Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies by Gregory D. Black

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 323 is an important story and deserving of serious treatment by historians. A portrait ofAmerican Catholics would be incomplete without it. Joseph Richard Preville Boston, Massachusetts Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies. By Gregory D. Black [Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communications.] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. x, 336. $27.95.) In this history of Hollywood censorship, primarily of the 1920's and 1930's, Gregory Black argues that the movie studios, the Production Code Administration (PCA), and the Catholic Church colluded in a system that prevented the "direct and honest" treatment of serious social, political, economic, and moral issues on the movie screen. Black laments that, as he sees it, the Code and its enforcement required all movies to be "morality plays." In his analysis, however, he runs the risk of devising his own morality play in which the champions of honesty and freedom are stymied again and again by the agents of prudishness and mediocrity. Black first chronicles (Chapters 1 and 2) the earliest struggles over motion picture content, those leading up to the establishment of official industry censorship . In order to quiet public protest, as well as to avoid federal anti-trust action or censorship, motion picture producers agreed to the self-regulation represented by the Hays Office. Black goes on (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) to detail the trials Hays faced in policing three different sorts of movie content: sex, especially the films of Cecil B. DeMiIIe and Mae West; themes and plots drawn from modern literature, especially Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Faulkner's Sanctuary; and gangster and prison films. Black then describes (Chapter 6) how dissatisfaction with the results of Hays's supervision grew, especially among the Catholics influential in the composition and adoption of the original Motion Picture Production Code who in 1933-34 threatened the nationwide boycott implied in the organization of the Legion of Decency. This threat was defused by negotiations among the major players that resulted in the establishment of the PCA, headed by a Catholic layman , Joseph Breen. With the threat of a boycott always available as leverage, Black argues, Breen was able for more than twenty years to insist that movies depict "Sex with a Dash of Moral Compensation" (Chapter 7) and that they avoid serious engagement with political and social issues (Chapter 8). He concludes that the "golden era" of movie production might have been more genuinely golden had the studios not been victims of the "economic blackmail" made possible by the combination of the producers' desire to reach the largest possible audience and the demands of special interest groups, particularly the Catholic Church. 324 BOOK REVIEWS The author has drawn on an impressive array of relevant archives—not only those of the PCA, but also of the relevant dioceses, the NCCB, motion picture studios, and individuals including Will Hays, Daniel A. Lord,Wilfrid Parsons, and Martin Quigley. He offers detailed and engaging descriptions of the controversies over specific pictures, and carefully traces the alliances among various groups both within and outside the motion picture industry. Black's analysis would have been richer if he had supplemented his excellent primary research with a more precise understanding of the cultural and intellectual context of the "morality codes" and the "Catholics" of his subtitle. Catholic involvement in motion picture censorship was motivated by an approach to art and morality grounded in a complex, self-conscious theology, not simply by a conservative desire to safeguard the status quo, still less by an unreflective "Victorianism." Black's analysis would have been more accurate and fairer to the world view of those involved had he achieved a fuller grasp of, for example, neo-scholasticism and natural law philosophy, the imperatives of Catholic Action, and the mechanics and rationale behind Catholic regulation of reading and publication. His assertion that Dos Passos, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway , and Sinclair Lewis were on the Index of Forbidden Books is simply incorrect . For this assertion the author cites Jonathon Green, Encyclopœdia of Censorship (New York: Facts on File, 1990), but he has apparently mistaken a generic list offrequently banned books ("index of banned books,"pp. 136-140) for...