Though the Code wasn't fully enforced until 1934, it had actually been instituted in 1930, as Hollywood's way of responding to anxiety over the way film content had been changing since the advent of talkies. The 2008 documentary Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood, written by Steven Smith and featuring the insights of film historians and cultural critics including Molly Haskell, Camille Paglia and Leonard Maltin, lays out the history of the Code in clear, chronological detail, explaining how it came into being and, later, how movies changed when it began to be enforced. In 1930, the MPPDA, a trade association of movie studios that had been formed in 1922 (and which was later renamed The Motion Picture Association of America, as it's known today), introduced and immediately adopted the Motion Picture Production Code. Hays, the MPPDA's first president, oversaw the drafting of the Code, and although the studios were willing to abide by it - they had, after all, helped forge it - economic pressures in the early years of the Depression led them to virtually ignore its admonitions. Failing box-office figures meant the studios needed to lure audiences into movie theaters, and portraying all manner of dazzling criminal activity and saucy antics among sophisticated city folk was the best way to do that.
Thou Shalt Not explores the films of the early 1930s, using clips and commentary to show what made them so exciting and vital. As of 1930, the MPPDA didn't necessarily have a moral agenda, and outlandish films like Cecil B. DeMille's 1930 Madam Satan carried over plenty of moral decadence from the 1920s: A party scene features male guests wearing feathery codpieces and a girl in a tiny, silvery costume perched on a swing. In Thou Shalt Not, the filmmaker John Landis calls Madam Satan "downright pornographic," and just from what we can see in these clips, he's probably right. Other films were far less cheerful, disturbing to audiences for other reasons: In 1930, with some 5 million people unemployed, cynicism and despair had taken root, and that was reflected in the movies, too. In a clip from William Wellman's 1933 Heroes for Sale, a man down on his luck laments, "It's the end of America." His friend offers a democratic yet cheerless response: "No, maybe it's the end of us, but it's not the end of America."
No wonder audiences needed cheering up. The studios filled that need with movies that showed all sorts of sexual misbehavior, usually among the rich. In 1930 Norma Shearer - wife of Irving Thalberg, himself one of the architects of the Code - appeared in The Divorcee, playing a character who gets revenge on her unfaithful husband by sleeping with his best friend. The performance earned her an Oscar, and in Thou Shalt Not, Paglia points out that the film made her reconsider Shearer's talents: Paglia used to think of Shearer as a "goody two-shoes," but in The Divorcee, she shows off her "marvelous ability, and fluid body language." And as film critic and historian Molly Haskell points out, women characters had "a lot of sexual freedom" in pre-Code movies like The Divorcee and Clarence Brown's 1931 A Free Soul, often conducting themselves with a cavalier spirit more frequently afforded to men.
Other films, like Mervyn LeRoy's 1932 Three on a Match, featuring Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak, were titillating for their more tawdry aspects. That film featured instances of drug use, drunkenness, adultery, frigidity, child abuse and kidnapping. But, as film historian Mark Vieira points out, Dvorak - who plays a woman gone morally astray - was at her best in pre-Code movies like this one. She was, he says, "like a raw nerve, a loose wire." She lost something as an actress after the 1934 Code crackdown. Similarly, as Landis points out, actors like Warren William, who played a series of marvelous, appealing cads in the early 1930s, had fewer opportunities to be the bad boy once Hollywood began cleaning up its act.
That cleanup began in earnest when Hays made Joseph Breen, a former journalist, head of the newly formed Production Code Administration in 1934. Breen, unlike Hays, was fiercely moralistic - he was a devout Roman Catholic, and anti-Semitic to boot - and didn't like what Hollywood was dishing out. One of the first movies into which he sank his claws was Alfred E. Green's 1933 Baby Face, in which Barbara Stanwyck played a woman from the "wrong side of the tracks" who goes to the big city and sleeps her way up the social ladder. Breen demanded four minutes' worth of cuts and changes to Baby Face, and the studio, Warner Bros., complied. Still, upon the movie's release, audiences weren't fooled into thinking it was wholesome entertainment; even with Breen's changes incorporated, the picture was still zealously racy. Liberty Magazine wrote, "Three cheers for sin!"
But Breen was not about to be defeated or ignored. In 1933, the Catholic Legion of Decency - later called the National Legion of Decency -- was established by Roman Catholic Bishops. Although the group wasn't affiliated with the PCA, it proved to be one of Breen's greatest allies: In 1934, it spearheaded a boycott of all films playing in Philadelphia, a move that hit Hollywood right in the pocketbook. Though the studios and some individual filmmakers continued to push back against Breen - and, according to lore, director W.S. Van Dyke even punched him out in a bar - he became so powerful and threatening to the business that they were ultimately forced to comply. As we now know, the Production Code hardly succeeded in killing off the movies: Paglia points out that the post-Code era, including the screwball comedies of the 1930s and early '40s, was "the height of American art-making," and that is has "never been surpassed. There are films that continue to have...deep emotional appeal and eroticism. [Post-Code movies are] far more erotic in their own way, because of what they could not show." By 1954, the power of the Code began to disintegrate; in 1968, it was replaced by the MPAA ratings system, still in use today. But as Thou Shalt Not shows, the movies of the pre-Code years constitute their own special, glorious era: In those years of freedom, Hollywood produced movies with a kind of wit, sophistication and vitality that's unmatched even by contemporary cinema, in which, supposedly, anything goes.
By Stephanie Zacharek
Screenplay: Steven Smith
Cast: Valerie Spencer (narrator), John Landis, Jonathan Kuntz, Mark Vieira, Camille Paglia, Molly Haskell, Leonard Maltin, Hugh M. Hefner, Rudy Behlmer
[B&W and color, 68 minutes]
