Pre-Code Hollywood '' (1896), starring
May Irwin, from the
Edison Studios, drew general outrage from moviegoers, civic leaders, and religious leaders, as shocking,
obscene, and immoral. ''. Scenes where criminals aimed guns at the camera were considered inappropriate by the New York state censor board in the 1920s, and usually removed. On February 19, 1930,
Variety published the entire content of the Code, and predicted that state film censorship boards would soon become obsolete; however, the men obliged to enforce the code—Jason Joy (head of the committee until 1932) and his successor, James Wingate—were generally unenthusiastic and/or ineffective.
The Blue Angel, the first film the office reviewed, which was passed by Joy with no revisions, was considered indecent by a California censor. Joy had to review 500 films a year with a small staff and little power. In 1930, the Hays office did not have the authority to order studios to remove material from a film, and instead worked by reasoning and sometimes pleading with them. Complicating matters, the appeals process ultimately put the responsibility for making the final decision in the hands of the studios. In the first picture, however, when the creature was born, his mad scientist creator was free to proclaim
"Now I know what it feels like to be God!" 's
The Sign of the Cross (1932) One factor in ignoring the code was the fact that some found such censorship prudish, owing to the libertine social attitudes of the 1920s and early 1930s. This was a period in which the
Victorian era was sometimes ridiculed as being naïve and backward. When the Code was announced, the liberal periodical
The Nation attacked it, Soon, the flouting of the code became an open secret. In 1931,
The Hollywood Reporter mocked the code and quoted an anonymous screenwriter saying that "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's just a memory"; two years later
Variety followed suit. The Production Code was not created or enforced by federal, state, or city government; in large part,
Hollywood studios adopted it in hopes of avoiding government censorship, preferring self-regulation to government regulation. Father
Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit, wrote: "Silent smut had been bad. Vocal smut cried to the censors for vengeance." Thomas Doherty, Professor of American studies at
Brandeis University, has defined the code as "no mere list of Thou-Shalt-Nots, but a homily that sought to yoke Catholic doctrine to Hollywood formula. The guilty are punished, the virtuous rewarded, the authority of church and state is legitimate, and the bonds of matrimony are sacred."
Joseph I. Breen, a prominent Catholic layman who had worked in public relations, was appointed head of the PCA. Under Breen's leadership, which lasted until his retirement in 1954, enforcement of the Production Code became notoriously rigid. Even cartoon sex symbol
Betty Boop had to change her characteristic
flapper personality and dress, adopting an old-fashioned, near-matronly appearance. However, by 1934, the prohibition against miscegenation was defined only as sexual relationships between black and white races. The first major instance of censorship under the Production Code involved the 1934 film
Tarzan and His Mate, in which brief nude scenes involving a
body double for actress
Maureen O'Sullivan were edited out of the master negative of the film. By the time the Code became fully functional (January 1935), several films from the pre-Code era and the transition period beginning in July 1934 were pulled from release exchanges (with some of them never again seeing public release), which led studios to remake some early 1930s-era films. 1941 saw the release of remakes of
The Maltese Falcon and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, both having had very different pre-Code versions released ten years prior. The Hays Code also required changes regarding adaptations of other media. For instance,
Alfred Hitchcock's
Rebecca could not retain a major element from
Daphne du Maurier's
1938 novel where the narrator discovers her husband (the aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter) killed his first wife (the titular Rebecca) and she makes light of it, since it followed Rebecca having strongly provoked and taunted him. As having a major character get away with murder and living happily ever after would have been a flagrant violation of the Code, Hitchcock's version had Rebecca die in an accident with Maxim de Winter being guilty only for hiding the facts of her death. The
2020 remake, not bound by the Code, restored du Maurier's original plot element. The PCA also engaged in political censorship. When Warner Bros. wanted to make a film about
Nazi concentration camps, the production office forbade it, citing the prohibition on depicting "in an unfavorable light" another country's "institutions [and] prominent people", with threats to take the matter to the federal government if the studio went ahead. This policy prevented a number of anti-Nazi films being produced. Breen's power to change scripts and scenes angered many writers, directors and Hollywood
moguls. Breen influenced the production of
Casablanca (1942), objecting to any explicit reference to Rick and Ilsa having slept together in Paris, and to the film mentioning that Captain Renault extorted sexual favors from his supplicants; ultimately, both remained strongly implied in the finished version. Adherence to the Code also ruled out any possibility of the film ending with Rick and Ilsa consummating their adulterous love, making inevitable the ending with Rick's noble renunciation, one of
Casablancas most famous scenes. 's 1946 film
Notorious, where he worked around the rule of three-second-kissing by having the two actors break off every three seconds. The whole sequence lasts two and a half minutes. Outside the mainstream studio system, the Code was sometimes flouted by
Poverty Row studios.
Exploitation film presenters operating on the territorial (states-rights) distribution system openly violated the Code through loopholes, masquerading the films as morality tales or
muckraking exposés. One example is
Child Bride (1938) which featured a nude scene involving a twelve-year-old child actress (
Shirley Mills). Newsreels were mostly exempt from the Code. Their content was generally toned down by the end of 1934 (not deviating much from the Code until World War II) as the result of public outrage over coverage of the killings of
John Dillinger in July, and of
"Baby Face" Nelson and three girls in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the latter two occurring during the same week in November. However, the most famous defiance of the Code was the case of
The Outlaw, a
western produced by
Howard Hughes which was denied a Seal of Approval after it was completed in 1941 since advertising focused particular attention on
Jane Russell's breasts. When the film's initial 1943 release was shuttered by the MPPDA after a week, Hughes eventually persuaded Breen this did not violate the Code and the film could be shown, although without a Seal of Approval. The film was generally released in 1946. The
David O. Selznick production
Duel in the Sun, featuring several on-screen deaths, adultery and displays of lust, was also released in 1946 without the approval of the Hays Office. The financial success of "Outlaw" and "Duel" was a deciding factor in the weakening of the Code in the late 1940s, when the formerly taboo subjects of rape and miscegenation were allowed in
Johnny Belinda (1948) and
Pinky (1949), respectively. In 1951, the MPAA revised the Code to make it more rigid, spelling out more prohibited words and subjects. That same year, however, MGM head
Louis B. Mayer, one of Breen's foremost allies, was ousted after a series of disputes with the studio's production head,
Dore Schary, whose preference for gritty "social realism" films was often at odds with the Hays Office. Breen retired in 1954 largely because of ill health, and
Geoffrey Shurlock was appointed his successor.
Post-Breen era Hollywood continued to work within the confines of the Production Code throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, but during this time, the
film industry was faced with serious competition. The first threat came from
television, a new technology that allowed TV owners to stay home for entertainment - including motion pictures. Hollywood needed to offer the public something it could not get on television, which itself was under an even more restrictive censorship code. In addition to the threat of television, the industry was enduring a period of economic difficulties compounded by the result of
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), in which the
Supreme Court outlawed
vertical integration as a violation of
anti-trust laws. Studios were forced not only to give up ownership of theaters, but were unable to control what exhibitors offered. This led to increasing competition from foreign films not bound by the Code, such as
Vittorio De Sica's
Bicycle Thieves (1948), released in the United States in 1949. In 1950, film distributor
Joseph Burstyn released
The Ways of Love which included
The Miracle. This
short film was originally part of ''
L'Amore (1948), an anthology film directed by Roberto Rossellini. Because The Miracle'' was thought to mock the Nativity, the
New York State Board of Regents (in charge of film censorship in the state) revoked the film's license. The ensuing lawsuit,
Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (dubbed the "Miracle Decision") was resolved by the Supreme Court in 1952. The Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision (
Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio) and held that motion pictures were entitled to
First Amendment protection, thus
The Miracle could not be banned. This reduced the threat of government regulation which had formerly been cited as justification for the Production Code, and the PCA's powers over the Hollywood industry were greatly reduced. Two 1956 films,
The Bad Seed and
Baby Doll, generated great controversy involving the PCA. The first dealt with the deaths of children, including that of the "wicked child" protagonist Rhoda at the end, which had been the result of changing the ending from the original novel to abide with the Code's "crime must not pay" rule. On the other hand, the second film was vociferously attacked by religious and moral leaders, partly because of its provocative publicity, while the MPAA attracted great criticism for approving a film that ridiculed law enforcement and often used racial epithets. However, the Legion's condemnation of the film did not attract a unified response from religious authorities, some of which considered that other films, including
The Ten Commandments (released that same year), had a similar amount and intensity of sensuous content. advertisements from the 1950s. Many Americans at the time turned towards racier and more provocative foreign films, which remained largely free from code restrictions. During the 1950s, studios found ways of complying with the Code while circumventing it. In 1956,
Columbia acquired an
art-house distributor which specialized in importing foreign art films,
Kingsley Productions, in order to distribute and capitalize on the notoriety of the film
And God Created Woman (1956). Columbia's agreement with the MPAA forbade it from distributing a film without a Seal of Approval, but the agreement did not specify what a subsidiary could do. Thus, exempt from the rules imposed by the Code, subsidiary distributors were utilized and even created by major studios such as Columbia in order to defy and weaken the Code.
United Artists followed suit and bought art film distributor
Lopert Films in 1958, and within a decade all the major studios were distributing foreign art films. Author Peter Lev writes: Explicit sexuality became expected in foreign films, to such an extent that "foreign film", "art film", "adult film" and "sex film" were for several years almost synonyms. Beginning in the late 1950s, increasingly explicit films began to appear, such as
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958),
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959),
Psycho (1960), and
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), often dealing with adult subjects and
sexual matters that had not been seen in Hollywood films since enforcement of the Production Code began in 1934. The MPAA reluctantly granted a Seal of Approval for these films, although not until certain changes were made. Owing to its themes,
Billy Wilder's
Some Like It Hot (1959) was not granted a Seal of Approval but still became a box office smash; as a result, it further weakened the authority of the Code. At the forefront of contesting the Code was director
Otto Preminger, whose films violated the Code repeatedly in the 1950s. His 1953 film
The Moon Is Blue, about a young woman who tries to play two suitors off against each other by claiming she plans to keep her virginity until marriage, was released without a Seal of Approval by
United Artists, the first production distributed by a member of the MPAA to do so. Preminger later made
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which portrayed the prohibited subject of drug abuse, and
Anatomy of a Murder (1959), which dealt with murder and rape. Like
Some Like It Hot, Preminger's films were direct assaults on the authority of the Production Code, and their success hastened its abandonment.
The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case" and was described by
The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent". In
Pictures at a Revolution, a 2008 study of films during that era,
Mark Harris wrote that the MPAA approval was "the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years".
Abandonment In 1963, MPAA president
Eric Johnston, who had previously "liberalized" the Code, died. The next three years were marked by a power struggle between two factions, which led to an erratic application of the Code. Finally, the "liberal" faction prevailed by 1966, installing
Jack Valenti as the Association's new head. The chaos of the interim period had rendered enforcement impossible and Valenti, an opponent of the Production Code, began working on a rating system under which film restrictions would lessen, an idea that had been considered as early as 1960 in response to the success of the non-approved
Some Like It Hot and
Anatomy of a Murder. In 1966,
Warner Bros. released ''
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'', the first film to feature the "Suggested for Mature Audiences" (SMA) label. As the PCA board was divided about censoring the film's explicit language, Valenti negotiated a compromise: the word "screw" was removed, but other language remained, including the phrase "hump the hostess". The film received Production Code approval despite the previously prohibited language. The surviving 1930 - 1968 records of the Production Code Administration, some 20,000 papers comprising files on over 5000 films, were donated to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1987. The
MPAA film rating system went into effect November 1, 1968, with the four rating symbols: "G" meaning suggested for general exhibition (persons of all ages admitted), "M" meaning suggested for mature audiences, "R" meaning suggested as restricted (persons under 16 not admitted unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian), and "X" meaning persons under 16 would not be admitted. By the end of 1968, Geoffrey Shurlock stepped down from his post. The PCA effectively dissolved and was replaced by the Code and Rating Administration (CARA) headed by Eugene Dougherty. The CARA would replace "Code" with "Classification" in 1978. In 1969, the Swedish film
I Am Curious (Yellow), directed by
Vilgot Sjöman, was initially banned in the U.S. for its frank depiction of sexuality; however, this was overturned by the Supreme Court. In 1970, because of confusion over the meaning of "mature audiences", the M rating was changed to "GP" meaning "for general exhibition, but parental guidance is suggested", then in 1972 to the current "PG" for "parental guidance suggested". In 1984, in response to public complaints regarding the severity of horror elements in PG-rated titles such as
Gremlins and
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the "PG-13" rating was created as a middle tier between PG and R. In 1990, the X rating was replaced by "NC-17" (under 17 not admitted) because of the former's stigma, being associated with
pornography. As the X rating was not trademarked by the MPAA (which expected producers would prefer to self-rate such product), it was soon appropriated by adult bookstores and theaters, which marketed their products as rated X, XX and XXX. As the
American Humane Association depended on the Hays Office for the right to monitor the
sets used for production, the closure of the Hays Office in 1966 also corresponded with an increase in animal cruelty on sets. The association did not regain its access until 1980. ==See also==