The Guardians of Morality vs. the Master of Suspense

Abstract

The Guardians of Morality vs. the Master of Suspense David Sterritt (bio) John Billheimer, Hitchcock and the Censors. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019. 370 pp. $50 cloth, $27.95 paperback. Near the beginning of Hitchcock and the Censors, author John Billheimer describes the Motion Picture Production Code as “a self-inflicted wound that took over thirty-four years to heal, affecting more than eleven thousand films, weakening most and leaving only a few stronger for the encounter” (9). This is a ruefully accurate description as far as it goes, but as Billheimer demonstrates, Alfred Hitchcock had more than the Production Code Administration (PCA) dogging his cinematic trail over the course of his long career. In the early years, the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) kept watch over his pictures. Starting in 1933, the Catholic Legion of Decency had a say when movies came to the American market, as did the PCA when it acquired its full clout in 1934. Other organizations also peered over Hitchcock’s shoulder for all sorts of reasons: Lifeboat was vetted by the Office of War Information, the American Humane Association was very interested in The Birds, and the Department of the Interior had problems with plans for North by Northwest. Local and overseas censorship boards also stalked the earth, even though a major reason for instituting the Code was to put the inconsistent patchwork of regional snoopers out of business. Moviegoers in Maryland didn’t see Bruno murder Miriam in Strangers on a Train; viewers in India [End Page 106] didn’t see Grace Kelly on James Stewart’s lap in Rear Window; those watching Lifeboat in England saw the killing of Willi only in part; no one in Ireland saw Notorious at all. Such were the capricious penalties inflicted on dubious behavior in films by one of cinema’s greatest artists. As a chronicle of misguided moralizing, Billheimer’s volume makes for engrossing film-historical reading. Led first by Will Hays and later by the more moderate Joseph Breen and Geoffrey Shurlock, watchdogs at the Code Office kept their eyes peeled mainly for sin, sex, violence, and crime, basing their judgments on a 4,000-word compendium of rules and guidelines. By contrast, their British counterparts started work in 1912 with only two strictures—no nudity, no depictions of Christ—and gradually expanded their mandate to cover everything from “indecorous dancing” to “relations between capital and labour” (36), with political matters getting the most emphasis. Billheimer’s report on Hitchcock’s interactions with the BBFC is unavoidably sketchy, since German planes bombed the agency’s London office in 1941, destroying all firsthand records. It’s nevertheless clear that the censors affected the director’s work—vetoing his proposal for a hard-hitting film about the General Strike of 1926, for instance, and watering down his plan to reproduce the Siege of Sidney Street, a fabled gun battle of 1911, in the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. “Again and again,” he said in a 1938 magazine interview, “I have been prevented from putting on the screen authentic accounts of incidents in British life” (41). Yet he sometimes found it possible to outsmart BBFC chief Joseph Brooke Wilkinson, who ran the organization throughout the director’s British years. In an irony worthy of a Hitchcock movie, England’s most powerful film censor suffered from chronically declining eyesight. Sitting alongside him in the screening room, Hitchcock claimed later, he would say something to distract Wilkinson’s attention, and if luck prevailed, “the scene went by . . . without his seeing it” (39). Even as he outfoxed the BBFC, however, Hitchcock lost various battles with his own producers. He reluctantly [End Page 107] acceded to front-office demands for relatively upbeat finales in The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog and Blackmail, and Gaumont British sliced more than five minutes from The Man Who Knew Too Much to appease American censors who saw “too much slaughter; too much gunplay; too much murdering of policemen” (44). Recognizing the PCA’s growing strength, Gaumont sent the screenplay for Secret Agent to Hays and company before starting production, reckoning that the inevitable changes would be cheaper...