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Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communication)

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The early motion picture industry didn't just entertain audiences, it enticed them into movie palaces with spectacle, sex, and (increasingly) lurid tales of sin and seduction. This combination proved so successful that, by the early 1930s, a conservative religious movement emerged with an aim to "clean up" Hollywood's excesses, led by the Catholic Church but supported by preachers, ministers, and spiritual spokesmen nationwide. The Catholic Church's League of Decency became the first cultural crusade against what was perceived as a threat to the national character. Wielding an authority of equal parts religion and politics, the League saw to it that movies were banned outright, content was snipped and clipped, and production scripts were combed over for hints of immorality. Classic novels were re-written for the screen to pass the scrutiny of the hastily-created, reactionary Hays Office. Is this a good thing? There was a backlash among Hollywood writers; Black's recounting of William Faulkner creating the story of "Sanctuary" in three weeks ("the most horrific tale" Faukner could imagine, Black writes, "a morbid tale of rape, murder, sexual impotence and perversion") certainly seems like an outright challenge to the Paramount studio writers and censors, and the rewritten, completed film ("The Story of Temple Drake") turns the story inside out for a relatively less-scandalous ending.

Over the course of years, the Legion of Decency and the Hays Office's Production Code (which functioned as a presumptive industry watchdog) ensured that onscreen crime would not pay and immorality would be punished. Realism in Hollywood films got bleached out, but as the book makes clear the industry preferered to deal with religious moralists, and to police themselves with a nebulous code, rather than face government interference. In that regard America hasn't come very far, as the religious right's contemporary battles over entertainment and the morality of content in movies, TV, and the internet make clear. Recommended.

What enabled one viciously anti-semetic Catholic, Joe Breen, to control an entire industry? This delightful scholarly tome gives a partial answer: the industry wanted to have its product go to the largest possible audience, despite local and national boards of censors. By censoring themselves, they obtained a pugnacious Irish Catholic who could browbeat bishops, state legislators, and others. The only price was to meet this one person's private moral code: to make movies that would not offend 12 year old girls in convent schools. This history of the Production Code Authority, and how it was exercised is par excellence. What gave Breen his power was a confluence of Catholic bankers, vertical integration from studio through distributor to exhibitor, coupled with mandatory booking at the exhibition level. The weakness for the studios was Catholic threats of boycotts at the midwestern exhibitor level where the studios were weakest. This book should be coupled with the author's "Catholic Crusade Against the Movies" and the pictoral "Sin in Soft Focus." An interesting footnote is the KKK response to the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency. Does the revival of Catholic horror of blasphemy, in the so-called Catholic League of the 1990s pose a similar threat? Probably not, since the Fr. Lord's Legion of Decency was focused on Jewish studio heads, and the Catholic League objects to Catholic movie makers and Catholic television writers. The PCA did more than condemn the use of angora sweaters in the finished movies, it forbade any movie that was social in comment or controversial in its politics. Somehow it even managed to offend William Randolph Hearst, a honor usually reserved to Orson Wells and "Rosebud."

the item I received was in a very good condition, just like a new one.