Code breakers

A Harvard Film Archive series shows how wild movies could be before the Hollywood Production Code was enforced

Thomas Doherty is professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and author of "Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration" (Columbia University Press). He'll speak before Friday's pre-Code double bill. (Reuters)

Thomas Doherty is professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and author of "Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration" (Columbia University Press). He'll speak before Friday's pre-Code double bill.

Pre-Code Hollywood is the marquee name for a savory slice of motion picture history dating from (roughly) 1930 to (precisely) July 15, 1934, a privileged zone of relative screen freedom that saw trigger-happy gangsters, wisecracking dames, and subversive rebels running wild through the lawless territory of American cinema. To survey the titles is to take the temperature of the type: "Call Her Savage" (1932), where a frisky hottie brawls and cavorts; "Employee's Entrance" (1933), where a ruthless executive violates business ethics and female chastity at will; and "Wild Boys of the Road" (1933), where juveniles are understandably delinquent in a bleak Depression landscape.

Beginning Friday and running through the following Monday, the Harvard Film Archive will unveil a choice sampling of pre-Code transgressions, "Vice vs. Virtue in Pre-Code Hollywood." Besides a rare opportunity to see the films in their 35mm glory, the eye-opening program offers a startling glimpse into a road not taken by Hollywood cinema.

In 1934, capitulating to outraged moralists and government coercion, Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, empowered an in-house agency known as the Production Code Administration (PCA) to actually enforce the document the major studios had pledged to abide by in 1930: the Production Code, a severe set of motion picture commandments written by Martin J. Quigley, an influential publisher of Hollywood trade periodicals, and Father Daniel A. Lord, a media-savvy Jesuit priest. The PCA would snip and scrub studio system cinema until 1968, when the regime was replaced by the alphabet ratings system we know today.

Yet before the ax fell, Hollywood dedicated itself to profiting from the wages of sin. "Pre-Code films have an authenticity and daring that still has a strong appeal," says Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive. "Beyond just the signature wisecracks and sexual innuendo of films such as 'Call Her Savage' and 'Female,' I think it is the tremendous energy and unexpected power (often dealing with topical and sensitive issues) of the pre-Code cinema that still impresses audiences today."

The edgiest pre-Code films flashed the shield of Warner Bros., the studio that had its fingers closest to the pulse of the working-class (or no longer working) public. It specialized in slum-pent melodramas with low-rent characters - bootleggers, boxers, convicts, taxi drivers, waitresses, stenographers, and working girls plying the oldest of professions. Typical of the short and not-so-sweet programmers the studio churned out is "Blood Money" (1933), in which a shifty bail bondsman (George Bancroft) is as crooked as his clients, and "Two Seconds" (1932), in which Edward G. Robinson, strapped in an electric chair, remembers in flashback the murder that got him there.

With the nation's economy in free fall, businessmen made ripe targets for pre-Code brickbats. In "Employee's Entrance," the elegant, dastardly Warren William luxuriates in his role as a merciless efficiency expert determined to restore prosperity to his department store. (When a fired worker commits suicide, William, unimpressed, barks, "Send him a wreath!") Forced to choose between the unemployment line and the boss's bed, even the virtuous Loretta Young must barter her body for a pay envelope. In "Female" (1933) what's good for the gander is good for the goose: The usually strait-laced actress Ruth Chatterton lets down more than her hair as a predatory female executive who plies her comely male subordinates with vodka and then demands overtime.

Warner Bros. faced heavy competition in pre-Code prurience. Frantic for patrons, every studio risked a raid from the vice squad to lure moviegoers whose spending was no longer discretionary, who were sometimes choosing between food and film. Even MGM, the Tiffany studio with high-hat pretensions, bankrolled "Kongo" (1932), a surreal run through the jungle featuring Walter Huston as a demented ivory trader trafficking in voodoo, vengeance, drugs, and prostitution.

Over at the Paramount lot, the European flair that was the house style found plenty of room for risqué moves in "Girl Without a Room" (1933), a painterly tale of Impressionistic artist and realistic models set in Paris, and "Search for Beauty" (1934), an equally artful canvas for bared skin. Quickies aside, the studio's most lavish excursion into pre-Code territory was Cecil B. DeMille's sex-and-sandals epic "The Sign of the Cross" (1932), an extended toga party with Romans, Christians, lions, and lesbians colliding on the way to the forum. As ever, DeMille's lip service to Judeo-Christian theology never precludes a lurid immersion in the pageantry of idolatrous bacchanalia. "Religion triumphs over paganism," insisted Variety in 1932. "It's altogether a moral victory." Right.

Of all the pre-Code provocations, Fox's "Call Her Savage: (1932) may rack up the highest number of affronts to common decency. Clara Bow, the Jazz Age's iconic "It" girl, still packing plenty of the antecedent in the early sound era, sizzles as a red-blooded hellion who struts about in her undies, cat fights at her debutante ball, and - in a sequence that can still make jaws drop - frolics at a decadent Greenwich Village restaurant where a pair of flamboyantly gay waiters serenade the rowdy customers.

Though later lauded for its frank sexuality and bared skin, pre-Code Hollywood was driven as much by economics as erotics. Scarred by the beaten-down quality of the harshest years of the Depression, the films careen through a universe cut loose from sure moorings. Where the silent screen of the '20s reveled in tweaking Victorian decorum with the antics of wild youth and dancing daughters, the pre-Code screen bespeaks more than a generational spat over manners and morals, bobbed hair and bathtub gin. In its most radical guise, pre-Code Hollywood denied the bedrock verities of American culture, knocking down the pillars of Christian justice, capitalist progress, and constitutional democracy.

Consider one of pre-Code Hollywood's most wrenching expressions of Depression-bred desperation, "Wild Boys of the Road" (1933). Directed by William "Wild Bill" Wellman, whose "The Public Enemy" (1931) helped launch the gangster genre, the grim road movie tracks the wanderings of a trio of ragtag adolescents who run away from home rather than burden their families with another mouth to feed. Wellman's unblinking depiction of an American frontier now defined by Hoovervilles and bread lines undercuts any hope offered by the last-second entry of the New Deal. "Is the youth of the land hitchhiking to Hell?" asked the taglines.

Needless to say, Hollywood's brazen commandment-breaking put bluenoses from coast to coast seriously out of joint. In 1934, livid that the moguls who had gone to confession in 1930 had refused to do sincere penance, American Catholics formed the Legion of Decency to boycott the vile exports spewing from the Sodom on the Pacific. Catholics of a certain age may remember reciting the "Legion pledge" in parochial school or at Sunday Mass. "I condemn absolutely those debauching motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land," affirmed the pledger. "Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality." To encourage compliance, priests stood vigil outside neighborhood theaters, eyeing parishioners contemplating a matinee with Mae West.

The campaign to convert Hollywood was joined by a powerful ally, a man ever-mindful of the importance of Catholics to his New Deal coalition: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, lately elected on a program of activist government and regulatory reform. FDR sent out word that unless Hollywood censored itself Washington would do the job for it.

The sheriff recruited to clean up the town was a prominent Catholic layman named Joseph I. Breen. Born in Philadelphia in 1888, the Jesuit-educated Breen embodied the stern Irish Victorian cast of his tribe and time. From July 15, 1934, the day he set up shop, until his retirement, in 1954, he held American cinema to the Code's strict catechism of thou-shalt-nots. He vetted story lines, blue-penciled dialogue, and exercised the moral equivalent of final cut over hundreds of motion pictures per year - expensive "A" caliber feature films, low-budget B-unit ephemera, short subjects, previews of coming attractions, even cartoons. Breen's imprimatur was a quite literal Code Seal of approval: an oval stamp bearing the initials of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, usually embossed in the lower left-hand corner of the title credits. The "pre-Code Hollywood" label is thus something of a misnomer; a more accurate term would be "pre-Production Code enforcement" or better, "pre-Breen."

But by whatever name, some of the most innovative, insurrectionist, and just plain whacked-out films in Hollywood history managed to jump through the four-year window of opportunity. The selection screened by the Harvard Film Archive is a reminder of what an alternative motion picture universe might have looked like - a Hollywood Golden Age untarnished by the censor's hands.