrocities that were occurring in some Southern states.[156]

Sex films[edit]

The titles of Pre-Code films were often created with a deliberate intent to titillate. Although violent, the film Safe in Hell (1931) 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 their own natural voices, without having to resort to a "Negro dialect".[158][159]
Main article: Pre-Code sex films


As films featuring prurient elements performed well at the box office, after the crackdown on crime films,[160] Hollywood increased its production of pictures featuring the seven deadly sins.[161] In 1932, Warner Bros formed an official policy decreeing that "two out of five stories should be hot", and that nearly all films could benefit by "adding something having to do with ginger."[162] Filmmakers began putting in overly-suggestive material they knew would never reach theaters in hopes that lesser offenses would survive the cutting-room floor. Mae West was known to employ this tactic. MGM screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart said that "[Joy and Wingate] wouldn't want to take out too much, so you would give them five things to take out to satisfy the Hays Office—and you would get away with murder with what they left in."[163] Films such as Laughing Sinners, Safe in Hell, The Devil is Driving, Merrily We Go to Hell, Laughter in Hell, and The Road to Ruin were provocative in their mere titles.[161] Studios marketed their films, sometimes dishonestly, by inventing suggestive tag lines and lurid titles, even going so far as to hold in-house contests for thinking up provocative titles for screenplays.[164] Commonly labeled "sex films" by the censors, these pictures offended taste in more categories than just sexuality.[161] According to a Variety analysis of 440 pictures produced in 1932–33, 352 had "some sex slant", with 145 possessing "questionable sequences", and 44 being "critically sexual". Variety summarized that "over 80% of the world's chief picture output was ... flavored with bedroom essence."[162] Attempts to create films for adults only (dubbed "pinking") wound up bringing large audiences of all ages to cinemas.[165]

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

Posters and publicity photos were often tantalizing.[166] Women 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 scantily-clad.[167] Hays became outraged at the steamy pictures circulating in newspapers around the country.[168] The original Hays Code contained an often-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.[169] The first seven addressed imagery. They prohibited women in undergarments, 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".[170] Studios found their way around the restrictions and published increasingly racy imagery. Ultimately this backfired in 1934 when a billboard in Philadelphia was placed outside the home of Cardinal Dennis Dougherty. Severely offended, Dougherty took his revenge by helping to launch the motion-picture boycott which would later facilitate enforcement of the Code.[171] A commonly-repeated theme by those supporting censorship, and one mentioned in the Code itself[172] was the notion that the common people needed to be saved from themselves by the more refined cultural elite.[173]



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.[175] While gangster films were claimed to corrupt the morals of young boys, vice films were blamed for threatening the purity of adolescent women.[165]

Jean Harlow was described in the Encyclopedia of Hollywood as "the reigning sex symbol of the 1930s."[38] Harlow was propelled to stardom in Pre-Code films such as Platinum Blonde, Red Dust, and Red-Headed Woman.



In Madame Satan (1930), 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.[179] In Secrets (1933), a husband admits to serial adultery, only this time he repents and the marriage is saved.[179] The films took aim at what was already a damaged institution. During the Great Depression, relations between spouses often deteriorated due to financial strain, marriages lessened, and husbands abandoned their families in increased numbers.[180] Marriage rates continually declined in the early 1930s, finally rising in 1934, the final year of the Pre-Code era, and although divorce rates lowered, this is likely because desertion was a more likely method of separation.[181] Consequently, female characters, such as Ruth Chatterton's in Female, live promiscuous bachelorette lifestyles, and control their own financial destiny (Chatterton supervises an auto factory) without regret.[176]

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, the title character (Miriam Hopkins), a cold, vapid "party girl", the daughter of a judge, 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.[182] Later, in court, she confesses that she killed the man who raped and kept her. She faints after this confession, upon which her lawyer carries her out, leading to a "happy ending".[183] In the RKO film Christopher Strong, Katharine Hepburn plays an aviator 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 point she takes off her oxygen mask and plummets to earth.[184] Strong female characters often ended films as "reformed" feminists, after experiencing situations in which their progressive outlook proved faulty.[176]

Marlene Dietrich, who was open about her bisexuality, wore men's clothes in public. In a society still markedly against homosexuality and cross genderism, 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.[185]

Female protagonists in aggressively sexual vice films were usually of two general kinds: the bad girl or the fallen woman.[186] In so-called "bad girl" pictures, female characters profited from promiscuity and immoral behavior.[187] Jean Harlow, an actress who was by all reports a lighthearted, kind person offscreen, frequently played bad girl characters and dubbed them "sex vultures".[188] 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.[189]

In Baby Face Stanwyck moves to New York and sleeps her way to the top of Gotham Trust.[190] 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.[191] In another departure from post Code films, Stanwyck's sole companion for the duration of the picture is a black woman named Chico (Theresa Harris), whom she took with her when she ran away from home at age 14.[192]


Cinema classified as "fallen woman" films was often inspired by real-life hardships women endured in the early Depression era 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 (1933), starring Loretta Young, a struggling department store offers dates with its female stenographers as an incentive to customers.[186] And Employees' Entrance was marketed with the tag line "See what out of work girls are up against these days."[186] Joy complained in 1932 of another genre, the "kept woman" film, which presented adultery as an alternative to the tedium of an unhappy marriage.[197]

Homosexuals were portrayed in such Pre-Code films such as Our Betters (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), Only Yesterday (1933), Sailor's Luck (1933), and Cavalcade (1933).[198] 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 portrayed as high of voice-tone and flighty of personality, existing merely as buffoonish supporting characters.[199] 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 brought to a Roman prefect and seduced in dance by a statuesque lesbian dancer.[200] Fox nearly became the first American studio to use the word "gay" to refer to homosexuality, but the SRC made the studio muffle the word in the soundtrack of all filmreels that reached theaters.[201] 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 Sign of the Cross in 1932 in a tuxedo replete with top hat and cane.[202] The backlash against homosexual characters appearing in films was rapid. In 1933 Hays declared that all gay male characters would be removed from pictures; 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.[203]


A well known film seductress, Mae West was also a noted wit. The Encyclopedia of Hollywood describes her as "easily the greatest comedienne in film history."[204] West is sometimes erroneously credited as being the sole reason for the Production Code.[205]

In the harsh economic times of the early Depression, films and performers often featured an alienated, cynical, and socially dangerous comic style. As with political films, comedy softened with the election of FDR and the optimism of the New Deal. Characters in the Pre-Code era frequently engaged in comedic duels of escalating sexual innuendo.[206] In Employee's Entrance, a woman enters the office of a scoundrel boss who remarks, "Oh, it's you — I didn't recognize you with all your clothes on."[207] Racial stereotypes were usually employed when ethnic characters appeared. Blacks in particular were usually the butt of the wisecrack, never the author. The most acknowledged black comedian was Stepin Fetchit, whose slow-witted comedic character was only meant to be successful in an unintentional manner, with himself as the punchline.[208]

The New York stage was filled with ribald humor and sexually-offensive comedy; when movie producers started to put wisecracks in their sound pictures, they sought New York performers.[34][209] Popular comics such as Mae West and the Marx Brothers got their start on Broadway in front of live audiences.[210] Censors complained when they had to keep up with the deluge of jokes in pictures in the early 1930s, some of which were designed to go over their heads.[209] The comic banter of some early sound films was rapid-fire, non-stop, and frequently exhausting for the audience by the final reel.[210]

The Marx Brothers as they appeared in the early 1930s. From the top: Chico, Harpo, Groucho, and Zeppo. The brothers' 1933 film Duck Soup is generally considered as their finest picture.[211]

Mae West had already established herself as a comedic performer when her 1926 Broadway show Sex made national headlines. Tried and convicted of indecency by the New York City District Attorney, she served eight days in prison.[212] West carefully constructed a stage persona and carried it over into her interviews and personal appearances.[213] Despite her voluptuous physique, most of her appeal lay in her suggestive manner. She became a wordsmith in the art of the come-on and the seductive line, and despite her obvious appeal to male audiences, was popular with women as well.[214][215] Over the cries of the censors,[216] West got her start in the film Night After Night (1932), which starred George Raft and Constance Cummings, as a Texas Guinan-esque supporting character. She agreed to appear in the film only after producers agreed to let her write her own lines.[217] In West's first line on film, after a hat check girl remarks "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds", West replies, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie."[218] Raft, who had wanted Texas Guinan herself for the role that went to West, later wrote, "In this picture, Mae West stole everything but the cameras."[204] She went on to make She Done Him Wrong in 1933, which became a huge box office hit, grossing $3 million against a $200,000 budget,[219] and then nine months later wrote and starred in I'm No Angel.[220] She became such a success that her career saved Paramount from financial ruin.[212][216]


The Marx Brothers had been stage performers since the early 1900s. By the 1930s, their act consisted of wisecracking leader Groucho, the chronically silent Harpo, the overly ethnic Chico, and the strangely normal Zeppo. The plot of the seminal comedy Duck Soup (1933) is quite convoluted. Groucho's plebeian character is named king of the fictional Freedonia, and he is pursued by two bumbling spies played by Chico and Harpo. Zeppo plays a typically normal secretary. Groucho's con artist character leads Freedonia into war with neighboring Sylvania. The plot essentially exists to provide a framework for several comedic bits and long sketches. The film was unsuccessful at the box office and the anarchic zaniness and subversive nature of the comedy in the film would be unmatched in the brothers' post-Code work, which was more standardly burlesque.[223][224][225]


Betty Boop: 1933 v. 1939


Horror and science fiction[edit]

Doctor Frankenstein's creation; actor Boris Karloff in full movie monster makeup. By the time the film's sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, arrived in 1935, enforcement of the Code was in full effect, and the doctor's overt God complex was forbidden.[227] In the first picture, however, when the creature was born his mad scientist creator was free to proclaim "Now I know what it feels like to be God!"[228]

Unlike silent-era sex and crime pictures, silent horror movies, despite being produced in the hundreds, were never a major concern for censors or civic leaders. When sound horror films were released however, they quickly caused controversy. Sound provided "atmospheric music and sound effects, creepy-voiced macabre dialogue and a liberal dose of blood-curdling screams" which intensified its effects on audiences, and consequently on moral crusaders.[229][230] The Hays Code did not mention gruesomeness, and Pre-Code filmmakers took advantage of this oversight. However, state boards usually had no set guidelines and could object to any material they found indecent.[231] Although films such as Frankenstein and Freaks caused controversy when they were released, they had already been re-cut to comply with censors.[232]

Comprising the nascent motion picture genres of horror and science fiction (sci-fi), the nightmare picture provoked individual psychological terror in its horror incarnations, while embodying group sociological terror in its science fiction manifestations. The two main types of Pre-Code horror pictures were the single monster movie, and films where masses of hideous beasts rose up and attacked their putative betters. Frankenstein and Freaks exemplified both genres.[233]

The Pre-Code horror cycle was similar to other Pre-Code cycles in that its boom was motivated by financial necessity. Universal in particular buoyed itself with the production of horror hits such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein, then followed those successes up with Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Mummy (1932), and The Old Dark House (1932). Other major studios responded with their own productions.[229] Much like the crime film cycle however, the intense boom of the horror cycle was ephemeral, and had fallen off at the box office by the end of the Pre-Code era.[234]

At the beginning of Frankenstein, Dr. Henry Frankenstein, and his faithful, moronic assistant Fritz are excavating graves for human body parts. Frankenstein sends Fritz to the local college to acquire a fresh brain. After dropping the only normal brain on the ground, Fritz leaves the college with an abnormal one. Meanwhile, Frankenstein's "insane ambition to create life" worries his fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) and his close friends. To allay their fears and prove to them he is not insane, Frankenstein shows them his science project—a sewn-together corpse lying on a medical slab, covered by a cloth—and asks them to watch him "endow it with life". Raising the monster upwards, the extending slab reaches the sky through a hole in the roof, and the monster is struck by lightning. Endowed with life by the magical electricity, it twitches its arm, at which point Dr. Frankenstein deliriously screams, "It's alive! It's alive!" The creature begins walking out of its cell in the next scene and Fritz, upset that his position as the doctor's freak companion may be usurped, torments the monster by waving a torch at it. After the monster kills Fritz, Frankenstein has second thoughts about his creation and instructs a medical colleague to euthanize it. His conscience clear, Frankenstein prepares to marry Elizabeth in a lavish ceremony. But the monster lives and escapes captivity. The first person he meets is a little girl throwing flowers into a lake and watching them float. Convinced that pretty things float, he throws the girl into the lake and she drowns. The creature then arrives at the doctor's house and vengefully abducts and kills Elizabeth. The entire town takes up pitchforks and torches in hand to search for the monster that has absconded with the doctor. They find the doctor and the monster at a windmill; the doctor escapes and the villagers burn the creature to death.[235]

While Joy declared Dracula "quite satisfactory from the standpoint of the Code" before it was released, and the film had little trouble reaching theaters, Frankenstein was a different story.[236] New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts removed the drowning scene and lines that referenced Dr. Frankenstein's God complex.[237] Kansas, in particular, objected to the film. The state's censor board requested the cutting of 32 scenes, which if removed, would have halved the length of the film.[231]

A screen shot from the trailer for Murders in the Rue Morgue. The ape Erik enters the room of Camille (Sidney Fox), with the shadow of his hand appearing over her head. What follows has been dubbed "interspecies miscegenation" by film historian Thomas Doherty.[238]

Paramount's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) played to the Freudian theories popular with the audience of its time. Fredric March played the split-personality title character. Jekyll represented the composed super-ego, and Hyde the lecherous id. Miriam Hopkins's coquettish prostitute sexually teases Jekyll early in the film by displaying parts of her legs and bosom.[238] Joy felt the scene had been "dragged in simply to titillate the audience."[237] Hyde coerces her with the threat of violence into becoming his paramour and beats her when she attempts to stop seeing him. She is contrasted with his wholesome fiancée (Rose Hobart), whose chaste nature dissatisfies March's baser alter ego.[239] Employing adventurous first person camera techniques, and a highbrow background—Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the source novella—the film is considered the "most honored of the Pre-Code horror films."[240] March won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, a rarity for a performer in a horror movie. Many of the graphic scenes between Hyde and Ivy were cut by local censors because of their suggestiveness.[241] Sex was intimately tied to horror in many Pre-Code horror movies. In Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale which has little in common with the source material, Bela Lugosi plays a mad scientist who tortures and kills women trying to mix human blood with ape blood during his experiments. His prized experiment, an intelligent ape named Erik, breaks into a woman (Sidney Fox)'s second-floor apartment window and rapes her.[242]

In Freaks, director Tod Browning of Dracula fame helms a picture that depicts a traveling circus populated by a group of deformed carnival freaks. Browning populated the movie with actual carnival sideshow performers including "midgets, dwarfs, hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, and, most awful, the armless and legless man billed as the 'living torso'".[243] There is also a group of Pinheads, who are fortunate in that they are not mentally capable enough to understand that they disgust people.[243] But the truly unsavory characters here are the villains, the circus strongman Hercules and the beautiful high-wire artist Cleopatra, who intends to marry and poison Hans, the midget heir who is enamored of her. At a dinner celebrating their union, one of the freaks dances on the table as they chant "gooble-gobble, gobble, gobble, one of us, one of us, we accept her, we accept her." Disgusted, Cleopatra insults Hans and makes out with Hercules in front of him. When the freaks discover her plot, they exact revenge by mutilating Cleopatra into a freak.[244] Although circus freaks were common in the early 1930s, the film was their first depiction on screen.[243] Browning took care to linger over shots of the deformed, disabled performers with long takes of them including one of the "living torso" lighting a match and then a cigarette with his mouth. The film was accompanied by a sensational marketing campaign that asked sexual questions such as "Do the Siamese Twins make love?", "What sex is the half-man half-woman?", and "Can a full grown woman truly love a midget?" [245] Surprisingly, given its reaction to Frankenstein, the state of Kansas objected to nothing in Freaks.[246] However, other states, such as Georgia, were repulsed by the film and it was not shown in many locales.[247] The film later became a cult classic spurred by midnight movie showings,[248] but it was a box-office bomb in its original release.[249]

In Island of Lost Souls (1932), an adaptation of H. G. Wells' science-fiction novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Charles Laughton plays yet another mad scientist with a God complex.[250] As Moreau, Laughton creates a mad scientist's island paradise, an unmonitored haven where he is free to create a race of man-beasts and Lota, a beast-woman he wants to mate with a normal human male. A castaway lands on his island, providing him an opportunity to see how far his science experiment, the barely-clothed, attractive Lota, has come. The castaway discovers Moreau vivisecting one of the beast-men and attempts to leave the island. He runs into the camp of the man-beasts and Moreau beats them back with a whip. The film ends with Lota dead, the castaway rescued, and the man-beasts chanting, "Are we not men?" as they attack and then vivisect Moreau.[251] The film has been described as "a rich man's Freaks" due to its esteemed source material.[252] Wells, however, despised the movie for its lurid excesses. It was rejected by 14 local censor boards in the United States, and considered "against nature" in Great Britain, where it was banned until 1958.[252][253]

Exotic adventure films[edit]

Pre-Code films contained a continual, recurring theme of white racism.[254] In the early 1930s, the studios filmed a series of pictures that aimed to provide viewers a sense of the exotic, an exploration of the unknown and the forbidden. These pictures often imbued themselves with the allure of interracial sex according to Pre-Code historian Thomas Doherty. "At the psychic core of the genre is the shiver of sexual attraction, the threat and promise of miscegenation."[254] Films such as Africa Speaks were directly marketed by referencing interracial sex; moviegoers received small packets labeled "Secrets" which contained pictures of naked black women.[255] As portrayals of historic conditions, these movies are of little educational value, but as artifacts that show Hollywood's attitude towards race and foreign cultures they are enlightening.[254] The central point of interest in The Blonde Captive (1931), a film which depicted a blonde woman abducted by a savage tribe of Africans, was not that she was kidnapped, but that she enjoys living among the tribe.[255] The lack of black characters in films highlights their status in Jim Crow America.[256]

Dolores del Río in a dance scene in Bird of Paradise.

In Bird of Paradise, a white American man (Joel McCrea) enjoys a torrid affair with a Polynesian princess (Dolores del Río). The film created a scandal when released due to a scene featuring Dolores del Río swimming naked.[257] Orson Welles said del Río represented the highest erotic ideal with her performance in the film.[258]

The white protagonist in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) is the "King of the [African] Jungle". Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) is a monosyllabic half-naked jungle creature whose attractiveness is derived from his physical prowess; throughout the movie, he saves Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) from danger and she swoons in his arms.[259] When Jane's father warns her "[h]e's not like us", she responds, "[h]e's white" as evidence to the contrary.[260] In the racy 1934 sequel, Tarzan and His Mate (the last word meaning both a status and a biological function[261]), men come from the U.S. with fancy gowns and other accoutrements to woo and clothe the bra-less, barely clothed Jane, again played by O'Sullivan, hoping to lure her away from the savage Tarzan.[262] He detests the fancier clothing and tears it off. The black characters of the film are treated poorly; when one of them refuses to go forward on a march in the jungle, the white ivory hunter shoots him on the spot, and moves on. The film included a skinny-dipping scene with extensive nudity with a body double standing in for O'Sullivan.[263] Breen, then head of the SRC, objected to the scene, and MGM, the movie's producer, decided to take their case to the appeals review board. The board consisted of the heads of Fox, RKO, and Universal. After watching the scene "several times", the board sided with Breen and the MPPDA, and the scene was removed, but MGM still allowed some uncut trailers and a few reels to stay in circulation.[264] MGM marketed the film primarily towards women using taglines such as:[265]



Films such as The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), explored the exoticism of the Far East — by using white actors, not Asians, in the lead roles. The white actors frequently looked absurd in yellow-face makeup next to genuine Asians, so the studios would cast all the Asian parts white.[268] In Manchu, Karloff plays a mad scientist who wants to find the sword and mask of Genghis Khan as they will give him the power to control the "countless hordes" into battle versus the West.[269] Manchu is a sexual deviant who engages in ritual torture and has occult powers.[270] In a scene cut from the film due to its miscegenation, he shows a man the image of Manchu's depraved daughter (Myrna Loy) violating one of the chaste good characters.[271] He is eventually conquered, but not before he temporarily lays his hand on the sword and proclaims to his men: "Would you have maidens like this [Karen Morley] for your wives? Then conquer and breed! Kill the white man and take his women!"[269]


Newsreels and documentaries[edit]

From 1904 until 1967, when television finally killed them off, newsreels preceded films. In the early sound-film era, they lasted around 8 minutes and featured highlights and clips of the world's biggest stories. Updated twice a week by the five major studios, they became a highly-profitable enterprise: in 1933, newsreels had a total box office take of almost $19.5 million against an outlay of under $10 million.[273] The sound-film era created the narrator; among the first was Graham McNamee, who provided voiceover during the clips, often delivering hackneyed jokes while delineating the on-screen action.[274] Sound newsreel interviews and monologues featured famous subjects unaccustomed to the new medium. These clips changed public perception of important historical figures depending on their elocution, the sound of their previously unheard voices, and their composure in front of the camera.[275] Around 12 "newsreel theaters" were soon created around the United States, the most successful being the Embassy Newsreel Theater on Broadway. The Embassy was a 578-seat facility that presented fourteen 45–50 minute programs a day, running from 10 in the morning until midnight.[276] It was noted for its discerning, intellectual audience, many of whom did not attend motion-picture theaters.[277]

The most gripping news story of the Pre-Code era was the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby on the evening of 1 March 1932.[278] As the child was already enormously famous before the kidnapping, the event created a media circus, with news coverage more intense than anything since World War I. Newsreels featuring family photos of the child (the first time private pictures had been "conscripted for public service"[279]) asked spectators to report any sight of him. On May 12, 1932, the child's body was found less than five miles from the Lindbergh home.[278][280] Although newsreels covered the most important topics of the day, they also presented human-interest stories (such as the immensely popular coverage of the Dionne quintuplets[280]) and entertainment news, at times in greater detail than more pressing political and social matters.[281]

Some of the images' impact belies their historical accuracy; nearly all ceremonies and public events that were filmed for newsreels in the early sound era were staged, and in some cases even reenacted. For instance: when FDR signed an important bill, a member of his cabinet was called away before the staged reenactment began, so the video shows him absent at the time of the signing, although he had been present.[282] The newsreels of FDR were staged to hide his hobbled gait caused by polio.[283] Caught between the desire to present accurate hard-hitting news stories and the need to keep an audience in the mood for the upcoming entertainment, newsreels often soft-pedaled the difficulties Americans faced during the early years of the Great Depression.[284] FDR in particular received favorable treatment from Hollywood, with all five of the major studios producing pro-FDR shorts by late 1933. These shorts featured some of the studios' lesser contract talent extolling the virtues of FDR created government and social programs.[285] Roosevelt himself was a natural before the camera. The newsreels were instrumental to the success of his initial campaign, and his enduring popularity while in office.[283] He was described by Variety as the "Barrymore of the Capital".[69]

Taking advantage of the existence of 30 years of newsreels archives were filmmakers who made early sound era documentaries. World War I was a popular topic of these pictures and spawned the following documentaries; The Big Drive (1933), World in Revolt (1933), This is America (1933), and Hell's Holiday (1933).[286] The most prescient Pre-Code WWI documentary was aptly called The First World War (1934). The most critically and commercially successful documentary of the era, the film is presented in 11 chapters, much like a book. The picture combined a multitude of new motion-picture techniques such as commentative music, voice-over narration, and slow-motion photography with a sense of when to speak for the images on screen and when to allow the images to speak for themselves.[287] The New York Times described it as "a memorable and infinitely important document which should be distributed in every civilized country."[288]

Filmmakers also made feature-length documentaries that covered the dark recesses of the globe including the Amazon Rainforest, Native American settlements, the Pacific Islands, and everywhere in between. Taking advantage of audiences' voyeuristic impulses, aided by the allowance of nudity in tribal documentaries, the filming of lands untouched by modernity, and the presentation of locales never before filmed, these movies placated Depression era American audiences by showing them lifestyles more difficult than their own.[289] Also captured were Arctic expeditions in films such 90° South and With Byrd at the South Pole, and deepest Africa in the safari films of Martin and Osa Johnson, among others.[290] Some exploitation style documentaries purported to show actual events but were instead staged, elaborate ruses. The most prominent of which was Ingagi (1931), a film which claimed to show a ritual where African women were given over to gorillas as sex slaves, but instead was mostly filmed in Los Angeles using local blacks in place of natives.[291] Douglas Fairbanks mocked the phoniness of many Pre-Code documentaries in his parody Around the World in 80 Minutes with Douglas Fairbanks, in one scene of which he filmed himself wrestling a stuffed tiger doll, then a tiger-skin rug.[292] Opposing these films was the travelogue which was shown before features and served as a short saccharine form of cinematic tourism.[293]

End of an era[edit]

Pre-Code films began to draw the ire of various religious groups, some Protestant but mostly a contingent of Roman Catholic crusaders.[294] Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, apostolic delegate to the Catholic Church in the United States, called upon Roman Catholics in the United States to unite against the surging immorality of films. As a result, in 1933 the Catholic Legion of Decency, headed by the Reverend John T. McNicholas (later renamed the National Legion of Decency), was established to control and enforce decency standards and boycott films they deemed offensive.[295][296] They created a rating system for films that started at "harmless" and ended at "condemned", with the latter denoting a film that was a sin to watch.[297] The Legion spurred several million Roman Catholics across the U.S. to sign up for the boycott, allowing local religious leaders to determine which films to protest.[296][298] Conservative Protestants tended to support much of the crackdown, 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.[299]



The Payne Study and Experiment Fund was created in 1927 by Frances Payne Bolton to support a study of the influence of fiction on children.[303] The Payne Fund Studies, a series of eight[304] books published from 1933-35 which detailed five (5) years of research aimed specifically at the cinema's effects on children, were also gaining publicity at this time, and became a great concern to Hays.[300][305][306] Hays had said certain 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."[307] Despite its initial reception, the main findings of the study were largely innocuous. It found that cinema's effect on individuals varied with age and social position, and that pictures reinforced audiences' existing beliefs.[308][309] The Motion Picture Research Council (MPRC, led by honorary vice president Sara Delano Roosevelt—FDR's mother -- [310] and executive director the Rev. William H. Short[311]), which funded the study, was not pleased. An "alarmist summary" of the study's results written by Henry James Forman appeared in McCall's, a leading women's magazine of the time, and Forman's book, Our Movie Made Children, which became a best-seller, publicized the Payne Fund's results, emphasizing its more negative aspects.[299][312]

The social environment created by the publicity of the Payne Fund Studies and religious protests reached such a fever pitch that a member of the Hays Office described it as a "state of war".[313] However, newspapers including The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), New Orleans Times Picayune, Chicago Daily News, Atlanta Journal, Saint Paul Dispatch, the Philadelphia Record and Public Ledger, the Boston American and New York's Daily News, Daily Mirror, and Evening Post all lambasted the studies.[314] When discussing the Supreme Court's 1915 decision, film historian Gregory Black argues that the efforts of reformers might have been lessened had "filmmakers been willing to produce films for specialized audiences (adults only, family, no children) ... but the movers and shakers of the industry wanted or needed the largest possible market."[315] The most provocative pictures were the most profitable, with the 25% of the motion picture industry's output that was the most sensational supporting the cleaner 75%.[316]

By 1932, there was an increasing movement for government control.[317] By mid-1934 when Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia called for a Catholic boycott of all films, and Raymond Cannon was privately preparing a congressional bill supported by both Democrats and Republicans which would introduce Government oversight, the studios decided they had had enough.[318] They re-organized the enforcement procedures giving Hays and the recently appointed Joseph I. Breen, a devout Roman Catholic, head of the new Production Code Administration (PCA), greater control over censorship.[319] The studios agreed to disband their appeals committee and to impose a $25,000 fine for producing, distributing, or exhibiting any film without PCA approval.[4] Hays had originally hired Breen, who had worked in public relations, in 1930 to handle Production Code publicity, and the latter was popular among Catholics.[320] Joy began working solely for Fox Studios, and Wingate had been bypassed in favor of Breen in December 1933.[321][322] Hays became a functionary, while Breen handled the business of censoring films.[323]

Breen was a rabid anti-Semite,[324] who was quoted as stating that Jews "are, probably, the scum of the earth."[298][325] When Breen died in 1965, the trade magazine Variety stated, "More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture."[326] Although the Legion's impact on the more effective enforcement of the Code is unquestionable, its influence on the general populace is harder to gauge. A study done by Hays after the Code was finally fully implemented found that audiences were doing the exact opposite of what the Legion had recommended. Each time the Legion protested a film it meant increased ticket sales; unsurprisingly, Hays kept these results to himself and they were not revealed until many years later.[327] In contrast to big cities, boycotts in smaller towns were more effective and theater owners complained of the harassment they received when they exhibited salacious films.[328]

Many actors and actresses, such as Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck, and Clark Gable, continued their careers apace after the Code was enforced. However, others, such as Ruth Chatterton and Warren William, who excelled during this period, are mostly forgotten today.[2][329] 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 West (whose name he later banned from all Hearst publications[330]) in his papers, further lessening her prospects.[28]

After the Pre-Code era[edit]

Situations such as this, a man about to kiss a woman who is in bed in her nightgown (Warren William and Ann Dvorak, 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:



Pre-Code scholar Thomas Doherty summarized the practical effects:[332]




Following the July 1, 1934 decision by the studios put the power over film censorship 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 cleansed of "the vulgar, the cheap, and the tawdry" and that pictures would be made "vital and wholesome entertainment".[334] All scripts now went through PCA,[327] and several films playing in theaters were ordered withdrawn.[313][335]

The first film Breen censored in the production stage was the Joan Crawford film Forsaking All Others.[336] Although Independent film producers vowed they would give "no thought to Mr. Joe Breen or anything he represents", they caved on their stance within one month of making it.[337] The major studios still owned most of the successful theaters in the country,[3] and studio heads such as Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures had already agreed to stop making indecent films.[338][339] In several large cities audiences booed when the Production seal appeared before films.[337] But the Catholic Church was pleased, and in 1936 Pope Pius XI stated that the U.S. film industry "has recognized and accepts its responsibility before society."[4] The Legion condemned zero films produced by the MPPDA between 1936 and 1943.[340]

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.[341] Another fortunate coincidence for Code supporters was the torrent of famous criminals such as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde that were killed by police shortly after the PCA took power. Corpses of the outlaws were shown in newsreels around the country, alongside clips of Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly in Alcatraz.[342] Among the unarguably positive aspects of the Code being enforced was 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.[343] A spate of more wholesome family films featuring performers such as Shirley Temple took off.[333] Stars such as James Cagney redefined their images. Cagney played a series of patriots, and his gangster in Angels with Dirty Faces (1937) purposefully acts like a coward when he is executed so children who had looked up to him would cease any such admiration.[342] Breen in essence neutered Groucho Marx, removing most of his jokes which directly referenced sex, although some sexual references slipped through unnoticed in the Marx Brothers post-Code pictures.[344] In the political realm, films such Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in which James Stewart tries to change the American system from within while reaffirming its core values, stand in stark contrast to Gabriel over the White House where a dictator is needed to cure America's woes.[345]

Some Pre-Code movies suffered irreparable damage from censorship after 1934. When studios attempted to re-issue films from the 1920s and early 1930s, they were forced to make extensive cuts. Films such as Animal Crackers (1930), Mata Hari (1931), Arrowsmith (1931), and A Farewell to Arms (1932) exist only in their censored versions. Many other films survived intact because they were too controversial to be re-released, such as The Maltese Falcon (1931), which was remade a decade later with the same name, and thus never had their master negatives edited.[346] In the case of Convention City (1933), which Breen would not allow to be re-released in any form, the entire film remains missing. Although it has been rumored that all prints and negatives were ordered destroyed by Jack Warner in the late thrities [347] further research shows the negative in the vaults as late as 1948 when it was junked due to nitrate decomposition. [348]

Home video and screenings[edit]

In the 1980s, New York City Film Forum programmer Bruce Goldstein held the first film festivals featuring Pre-Code films.[349] Goldstein is also credited by San Francisco film critic Mick LaSalle as the person to bring the term "Pre-Code" into general use.[350]


MGM also released other Pre-Code films such as The Divorcee, Doctor X, A Free Soul, Little Caesar, Mystery of the Wax Museum, Possessed, The Public Enemy, Red Dust (remade in the 1950s as Mogambo), and Riptide under other labels. UCLA ran several series of pre-Code films during the 2000s, showcasing films which had not been seen for decades, and not available on any home media.[353]

In 1999, the Roan Group/Troma Entertainment released two Pre-Code DVD collections: Pre-Code Hollywood: The Risqué Years #1, featuring Of Human Bondage, Millie and Kept Husbands, and Pre-Code Hollywood 2, featuring Bird of Paradise and The Lady Refuses.

Warner Bros. Home Video has released several of their Pre-Code films on DVD under the Forbidden Hollywood banner. To date, eight volumes have been released:

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[edit]


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  • Vasey, Ruth. The world according to Hollywood, 1918-1939. University of Wisconsin Press 1997; ISBN 0-299-15194-8.

Further reading[edit]


External links[edit]