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1 God Talks
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| 1 1 God Talks One late spring day in May 1934, the Roman Catholic cardinal of Philadelphia, Dennis Dougherty, ordered his diocesan flock to “stay away from all [movie theaters].” He framed this exhortation not as pastoral counsel , but as a “positive command, binding all in conscience under pain of sin.”1 The same year, a forceful Roman Catholic layman, Joseph Breen, commandeered the reins of the Production Code Administration board, believing , like many frustrated church people, that the movie morality czar Will Hays had compromised the mission of guarding the public from Hollywood excess.2 When Hollywood looked at religious concerns, they were likewise frequently nonplussed. On one hot July morning in 1934, as Hollywood moguls grabbed bagels on their way to work, they glanced at their own trade paper bible, the Hollywood Reporter, and may have been startled to read the headline “Taking It on the Jaw.” The surprised executives read that it “seemed that every living soul (if you are going to believe the newsprints) was lined up against the industry, and the Churches of all denominations have created a new sin—the sin of going to the movies.”3 Christian fundamentalists and Roman Catholics, and even many mainline churches, believed that lax enforcement of movie morals had allowed film content to degenerate. Such accusations were extended into a general condemnation of all movies as sinful. Frustrated grumbling from clergy and laity toward Hollywood during the early 1930s percolated into a vocal, even vociferous protest. The campaign for decency in the moving pictures pitted religious people of all stripes against the devil’s minions who shot out filth and violence at twenty-four frames a second. It was, in a strange, unforeseen way, a truly ecumenical movement, uniting Protestants and Roman Catholics in a joint crusade.4 The religious boycott of movie theaters in Philadelphia spurred Hollywood to recognize that it knew little about this giant block of ticket buyers.5 Acknowledging the powerful lobby of the Roman Catholic Church, with its 2 | God Talks Legion of Decency driving a protest against Italian gangsters in Scarface, the suggestive naughty bits of Mae West and Betty Boop, and film exports that exemplified the “morals of the barnyard,” Hollywood moguls conceded that they needed the support of religious audiences to insure the industry’s profitability , especially during the Depression.6 Deals were made and the Roman Catholic influence substantially shaped the golden age of Hollywood filmmaking . Acquiescing to religious pressures, Hollywood essentially decided to avoid religious topics in its films throughout the 1930s, and only tiptoed back in the mid-1940s with inspirational priests played by the likes of Patrick O’Brien and Bing Crosby. As film the historian Francis Couvares adroitly pointed out, a grassroots Kulturkampf took place on Main Street America.7 Just before the Production Code secured its teeth to guard against “immorality ” in Hollywood, numerous testimonies were broadcast against the kinds of films being exhibited, suggesting the kind of public struggle over cultural authority. One Methodist layman, A. H. Beardsley, attended the movies in the early thirties and found himself confused by what he viewed as Hollywood ’s religious worldviews. On the one hand, he found much to laud about the 1929 feature film Evangeline, with its portrait of a kindly, courageous priest. He judged an accompanying short comedy less favorably. Its amusing plot centered on an urban rescue mission, where samplers like “Remember, Jack, your mother is praying for you tonight” decorated the walls. Beardsley interpreted the scene as mocking religion, as when a “bad boy” passed around a large bottle of “lemonade” laced with glue to all the parishioners, so that everyone in the whole mission got their lips stuck together as they attempted to sing a hymn. In the accompanying newsreel, a Catholic priest was called to bless hunters and hounds before a fox hunt (at which the writer wondered, “Who blessed the fox?”). The Methodist who visited the moving picture that day found that religion had been positively portrayed in a heartfelt drama, satirized by the ridiculous scene of a puckered-lip congregation, and finally thrown to the dogs. He left the theater feeling fully betrayed.8 The critical discourse of conservative religious spectators during this era marks a cultural divide on the nature and purpose of movies. With such a chasm opening between Hollywood and Christian traditions, it is not surprising to see the emergence of an alternative film movement, an independent cottage industry of religious filmmakers making movies for...