From its earliest days, filmmaking pushed the boundaries of storytelling. It not only aimed to entertain but to challenge preconceptions and offer new ways of seeing the world. A diverse array of people, often from the margins of mainstream society, were integral to the production of the very first motion pictures. As Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood author William J. Mann puts it, “Hollywood before the Code was a haven for free thinkers and free lovers.” Film boldly showcased the freewheeling lives of gangsters (Scarface, 1932), con artists (Trouble in Paradise, 1932), social climbers (Red-Headed Woman, 1932), religious cynics (The Miracle Woman, 1931), adulterers (The Office Wife, 1930), alcoholics (Night Nurse, 1931) and risqué women (Baby Face, 1933). Their storylines were smattered with edgy humor, sexual suggestion, stylized violence and the grotesque.
Every Monday this month at 8pm ET, TCM highlights the anniversary and influence of the Hays Code with a series of contrasting film pairings – before and after the implementation of censorship – that starkly show what was lost and what was gained by its revisionist aims.
As a result of these types of films, early Hollywood was the target of moral outrage, with several cities and states seeking to curb the influence of the movies. Chicago passed the first ordinance in 1907 and, in 1911, Pennsylvania became the first state to enact movie censorship. These laws became even more popular after the 1915 Supreme Court decision in the Mutual Film Corp. case, which ruled that free speech did not extend to motion pictures. Beyond the law, religious leaders zealously promoted censorship. For instance, in 1926, the Episcopalian minister canon William Sheafe Chase co-led more than 200 women’s organization members to Washington to call for the federal regulation of movies. Chase testified to the House Committee on Education that movies were a “threat to world civilization.” To make matters worse, offscreen there were rumors of industry partying and overindulgence, coming to a head with huge scandals: the controversial death of Olive Thomas, the murder of William Desmond Taylor and the alleged rape and death of Virginia Rappe by movie star Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle.
Facing disapprobation on multiple fronts, the film industry devised its own system of censorship to assuage its critics: the Motion Picture Production Code – better known as the Hays Code, after Will H. Hays, then president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, a Presbyterian elder and former head of the Republican National Committee. Given his conservative background, Hays had been enlisted to rehabilitate Hollywood’s image. The Code, co-written with Catholic layman Martin J. Quigley, publisher of the Motion Picture Herald, and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord, sought to determine what could be portrayed onscreen.
In 1930, it was published in its entirety in Variety magazine and divided into two sections. The first was a set of “general principles” calling for depictions of the “correct standards of life” and forbade a film to show any criticism or ridicule of the law that would “[create] sympathy for its violation.” The latter half was a long list of acts and items that could not be depicted, most influentially “sex perversion,” which included homosexuality and miscegenation, two themes that were not avoided in cinema at the time. For instance, the first kiss between two women came with Cecil B. DeMille’s Manslaughter (1922) and between two men in William A. Wellman’s Wings (1927), though many argue it was in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). Miscegenation was a theme for two of Griffith’s popular films, Birth of A Nation (1915) and Broken Blossoms (1919).
Initially, enforcement of the Code was curtailed by shoddy processes and ridicule of its prudishness. However, with the establishment of the Production Code Administration in 1934, films had to obtain a certificate of approval before being released. For over 30 years – until 1968 – all movies had to adhere to the Code before being distributed. And so, an art form that once openly explored gender, sexuality and race relations was rather suddenly disciplined into promoting traditional values by its very own producers. While some filmmakers – like Alfred Hitchcock and Edward Dmytryk – took the Code as a creative challenge to portray censorable content slyly aslant, others, notably forthright women such as Dorothy Arzner and Mabel Normand (who had collaborated with Arbuckle prior to the assault allegation), were pushed out of the industry altogether.
TCM’s spotlight kicks off with James Whale’s pre-Code Waterloo Bridge (1931) about an American chorus girl, Myra (Mae Clarke), who resorts to prostitution when she is unable to find work in London at the height of World War I. She often finds her clients on Waterloo Bridge, the primary entry point into the city for soldiers on military leave. During an air raid, she meets American soldier Roy Cronin (Douglass Montgomery), and they begin a romance without Myra disclosing her work to him. Because of its controversial material – namely its portrayal of prostitution – censor boards in cities across the U.S. insisted that the film be extensively cut. Once the Code was enforced in 1934, it was impossible to re-release the original version of the film. In 1939, MGM bought the rights for an adaptation. TCM thus also screens the 1940 remake of Waterloo Bridge directed by Mervyn LeRoy, in which Myra (Vivien Leigh) is a ballerina, not a sex worker.
Illegitimate children were another theme that the Code found taboo. The pre-Code comedy-drama The Bachelor Father (1931), directed by Robert Z. Leonard, tells the story of nobleman Sir Basil Algernon Winterton (C. Aubrey Smith), who, in his ailing older years, decides to seek out the children he had with various women in his youth. Now young adults, they are all brought to his London home where they bond with their father, particularly Tony (Marion Davies), his American daughter. But their happy home is threatened when Basil’s attorney finds out the truth of Tony’s relation to Basil. TCM pairs the film with Garson Kanin’s Bachelor Mother (1939), starring Ginger Rogers as Polly Parish, a young woman who is mistaken for the mother of an abandoned baby. The film is an example of the ways in which directors had to be nimble with censorable content. Kanin gets around Code rules with delicate directing and a complete lack of sexual suggestiveness. Rogers and the men in her life are funny and wholesome. The film was highly successful and transitioned Rogers from Fred Astaire’s dancing partner to a comedic actress in her own right.
Also paired is the pre-Code American horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) directed by Rouben Mamoulian with its remake directed by Victor Fleming (1941). The original film is widely considered the best adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel. In it, Dr. Henry Jekyll (Fredric March), who believes that within each man lurks impulses for both good and evil, experiments with drugs that unleash his sadistic, amoral alter-ego, Edward Hyde. After the Code came into full effect, the film was shorn of 8 minutes of footage owing to sexually suggestive scenes featuring March and Miriam Hopkins, who plays Ivy Pearson. When MGM remade the film with Spencer Tracy in the lead, the studio acquired the rights to the original and shelved it for decades. However, audiences remembered the original and found the remake hardly scary as Tracy’s depiction of Hyde was more humorous than terrifying.
The Tarzan series suffered severely from Code-era sanitization. The second installment of the franchise about the “King of the Apes” (Johnny Weissmuller), Tarzan and His Mate (1934), is considered one of the most notorious of all Hollywood pre-Code movies. It was deemed so brazen at the time of its release that it became one of the main reasons for enforcing the Code. Until recently it’s only been available in its cut version, with all the sexual innuendo (including the infamous nude swimming scene) and disturbing violence removed. Adding insult to injury, the subsequent third film in the series, Tarzan Escapes (1936), which was made prior to the Code but released after it took effect, suffers so badly from extended reshoots, editing and cutting (notably an intense scene in which Tarzan fights vampire bats) that the once hunky and heroic, if campy, lead character seems clunky and cartoonish in comparison, paving the way for a more youth-focused representation.
The Code faced a host of challenges throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Between the popularity of European films, which weren’t bound by the same morality clauses, and general post-war liberalism, the American film industry was forced to get with the times. Setting the precedent for a change, in 1952 the Supreme Court overturned its Mutual decision, allowing films to be protected by free speech. It was known as “the Miracle” decision as it referred to the short film “The Miracle” (1948) directed by Roberto Rossellini. The Motion Picture Association initiated a new rating system, the one we still use today, in 1968.
