Dedicated to Keeping Mouths Shut

Slocum I Dedicated to Keeping Mouths Shut J. David Slocum New School for Social Research / Dedicated to Keeping Mouths Shut Francis C. Couvares, ed., Movie Censorship andAmerican Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996) ccounts of cinema censorship tend, like many of the fictional films they consider, to be care-fully constructed narratives. They sharply draw conflicts, clearly flesh out protagonists, and simply set forth the values or vices at issue. Most accounts, finally, are straightforward histories of great-though sometimes bad or misguided-men and the world of movies they made (or didn't make). The Hays Office from Hollywood's studio era remains the paradigmatic example. It began in 1922 with the arrival of Will Hays, conservative and well-connected, as head of the filmmakers' industry association dedicated to maintaining the moral quality of movies. In the early 1930s, with the codification of production guidelines and the establishment of an administration for their application, Hays and his chief enforcer, Joseph Breen, effectively regulated the content of all studio productions. By the late 1940s, Hays had retired, the studio system was breaking apart (both from internal fissures and external decree), and the power of the Office and its Code began to diminish. Eventually, in 1968, after repeated challenges, and amidst tumultuous cultural change and the emergence of a new generation of Hollywood filmmakers, the unenforceable remnants of the Hays Office Code were scrapped in favor of a movie rating system. Adept at framing the public image of Hollywood, its stu-Progressives, Protestants, Catholics, jurists and parents, state dios, and individual players and productions, the Hays Officeand local boards ofreview operated at various times to augnot surprisingly did much to burnish its own. A former em-ment or reorient the industry's efforts at producing acceptployee , Raymond Moley, penned in 194S a hagiography ofable and appealing films. With only a few exceptions, the Hays that cast his efforts at maintaining Hollywood values ininfluence of these groups has been studied individually. The a nearly biblical hue, establishing the story of film industryrole of the Roman Catholic Church and its film review board, self-regulation that would prevail for decades. Only recentlythe Legion of Decency, has for example received much recent have scholars like Richard Maltby begun to scrutinize theattention from Gregory Black, in Hollywood Censored exercises in self-publicity undertaken by Will Hays and oth-(1994), and Frank Walsh, in Sin and Censorship (1996). ers on his behalf.What many ofthese studies suggest is that specific cenJust as the self-promotion suffusing die most familiar ac-sorship debates played out, often on several levels, broad culcount of Hollywood censorship has cast new light on theturai struggles. On one level, for instance, disputes over industry's self-regulatory practices, die involvement of odierspecific films or players—say, the sexual provocations ofMae institutions and groups has also been subject to revision.West—compelled direct attention to particular tenets ofpub114 I Film& History Regular Feature | Book Reviews lie morality. On another level contests took place over institutional authority. In its attempts to influence film producers , the Legion ofDecency was negotiating the public roles ofboth the youthful film medium and the Church itselfin an increasingly modern, urban, and secular American society. Such negotiations are the explicit subject ofFrancis G. Couvares' Movie Censorship andAmerican Culture. The anthology self-consciously undertakes a shift from thinking about censorship as a group or individual's reflexive act ofdefining and prohibiting the "indecent" or "immoral" to a loose set ofprocesses that constitutes a society's prevailing values and vision of reality. In his Introduction, Couvares writes that these processes should be understood as part of"a complex and continuing social drama in which the parties in conflict engage, albeit in different ways, fundamental questions about how to live in a modern, capitalist, democratic, and plural society ." This is hardly a novel formulation for film historians: Annette Kuhn's study offilm in Britain between 1909 and 1925, Cinema, Censorship, andSexuality employs a similar approach . Yet Couvares' collection is important for its varied engagements with the Hollywood censorship story—that familiar ifmany-sided story ofa cultural industry coming to terms with the market, the state, the public, and religion. Religion occupies a...