Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America (review)

Our knowledge of early cinema has exploded in the past fifteen years, in no small part from the work in academic film studies that was the direct or indirect result of the seminal FIAF conference in Brighton in 1978. Although most research has previously focused on the developing infrastructures of the film industry in the first twenty years of its existence, as well as on the evolution of cinema's formal language in the preclassical era, the most interesting new research is looking at audiences and other social forces outside the industry. There has also been a growing literature in both censorship and the film industry's evolving attempts to preempt government censorship though self-censorship, which was instituted during film preproduction and production, rather than after a film's completion. Much of this work, however, including Lea Jacobs's seminal book, The Wages of Sin, or Gregory Black's Hollywood Censored, and Anne Morey's Hollywood Outsiders, has focused on the so-called Hays Office and the "Production Code."

Lee Grieveson's book on censorship in the first decade of twentieth-century America is not only important because of what it tells us about the public and state mechanisms for the social control of the new medium of film but also because of the far-reaching effects such efforts to censor movies had on the whole history of Hollywood. Indeed, Grieveson argues that the Hollywood-mandated ideology of the "happy end," still more or less in effect today, was in the mid-1910s a defensive reaction of film producers to outside attempts to control film content and ultimately led to both a narrowing of allowable discourses in the cinema and to the institutionalization of a formal system of filmmaking now referred to as classical Hollywood narrative.

The major event in this regard was the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio State Censorship Ordinance in 1915, which categorically ruled that film was not protected by the free-speech clauses of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution but rather was considered "mere entertainment" and commerce—unlike the privately controlled and commercially oriented press—and therefore subject to government regulation. Not until 1969 in the case of Stanley v. Georgia would the free-speech aspects of this ruling be overturned by the Supreme Court, when the Court "observe(d) that the line between the transmission of ideas and mere entertainment is too elusive for a court to draw, if, indeed, such a line can be drawn at all" (311, note 39).

Grieveson sees Mutual v. Ohio not as the beginning but as the endpoint of a public discussion about the social value of movies and government censorship that had begun as early as 1906, when ruling-class interests first began to worry about the "unhealthy" influence the flickers might have on uneducated and unwashed working-class audiences. According to Grieveson, the initial causus bellum was a Sigmund Lubin film, The Unwritten Law (1907), which purported to be a true visual record of the notorious Harry K. Thaw murder trial: on June 25, 1906, Thaw shot and killed the wealthy socialite Stanford White for allegedly raping Thaw's wife, the ex–chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit; however, the catalyst for the "crime of passion" had actually occurred five years earlier and three years before Thaw's marriage to Nesbit. In a feeding frenzy equal to 2004's Scott Peterson trial, the American press reported daily about the immorality, debauchery, and sexual perversion of the moneyed classes, yet it was the film version that "was singled out by the trade press, reform groups, and various police forces as an unacceptable representation" (58), leading to its banning in numerous locations. Although the cinema had previously consisted to a large extent of actualtiés and short entertainment-oriented attractions, the film industry was increasingly turning out melodramas...