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Reviews in American History 28.2 (2000) 270-277



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The Seen, the Unseen, and the Obscene:
Pre-Code Hollywood

Steven J. Ross


Thomas Doherty. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xiii + 430 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, and index. $49.50 (cloth); $19.50 (paper).

In September 1999, in the aftermath of the tragic shootings at Columbine High School, Congressional leaders interested in explaining the seeming proliferation of violence and immorality among American youth fell back on a familiar strategy: blame Hollywood. Insisting that Hollywood, not Washington D.C., was the real center of power, Senator Sam Brownbeck (R-Kansas) blamed the movie industry for fostering criminal behavior and sexual promiscuity among the nation's teenagers. Brownbeck's comments, as former baseball great and one-time movie critic Yogi Berra might say, are like déjà vu all over again. Since the appearance of the first nickelodeons in 1905, political, civic, and religious authorities have repeatedly blamed movies and the industry that produced them for all that is wrong in America. Studio heads, then and now, responded to threats of boycotts and federal censorship by instituting various self-censorship plans. The Production Code Administration (PCA), the most powerful of these, regulated the content and subject matter of American film from 1934 until its abolition in 1968. Under the leadership of former journalist and Catholic layman Joseph I. Breen, the PCA set out to restore morality in Hollywood and the nation by controlling what audiences could and could not see on the screen.

While scholars have recently reexamined the impact of censorship in general and the PCA in particular, it is intriguing to ask what would happen if Hollywood producers were relatively free to make whatever they wanted. What subjects would they explore? What would these films say about American society? These questions are answered in Thomas Doherty's lively new book, Pre-Code Hollywood. 1

Filmmakers have been turning out movies for over 100 years, but historians and cinema scholars are still trying to figure out the best ways to study movies, the industry that produced them, and the people who watched them. [End Page 270] Cinema scholars have acknowledged the need to historicize--not simply theorize--their subject matter, but they are still left with the thorny question of how one goes about understanding the relationship between cinematic text and historical context. Although films can certainly be analyzed independent of any context, understanding why some films are made and others are not requires grounding in material realities. Doherty, an associate professor of American Studies and chair of the Film Studies Program at Brandeis University, offers us valuable insights into these areas by analyzing the films of the pre-Code era and the historical and material context in which they were made. Although any film produced before 1930 could technically be considered pre-Code, Doherty uses the term to describe American movies made between March 31, 1930, when the Production Code was adopted but largely ignored, and July 1, 1934, when an expanded Code was rigorously enforced by the newly created PCA. During these four years, producers repeatedly violated Code regulations and exposed Americans to a remarkable range of topics and points of view that would be sanitized or suppressed under the Breen-run PCA. Audiences regularly watched films about "Sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man . . . ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored . . . economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed . . . vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded . . . in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled" (pp. 2-3).

Given the seemingly racy nature of pre-Code cinema, two questions immediately come to mind. The first, to paraphrase a query posed at Passover seders, why were pre-Code era films different from all other films? Second, why would producers agree to adopt such a restrictive Code? Doherty answers these questions by examining the off-screen problems movie industry leaders confronted between 1930 and 1934. He begins in 1930, with the...

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