Search Results

This chapter traces the origins of film censorship in the US from 1910 onward. It documents the rise of public concern over movie sex and violence and traces the manner in which pressures from religious and social groups led to the formation of individual censorship entities in various states and municipalities. The motion picture industry tried to counter these pressures by forming the Motion Picture Production and Distribution Association under Will Hays and promising to police itself, an effort that proved ineffectual until 1934, when government pressure, the Legion of Decency, and Catholic boycotts led to the requirement that any motion picture produced in the US had to earn the Seal of Approval of the Production Code Administration under Joe Breen.

This chapter examines the “movie problem” during the 1920s and 1930s, when political battles for control of the screen focused first on issues of labor and class, and then, as fascism threatened Europe beginning with the Spanish Civil War, on issues of foreign policy. In the early 1920s, government officials led by J. Edgar Hoover and his Bureau of Investigation began monitoring filmmakers, fearing the production of films they considered Communist propaganda. However, in the wake of the first red scare, the bureau's powers were removed and federal surveillance of filmmaking ceased. Nevertheless, concerns over Communist propaganda remained. During the 1930s, Hollywood's internal censors in the Production Code Administration sought to prohibit the production of radical films. Yet the 1930s culture remained open to cinematic critiques from the left despite the efforts of these censors.

This chapter examines the seven thrillers created by Hitchcock in Britain just before he left for America: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, The Lady Vanishes, and Jamaica Inn. These thrillers established his international reputation and helped build a demand for his services among American studios. The chapter explores the influence of the British Board of Film Censors on these films as well as the reaction of the Production Code Administration, which reviewed each of the films in the light of its own criteria before permitting US distribution. At first, American censors simply scissored ‘objectionable’ scenes, but toward the end of Hitchcock’s British tenure, they involved themselves in decisions made at every stage of the production process.

This chapter examines the influence of Production Code censors and wartime conditions on the production of Saboteur. War with Germany freed moviemakers from the shackles of the Neutrality Act, so that the common enemy could be identified without fear of censorship. Censors instead focused on several class-conscious remarks inserted in the script by left-leaning author Dorothy Parker suggesting a disdain for the police and the upper classes. The film did well at the box office and less well with critics, but Hitchcock created a memorable finale on the Statue of Liberty and succeeded in his attempt to make a thriller warning the US of the dangers of internal sabotage and the pro-German leanings of the America First Party.

This chapter describes Hitchcock’s working relationships during his most productive years as a director. Under terms negotiated by his agent, Lew Wasserman, ownership of the films he directed for Paramount reverted to Hitchcock eight years after their initial release, eventually pushing his earnings well beyond those of his peers. As Hitchcock’s star ascended, the influence of Joe Breen and the Production Code declined. Joe Breen’s health failed, and he was replaced in 1954 by his assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock, who was more accommodating than his predecessor with directors he admired, like Hitchcock. The Code itself received a major makeover in 1956 with the rescinding of flat bans on illegal drugs, abortion, white slavery, and kidnapping. Restrictions on such long-forbidden words as damn and hell were also lifted, and some directors, like Otto Preminger, openly challenged the Code and released films, notably The Moon Is Blue, without a Code Seal. Subsequent chapters include detailed discussions on the impacts of censorship on each of the eleven films Hitchcock made during his glory years.

The conclusion summarizes Hitchcock’s experiences, strategies, and priorities in dealing with censorship to produce suspenseful thrillers. By the end of his career, Hitchcock was manipulating the censors as successfully as he manipulated moviegoers. But the harm done by the Production Code early in his career was incalculable. Although the censors’ prodding stimulated the director’s creativity in a few instances, on balance his movies were damaged by their interference. The Production Code rule that did the most damage to Hitchcock’s films was the admonition that evildoers must be punished. Blind adherence to this rule made a mockery of the death of the title character in Rebecca, implausibly absolved Cary Grant of guilt in Suspicion, forced an improbable conclusion on The Paradine Case, kept Farley Granger from fulfilling his crisscross murder bargain in Strangers on a Train, and saved Montgomery Clift from the gallows in I Confess. Toward the end of his career, the declining Production Code was little more than a nuisance to Hitchcock, but the damage done to his early US films can never be undone. And audiences will never know what other movies he might have made if he hadn’t adjusted his own sights to fit within the censors’ limitations.

The CIA was established in 1947, but it did not appear in a Hollywood film until Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in 1959. Why? This chapter explains Hollywood’s long silence on American foreign intelligence during the early Cold War. It argues that a combination of patriotism, stringent libel laws, the restrictions of the semi-documentary format, and Hollywood’s in-house industry censor the Production Code Administration, encouraged filmmakers to respect the CIA’s proclaimed “passion for anonymity”. It ends with a sustained examination of one of the most well-known examples of CIA interference with a Hollywood representation of their Agency: Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1958 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American.

This chapter reviews the influence of the Production Code and marketing considerations on the Cary Grant vehicle Suspicion. Marketing considerations dictated that Grant could not be a murderer, as his character was portrayed in the source novel. And Joe Breen, who took over RKO productions on a brief stint away from the Production Code Administration, sought to erase all suspicious activity from Grant’s character. Hitchcock sidestepped much of the meddling, but this movie suffered more than most of his films from Production Code interference, particularly the provisions regarding suicide and the need to punish evildoers. Nonetheless, it still managed to earn a healthy profit and a Best Actress Oscar for Joan Fontaine.

Notorious is one of the few Hitchcock films that were actually improved by the involvement of the Production code. Code censors objected to the original plot, in which a woman of loose reputation is hired by the FBI to use her wiles to infiltrate a group of ex-Nazis hiding out in Rio de Janeiro. Code officials suggested that the woman, played by Ingrid Bergman, be someone who lived by her wits, rather than someone with loose morals, and who is recruited because the head of the exiled Nazi ring, played by Claude Rains, was once in love with her. These suggestions greatly improved the film, making both Bergman and Rains more sympathetic characters. Notorious contains a kissing scene between Bergman and Cary Grant that Hitchcock concocted specifically to get around the supposed ‘three-second rule,’ according to which lips locked for more than three seconds were considered unduly lustful. Grant and Bergman remain in each other’s arms for nearly three minutes as they travel through her Rio apartment exchanging at least twenty kisses, none of which exceed three seconds. Hitchcock also had to contend with close scrutiny from the FBI as a result of the use of uranium as a plot point in pre’atom bomb days. The film has gone on to become one of Hitchcock’s most venerated masterpieces, partially because of the Production Code insights that improved the plot and gave Hitchcock the impetus for a memorable romantic sequence.

The Hollywood film industry at the end of World War II was very lightly regulated. Yet a variety of forms of regulation played a vital role in sustaining the intricate and profitable mechanisms of the studio system. The most obvious and visible of these was the self-censorship of motion picture content though the industry-sponsored, arm's-length Production Code Administration (PCA), run since 1934 by Joseph Breen. The effective regulation of output through the operations of an assembly line-like system of production, distribution and exhibition was central to the business model of the Big Five studios. This chapter examines the Supreme Court decision in the 1948 case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al. — the famous ‘Paramount Decree’ — which revisited and definitively resolved the question of whether the major studios constituted a ‘trust’ in the terms of U.S. commercial law, that is, a cartel operating illegitimately to restrict market freedom in a given industry. It also discusses the rise of independent studios after Paramount and the impact of television on the film industry.

North by Northwest chronicles a cross-country chase in which Cary Grant is mistakenly identified as a spy and pursued by spies and police from the UN building in New York to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. The Production Code lodged three key objections to the film: the possible homosexuality of the henchman played by Martin Landau; Cary Grant’s status as a twice-divorced man; and any hint that the double agent played by Eva Marie Saint is a ‘woman of loose morals.’ The Code also seriously questioned the advisability of identifying Saint’s character as the mistress of the lead spy, played by James Mason. Hitchcock accommodated many of the Code objections by dubbing in dialogue changes, a few of which are visible on-screen. In the film’s climax, he looped in dialogue in which Grant welcomes Eva Marie Saint as his new wife as he helps her into an upper berth on the Twentieth Century Limited, but undermines this lip service with a final scene of the train going through a tunnel a clear bit of phallic symbolism.

The Production Code Administration insisted that Hitchcock submit to the oversight of the American Humane Association during the filming of The Birds, and the Humane Association had a greater impact on the finished film than the Code itself. Humane Association representatives were on location for all scenes involving birds, and an aviary was set up to treat any that were injured. Concern for the birds’ welfare often dictated shooting schedules, which were sometimes halted when the Humane Association representatives felt the birds were too tired to continue. The production company also had to obtain a special permit to catch and train seagulls, a protected species. For its part, the Production Code Administration found the basic story acceptable, but cautioned against presenting the Tippi Hedren character in a bra and skirt, preferring a bra and full slip, and warned against excessive gruesomeness in the bird attacks. At least one commentator suggested it might have been better if Hitchcock and the Code office had shown less solicitude for the birds and more for the leading lady, who suffered grievously under the final avian attack and had to take a week off to recuperate.

This chapter examines efforts by Catholics to influence the content of American popular culture, such as motion pictures and all-fiction “pulp” magazines. It first discusses the perceptions of believers and nonbelievers alike regarding Catholicism's views of the place of literary art and intellectual freedom in the world as compared with those fostered by American culture. It then explores the public rationales developed by Catholics to justify their involvement in the control of popular media, revealing a fully articulated understanding of the relationship of Catholicism with American culture and, by extension, with modernity. It also considers the impact of the Legion of Decency, the Production Code Administration, and the National Organization for Decent Literature on the motion picture industry. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how debates over Catholic control of print and of popular media drew on and reconfigured the basic elements and ideas of Catholic literary culture.

This chapter examines the impact of external forces on the film Hitchcock often claimed to be his personal favorite. The Production Code office found little fault with the tale of a serial killer returning to his small-town roots. The War Production Board, by putting a limit of $5,000 on construction costs using new materials in Hollywood pictures, forced Hitchcock and screenwriter Thornton Wilder to shoot much of the film on location in Santa Rosa, California, adding greatly to the small-town feel of the film.

I Confess is based on a 1902 play in which a priest, after hearing the confession of a murderer, is himself accused of the crime and, unwilling to break the seal of the confessional and reveal the real killer’s identity, is convicted and sent to the gallows. Here again, a Hitchcock film ran afoul of the Code dictum that murderers may not go unpunished. The Production Code Administration logged more suggestions regarding this film, fifty-nine in all, than they did on any other Hitchcock film. Most involved the details of the confessional seal and the priest’s obligations. The censors were also concerned about a love affair the priest had before deciding to enter the seminary. Despite all these concerns, the Code office had no objections to the priest being hanged, so long as the real murderer did not get off scot-free. However, Warner Bros. did not want to send rising star Montgomery Clift to the gallows, so the script was rewritten to acquit him, leading to a climax in which the real murderer is fingered by his wife and killed trying to escape.

The Trouble with Harry represented a departure for Hitchcock; the film is a black comedy in which the consistently dry humor undercuts any suspense. The Code office objected to John Michael Hayes’s witty dialogue as well as the illegitimacy of the child of the Shirley MacLaine character and the description of an unsatisfactory wedding night. Hitchcock solved the problems by altering the script so that the boy’s parents were married before his father was killed and revised the objectionable description of the widowed Shirley MacLaine’s wedding night by having her new husband fail to show up because a horoscope warned him ‘not to start any new projects on that day.’ These changes satisfied the Production Code office, which allowed most of Hayes’s salty dialogue to remain as written.

There is little in Hitchcock’s final film that could not have been filmed ten years earlier under the Production Code. Double entendres between two of the lead actors, Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern, along with a smattering of swear words, are the only elements that might have been questioned by the Code censors. Critical reviews were mixed, but the film did well at the box office and ended with Barbara Harris winking at the camera, a wink that Hitchcock appropriated for his own image in the ad campaign, which featured him winking at the audience from inside a crystal ball, a fitting end to over fifty years of collaboration with a grateful audience.

Chapter 8 demonstrates the ways in which ideological constraints in studio-era Hollywood shaped the aesthetic properties of an entire body of crime films, now commonly known as film noir. The ideological restrictions of the Production Code Administration posed creative problems that noir filmmakers solved through visual and narrative contortion. The contortions created challenges for audiences, who had to decode and make sense of films that may not show complete clarity or coherence in their storytelling. Film noir remains aesthetically engaging because it operates near the boundaries of classicism without sacrificing classical Hollywood’s accessibility and formal unity.

Vertigo received mixed reviews on its initial release, but a 2012 poll of film critics rated it the best film of all time. During script preparation and filming, the Production Code Administration reported several objections to the somewhat implausible story of a man who tricks a friend with vertigo, played by James Stewart, into witnessing the ‘suicide’ of the man’s wife with the help of a double for the wife who later falls in love with the friend. Code office objections included the filming of intimate undergarments drying on a line, discussions of brassiere design, a ‘cat house’ reference, all scenes that are ‘objectively lustful’ and feature ‘open mouth kissing,’ and any hint of sexual relations between the Stewart character and the two characters played by Kim Novak. Most of all, the censors advised that ‘it is most important’ that the guilty husband be brought back for trial. The ban on unpunished crime had an adverse impact on more of Hitchcock’s American films, starting with Rebecca, than almost any other Code provision. Hitchcock made a show of accommodating the dictum in Vertigo by filming an ending in which Stewart and his ex-fianc’e listen to a news broadcast announcing that the villainous husband has been captured and is about to be extradited for trial. The ending was so out of place and obviously ‘tacked on’ that it was cut from the American release but included in foreign prints to satisfy the censorship boards of other countries.

When he made Torn Curtain in 1966, Hitchcock was sixty-six, the Production Code was thirty-six, and both were in decline. The curtain of the title is the Iron Curtain, and Paul Newman plays a nuclear scientist assigned to travel to East Germany as a Communist sympathizer to bring back the mathematical formula for an anti-missile system. The Production Code had three major concerns with the script. In one of the movie’s earliest scenes, there appeared to be inappropriate ‘intimacies of lovemaking’ between Newman and costar Julie Andrews. Code reviewers also worried that the killing of the East German bodyguard assigned to Newman was entirely too gruesome, and a scene in which Newman cried, ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater might create panic among real theatergoers. Hitchcock recut the love scene, had Newman shout ‘Fire!’ in German? presumably so only German audiences would panic?but left the bodyguard’s murder uncut because he wanted to show just how difficult and messy it is to kill a man. He succeeded in this, and the murder is the high point of a disappointing film and a worthy addition to Hitchcock’s canon of memorable scenes.