Sex, Communism, Race, and Creative Freedom in Hollywood
IN 1934, THE creative freedom of unconstrained Hollywood came to a halt, setting the stage for decades of self-serving attempts at internal censorship and creative control.
Until then, filmmakers went about their business more or less unchecked, pushing the era’s moral limits with bawdy humor, violent crime, and sexual provocation. There was James Cagney swaggering and shooting his way through The Public Enemy (1931), a portrait of a bootlegging gangster who built an empire out of “beer and blood” (and famously assaulted his nagging girlfriend at the breakfast table with a grapefruit to the face). There was Barbara Stanwyck sleeping her way to success in Baby Face (1933), leaving a trail of heartbroken (and sometimes dead) lovers in her lusty wake. There was adultery! Abortion! Profanity! Visible undergarments! At the end, righteousness would usually prevail—the antihero would repent and reform or die trying—but this was strictly perfunctory. Then, as now, audiences loved a story that made being bad look good. And then, as now, the popularity of sensational and sexy movies began to raise questions about their effect on impressionable viewers.
Amid a climate of concern that edgy films might spark immoral behavior, and with the threat of government censorship close behind, Hollywood set out to get ahead of the game. In 1927, a committee of studio execs, at the behest of a freshly anointed industry honcho named Will H. Hays, had already collaborated to publish a now-infamous list of “don’ts and be carefuls,” a 37-item litany of topics that filmmakers agreed would be either approached with caution or avoided entirely.
The taboos were numerous and wide-ranging: “Sexual perversion,” drug use, miscegenation, and profanity (including irreligious exclamations of “My God!”) were completely off-limits, while a soft touch was urged when depicting murder techniques, law enforcement, or (my favorite) portrayals of safecracking or dynamiting, due to
