Ellen C. Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era by Ellen C. Scott Delphine Letort Ellen C. Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015 Drawing on her research into the studios’ and the state censorship boards’ remaining archives, film history professor Ellen C. Scott has written a well-informed study of the racial politics of classical Hollywood cinema that translated into a “history of the repression of civil rights on the American screen and the struggle of African American activists to find civil rights among a jumbled cache of images” (2). Scott deciphers the various stages of a vetting system aiming at regulating racial representations on screens across the country. While the studios more often than not heeded the advice given by the Production Code Administration (PCA), established in 1934 to ensure that films comply with moral standards, the author calls attention to cases of resistance on the part of ingenious scriptwriters who learned to circumvent the constraints of the code using indirect means to broach forbidden subjects. Scott lists three main concerns among censors: lynching, social equality, and miscegenation. Through the four chapters of the book, the scholar retraces how the enforced regulations affected both film form and content. Striking to this reviewer was to note that racial injustice extended to the viewers’ civil rights: state censors being allowed to devise film cuts, viewers were not presented with the same films from one state to another. The decisions made by state boards reflect local political practices and the comparative approach used in the book draws attention to strikingly similar choices in the North and in the South; films endorsing progressive racial views could lose their political power due to state-enforced cuts. While the first chapter is devoted to an examination of the industry’s practice of self-censorship, underlining the overwhelming power of such characters as Jason Joy and James Wingate as leaders of the Studio Relations Committee (1926–1934), the second chapter defines a “regionally accented cinema” that emerged across the country through the differential policies adopted by state censors. Quite interesting to study is the interaction between Hollywood’s power structure, including the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of American (MPPDA), and state censors whose locally made decisions often influenced the PCA’s recommendations. By quoting from the memos written by Joseph Breen, serving as an administrator on the PCA [End Page 243] board from 1934 to 1954, Scott helps readers grasp the assumptions that underlay discussions of such films as John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934). Breed worried that passing might be read as a disturbing allusion to miscegenation that would “prevent exhibition in Southern states” (22) and should therefore be avoided whereas he expressed concern about the racial implications of lynching as illustrated by his comments on Stevedore, a play that was never adapted to screen on account of its “inflammatory subject” (28). As suggested through this example, the book brings to light untold stories unfolding in the shadow of Hollywood, highlighting the regulators’ unease with such words as “nigger” which they urged to delete from all dialogues. The history of lynching representations on screen illustrates the repression of subjects that might cause civil rights activists to overtly question Hollywood’s politics. Fury (dir. Fritz Lang, 1936) is an apt example that the author exploits to make her point: the brutal lynching that happens after the ending sequence is aimed at a white man, thereby obscuring the racist dimension of the crime. The author’s demonstration follows a timeline that also emphasizes the impact of contemporary events on film policies, pointing out the priorities of the Office of War Information (OWI) that strove to portray an “idealized American democracy” that disapproved of racial injustice (44). The context of the war seems to have awakened Breen to racial stereotypes and prompted the PCA to warn against their deriding impact. The stills included in the book enliven the reading and provide apt illustrations of the overall demonstration. The third and fourth chapters broach the same topics from two different standpoints. Chapter three calls attention to...