The Breening of America

Abstract

HE DOMINANT FORM of cinema history has the narrative-more specifically, the Hollywood roman-fleuvethat pits heroic writers and directors against philistine industry executives in a plot as absorbing, and accurate, as Margaret Mitchell's story of the old South. The philistine of philistines has the Production Code Administration (PCA). An intraindustry agency concerned with screen mores and values, the PCA supervised the treatment of sex (including costumes, dances, and bedroom scenes), religion, and such repellant subjects as executions, white slavery, and cruelty to animals. For almost thirty years the Production Code seal was the passport that motion pictures needed to enter the largest and most profitable theaters in America. In A Short History of the Movies Gerald Mast sneers at the scissors of the agency (295), while David Cook calls the code awesomely repressive. From 1934 to the 1950s, Cook notes in A History of Narrative Film, the Production Code rigidly dictated the content of American films, and in a very real sense kept them from becoming as serious as they might have, and, perhaps, should have, been (266-67). Conventional wisdom on the Production Code and the PCA suits those who shape Hollywood history as fictional narrative. Tales of a moralistic and repressive code make the romantic artist (director or writer or actor) seem even more romantic, just as tales of Joseph Ignatius Breen-the head of the agency-and his sternness toward the moviemakers provide a focus for charges that Hollywood was antiintellectual and anti-art. The PCA archive, however, opened to scholars less than a decade ago, forces a broader interpretation of the