Self-Censorship in Hollywood during the Silent Era: A Woman of Affairs (1928) by Clarence Brown

A Woman of Affairs (1928), produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a Greta Garbo vehicle, was based on Michael Arlen’s succès de scandale novel The Green Hat (1924), one of the books banned by the Hays Office, which imposed a great number of changes on the screenplay and forced the studio to conceive a new plot. This article studies, from a historical as well as an aesthetic point of view, the constraints placed by the MPPDA on the production and on director Clarence Brown’s use of visual images to convey the full content of the novel. As a result, A Woman of Affairs presents two separate and contradictory story lines: the narrative revealed by the images and the official speech supervised by the censors and featured in the intertitles of the film.