The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code

Preface

Preface When Iva Archer rapped at the door ofthe swank flat, she sensed that she had not awakened Samuel Spade but had somehow interrupted him. The middle of a phone call? A cheese Danish and coffee? What was it? He seemed less the occupant of the flat than a precinct cop assigned to guard it. He talked as he always talked: reserved, under control. But the reserve and control now seemed forced. Then Iva saw the woman in the bedroom, the woman in dishabille. The woman who had thrown on a robe that Spade had perhaps tossed her. Itlooked bad for Spade. Iva turned to the private eye and asked one hard question : "Who is that dame wearin' my kimono?" Mark it! Joe Breen hollered to the projectionist. In the arid screening room ofthe Hollywood "Hays Office," where in summer 1934 he monitored even rereleases, Breen had had enough of the 1931 Maltese Falcon. The foul language (a stage-whispered "S.O.B.") and homosexual riffs (Joel Cairo with an arm around his buddy) were bad. The low morals of Spade and the women were worse. In one scene, Spade dangled a DO NOT DISTURB sign in one hand and fluffed pillows with the other; later Spade's dame dropped her kimono and slipped into the bath with "breasts partially exposed and one leg raised the height of the side of the tub." Though the screening ended well after seven 0'clock, Breen marched into his office to dictate a stem memorandum for theWarner brothers. The picture could not be rereleased, he ordered; the studio must return The Maltese Falcon-kimonos and all-to the vault. A battle over the Falcon would leave Breen and Jack Warner scarred, but for now, confident and exhausted, Breen could head for home. Breen doused the lights and looked around. Even in shadow the Production Code office on Hollywood Boulevard resembled that of a third-rate Sam Spade: the rugs were matted, the paint yellowed, the chairs hand-me-down; the antique switchboard belonged on the set xiv Preface of a 1920s melodrama, not at the hub of an important Hollywood agency. But Breen could smile. Across the threshold of the Production Code Administration passed the scripts and release prints of virtually every motion picture made. Within those dingy walls, Breen and the Production Code staff helped shape the content ofAmerica's most vital cultural medium. Breen could well recall the days before 1934 and the formation of the Production Code Administration, the days of easy morals and Maltese Falcons. "I am so enthusiastic about this whole business and so willing to work that I'd be tempted to bite the legs off anybody who might dare to cross us at this stage of the game," Breen had told his boss, Will Hays. But in 1930 the Irishman had been a public relations flack for the Production Code office, not its supervising director , and the studio heads had scorned both the Code and its guardians. Charged with Production Code enforcement in 1931, the West Coast Hays Office staff had been ministers without portfolio. When they asked Motion Picture Association presidentWill Hays for "some help in cleaning up" the Falcon, he did not respond; apparently he was more concerned with East Coast matters-from antitrust threats to restrictive trade practices-that posed an even greater danger to the studios than the dirty laundry the production chiefs were accused of hanging out on-screen. So strapped for funds were the Depression -whipped major companies in 1932 that they could not even pay Association dues. The remedy was sex, and the pictures were wanton , the movie industry's critics maintained. The wisecracks and double entendres exposed the Production Code as one more Hollywood facade , a public relations gimmick that allowed the studios to preach morality and purvey sin. "The pest hole that infects the entire country with its obscene and lascivious moving pictures must be cleansed and disinfected," a Catholic church group commanded in 1933. Down through the centuries , the moral guardians ofthe masses had issued comparable warnings about "cheap amusements." In the seventeenth century it was theaters, in the eighteenth romance novels, and in the nineteenth dime novels and the penny press. These were the purveyors of wanton desires and social antagonisms, and in the twentieth century, censorship , as ever, served those who practiced or advocated it, from Preface xv demagogues to sermonizers. Hollywood...