Mark A. Vieira,
Sin in Soft Focus Pre-Code Hollywood.
New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999.
ISBN 0810944758 (cloth)
240pp
A$75.00

(Review copy supplied by Thames and Hudson (Australia) Pty Ltd)

Uploaded 1 November 2000
Mark A. Vieira’s Sin in Soft Focus traces a period of profound destabilisation in Hollywood during the early 1930s. It presents an historical account of this volatile period illustrated by a collection of wonderful black and white images of excess and depravity, undercut by a sensual soft focus. Organised chronologically, this book investigates a spurt of creative, often lascivious and outrageous films produced between 1930 and 1934, a period of ‘self-regulated’ censorship.

In pre-code films directors, scriptwriters and cinematographers used their skills creatively to avoid censorship. Consequently these films deploy inference and metaphor rather than an unveiled exhibition. Other films, usually starring Jean Harlow, were blatantly outrageous. Vieira notes that Mae West evaded censorship by using decoys. She deliberately planted excessive material into her scripts, scenes that she had no intention of keeping and were written to attract disapproval. Distracting the censors enabled the rest of her film to remain intact(195).

The text documents the implementation of a formal system of American film censorship by tracing the development of self regulation, through its corruption and eventual demise, obliging the acceptance of a code of censorship enforced by the Hays Office in 1934. Vieira’s approach focuses on the production of cycles of scandalous films, including ‘”vice films”, “social problem films”, “fallen women films” and the “kept woman” cycle. He also examines sensational genres like Universal’s horror films and the gangster films infamously emerging from the Warner Brothers studio. The vitriol of the negotiations is illustrated with Jason Joy’s attempted censure of Howard Hughes, insisting that the American public found mobsters “repugnant”. Hughes responded by sending a memo to his director Howard Hawks saying, “Screw the Hays Office, start the picture and make it as realistic, as exciting, as grisly as possible.” (69)

Vieira examines the volatility of this period, exposing the allegiances of the Production Code Administration. He reveals that Joseph Breen (who eventually presided over the PCA) convinced Cardinal Dougherty that a boycott of films in Philadelphia might pressure the studios to accept The Production Code. Three million Catholics took a pledge to protest the release of pre-code films, often blindly. Furthermore they were charged with identifying any other stray Catholics attending the films. The film industry was also threatened by The Federal Council of Churches who had twenty-two million members willing to join the Legion of Decency if the studios continued to produce “immoral films”. Drastically financially depleted, the studios were forced to agree to the institution of a formal policy and procedure for censorship. Although The Production Code was written in 1930, it was not fully implemented until the wake of the 1934 boycott.

Vieira draws from studio memos, letters and historical documents, and his research was facilitated with the re-release of a collection of pre-Code films. This book marks a resurgence of interest in pre-Code films, joining a wave of recent publications including Lea Jacobs’ lucid analysis of the subversive “fallen women films”, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film 1928-1942 and Thomas Doherty’s study of the era in Pre-code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. Vieira’s book distinguishes itself by its dual historic and aesthetic focus.
Vieira expresses a nostalgia for the images, dialogue and attitude of the pre-Code films. His book reinstates these ephemeral images, celebrating the audacity of the period by presenting two hundred and seventy-five black and white images, mostly laden with controversy.

His catalogue of breathtaking photographs provides a mesmerising survey of pre-Code images. This book depicts the brilliance of Joseph von Sternberg and his cinematographer Lee Garmes who glamorise Marlene Dietrich as a woman with a dark past in Morocco (1930). But Vieira also includes still shots and studio portraits, some of which appear dream-like or hallucinatory in their soft focus. One of the most excessive and disarming of all images shows Bessie Love, her body partially obscured by the doorway of the shadowy set in Human Wreckage (1923), a film that was a casualty of censorship. She is lit with a key light from above and to her right illuminating her ritual as she inserts a needle into the vein of her luminous arm. In the foreground Mrs Wallace Reid cradles her baby, averting the child’s eyes as hers remain transfixed on the illicit action in the background. The child’s face is the other point of illumination in this shot, the infant’s startled expression probably reflecting a similar sensation in the audience.
Whilst it bears the dimensions and design of a coffee table book, the text contributes an extensive historical context for the photographs, a dual focus that is both breathtaking and fascinating.

Wendy Haslem.

References:

Thomas Doherty, Pre-code Hollywood : Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999.
Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film 1928-1942, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.