The process of repression is not to be regarded as something which takes place once for all, the results of which are permanent, as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead; on the contrary, repression demands a constant expenditure ofenergy, and if this were discontinued the success of the repression would be jeopardized, so that a fresh act of repression would be necessary. — Sigmund Freud [1]
Mr. Breen goes to the bathroom every morning. He does not deny that he does so or that there is such a place as the bathroom, but he feels that neither his actions nor the bathroom are fit subjects for screen entertainment. This is the essence of the Hays office attitude towards prostitution, at least as Joe told it to me in somewhat cruder language. — Val Lewton to David O. Selznick, 4 April 1939 [2]
In September 1931 Joseph I. Breen was new to the “Hays Office” of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and not as convinced as he was later to become about the propriety of keeping prostitution off the screen. In that month he contacted his friend Father FitzGeorge Dinneen in Chicago about a problem the office was encountering with a Universal release, Waterloo Bridge (1931). A film about the redemption of a prostitute, it had been passed by the industry watchdog body, properly known then as the Studio Relations office, as being eminently in keeping with the spirit and letter of the newly adopted Production Code. In a telegram to Will H. Hays, president of the MPPDA, office head Colonel Jason Joy had argued:
quote waterloo bridge unquote is a story of regeneration stop it deals with a prostitute who sacrifices her future happiness because she feels that her past makes her unworthy of the boy who wants to marry her and whom she loves stop there is increased sympathy for the girl because she is essentially fine truthful and honest stop no brief is held for her mode of existence stop she knows it would be wrong and forsakes it stop but her previous profession has made her an outcast a fact which she realises and for which she ultimately pays with her life rather than bring unhappiness to the boy whom she loves stop goodness and the happiness which come as a result of following the correct standards of life are stressed from the beginning stop it is amply shown that only grief and unhappiness can come as a result of immorality [3]
But now the Chicago censors — attached to the Police Department, and with a reputation as among the most scissor-happy of local authorities — were making substantial cuts to the film, and Universal had requested the Studio Relations office to intercede.
A Jesuit priest, FitzGeorge Dinneen was an adviser to the Chicago censor board and supporter of the Production Code — in fact it was he who had suggested Father Daniel Lord, S.J., as the man to draft it. At Breen’s request, Dinneen contested the board’s excision of images of prostitution in Waterloo Bridge. His position was in line with that of Father Lord, who in presenting his “Working Principles” to the industry the previous year had contended:
The showing of a murder, the showing of arson, the showing of a prostitute, the showing of all of those is absolutely not at all wrong… not if the audience always recognizes at all stages of the film that they are murder, that they are arson, that it is prostitution, and that the thing they are doing is wrong. [4]
But Dinneen failed to convince the censors. The board wrote to him:
The several cuts to which objection is made, all had clear reference to prostitution which is a subject that neither our Ordinance nor Commissioner Alcock permits us to leave in pictures whether for an adult or a general permit. It is a clear violation of all our standards and also, we had understood, a violation of the underlying purpose of your Code.
Dinneen was troubled by the experience, confessing to Breen: “My efforts as an intermediary have not been very successful, but I did what I could without being inconsistent. It seems to me that this problem grows more complex and baffling with time and developments.” [5]
The problem was that the Code itself, adopted by the MPPDA in March 1930, did not specify precisely how motion pictures should deal with prostitution. White slavery, along with illegal drug traffic, “sex perversion”, miscegenation, sex hygiene, and scenes of actual childbirth, was banned outright, but other forms of prostitution (“The sale of women, or a woman selling her virtue”) were lumped in with hangings and electrocutions, third degree methods, brutality, branding, cruelty to children or animals, and surgical operations as “repellent subjects” to be “treated within the careful limits of good taste”. The difficulty of defining in what respects the representation of a prostitute could be considered in good taste — of resolving what we might call the Dinneen dilemma — was such that within a very few years the Hays Office had decided that no representation would be permitted at all. (One of the very few films which managed to sneak around this ban in years to come was, interestingly, the 1940 remake of Waterloo Bridge.)
When controls on the content of motion pictures in the United States were first mooted, the subject of prostitution (and sexual conduct in general) was conspicuous by its absence. Eileen Bowser notes:
By the beginning of 1909, The moving picture world would propose the following as subjects to be barred from the screen: the inside of prisons, convicts, and police stations, considered to be too morbid; contemporary sensational crime; anything to offend any religion; lingering over murders and executions; piling horrors upon horrors; comedies that depended on the degradation of people or their defects. [6]
The National Board of Censorship, a voluntary body established that year with the industry’s support as a prophylactic measure against legal regulation, did not at first come under any public pressure to establish guidelines in the area of prostitution. It was only with the release in 1913 of two very popular and controversial white slave films — Traffic in souls and The inside of the white slave traffic — that it was forced to take a stand. In what Charles Matthew Feldman, historian of the Board, has described as “a rather brash statement for the times,” it declared that it would pass films “which presented the prostitution problem in a sincere dramatic manner and attempted to offer a sensible method of repression or made an effort to reform the prostitute”. [7]
Support for such a position was divided. Shelley Stamp Lindsey argues that “there was considerable discord in both the reform movement and the film industry regarding the wisdom of engaging cinema in social issues like prostitution”:
An editorial in reform-minded magazine The Outlook advocating the use of “intensely democratic” media like cinema as “purveyors of social information” on white slavery was unequivocally denounced by its readers, who complained that the very democratic constituency of movie audiences rendered the medium an unsuitable vehicle for social change. [8]
States began to pass their own film censorship laws (Pennsylvania in 1912, Ohio and Kansas in 1913), and the question of sexual thematics and their representation was now very much to the fore. In its annual report for 1913, the National Board of Censorship made its first full declaration of the standards it applied. Outlawed were “obscenity in all its forms” and “vulgarity when it offends or when it verges toward indecency,” while the Board, as quoted in Feldman (64-5), stated that it “feels in general that it is right in forbidding scenes or films which, because of elements frequently very subtle which they contain, have a deteriorating tendency on the basic moralities or necessary social standards”. Nevertheless there was still no explicit reference to prostitution, despite the clamour which was beginning to arise as the white slave genre took hold of the public imagination.
When Alice Guy (Blaché) showed her white slave film The lure to the Board in 1914, a certain confusion was evident. The committee, “composed on that day of two old ladies and a churchman,” decided to ban the film. Guy appealed, and this time, as she recounts, twenty to twenty-five people sat in judgement.
The chairman requested me to defend my film. I replied that I had no idea what the objections of the jury were. So the chairman asked someone to speak. A young woman got up. “The subject was offensive,” she said, “I believe that only a woman could have treated it with such delicacy. In my opinion Madame Blaché has done very well.” And the film was passed unanimously. [9]
Hoping to ward off any further inroads on the freedom of the screen, the industry in 1914 mounted a massive campaign against censorship; and as Kevin Brownlow relates, “to the dismay of social workers, women’s clubs, and church groups, the Board supported the drive.” [10] From this point the power of this liberal-minded body (which became the National Board of Review in 1915) began to wane as demands for tighter controls on movie content became ever more strident. In 1916 a continued outpouring of white slave films forced the issue.
When Is any girl safe? (1916) opened in September, it did record business, but the Commissioner of Licenses of New York City threatened to revoke the licence of the exhibitor. In the court hearing which followed, the Board came under attack from the Commissioner for having passed the film:
It seems to me that in approving this picture with certain eliminations the National Board of Review is again drifting back into the position in which it found itself a year or so ago, when it seemed totally unable to deal with objectionable pictures presented to it. It ought to be clear to any thinking man that we are now at the beginning of a time in which many attempts to produce “white slave” pictures will be made. Nearly every person who has studied the effect of such pictures on audiences knows that they do not teach great moral lessons, but, on the contrary, have a thoroughly bad effect. [11]
Despite the fact that the film used a minister speaking from the pulpit to narrate its story of women being sold into white slavery, and was released by the Anti-Vice Motion Picture Company with the approval, purportedly, of “the Reverend C. H. Parkhurst, Lieutenant Costigan, the head of the Vice Squad of the New York police, and twenty ministers,” the Commissioner was able to line up an impressive array of reformers and religious authorities on his side to condemn it. [12]
The moving picture world took the opportunity to excoriate the producers of white slave films and the like which “bring discredit on the industry and provoke the danger of hostile legislation”; as an industry publication it was “doing its share toward the suppression of this detestable stuff in consistently denying it admission to its pages.”
Here is an evil which must be killed within the industry and by the men who have the welfare of the industry at heart. From what we have seen of these disgusting films at press exhibitions they largely portray scenes and incidents supposed to have occurred in houses of prostitution. It will be remembered that two men were convicted in this city of maintaining a lewd and obscene exhibition solely on evidence that their picture showed the interior of a house of ill fame. There is no doubt whatever that the exhibition of such scenes is a misdemeanour at common law and that a warrant will issue against any person responsible for such an exhibition. [13]
Approvingly quoting an editorial in the New York globe which stated that “producers of pictures are short-sighted indeed if they cannot see the result of tolerating corrupting films,” The moving picture world concluded:
Releasing such films under the guise of anti-vice or moral uplift societies or companies is a farce and an insult to ordinary intelligence. We-need-the-money is the real object or correct title and the one that will eventually mean less money for all concerned. [14]
That the National Board of Review’s tolerant stance was no longer tenable was now clear. The Board conducted a survey amongst theatre managers, who “almost without exception” reported that “the great majority of their patrons are entirely opposed” to white slave pictures. It declared in December:
This is conclusive evidence of a well-defined sentiment throughout the country repudiating the so-called “white slave” film. Newspaper clippings, letters and official communications constantly reaching the National Board make this fact undeniable. Public opinion has crystallised upon this point. It demands that “White Slave” as a theme for commercial exploitation on the motion picture screen be no longer used.
Accordingly the Board announced that it would refuse to pass such films –but this ban would not apply to “strictly propaganda pictures produced obviously for social betterment and exhibited in a way compatible with that purpose.” [15] Fifteen years before Dinneen and Waterloo Bridge, the dilemma of the moral representation of prostitution — here of the coercive kind — had been struck and resolved, as it was to be later, in favour of repression.
Despite buckling to the pressure in adopting the tougher line, the National Board of Review was to have a diminishing influence over movie content in the years ahead. To take its place as a bulwark against the menace of municipal, state and federal censorship, leading studios established in 1916 the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI).
NAMPI’s ability (or willingness) to stem the flow of white slavery pictures seems to have been less than total, since in the years 1917-20 a number of major entries in the genre achieved apparently unhindered release, including Little lost sister, Sold at auction, Her moment/Why blame me?, The knife, The struggle everlasting, My little sister, and The money-changers. But several significant filmic studies of prostitution in this period did provoke censorship battles.
The eternal Magdalene (1917) depicted a moral crusader intent on driving prostitutes from his town learning compassion when Mary Magdalene appears to him in a dream; it met with opposition from censors in Pennsylvania and Chicago and was not finally released until 1919. Based on the anti-vice campaign which led to the closing down of the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, The finger of justice (1918) was an exposé of urban corruption, showing a red-light district flourishing with the patronage of a political boss. The reaction of authorities across the nation was intriguingly mixed. Though endorsed by the Superintendent of Police in Washington, D.C., and by the Mayor of Seattle, the film was banned in Maryland, New York, and Chicago, where the chief of police declared that he would refuse a permit because Chicago was a clean city with no organised vice and required no lessons of the kind taught in the film.[16]
Fit to fight (1918) was produced for the US Public Health Service as a warning about the dangers of venereal disease. The story involves five young men drafted into the army, two of whom contract syphilis after consorting with prostitutes. After the war the film was re-released as Fit to win, with NAMPI attempting to prohibit its commercial distribution and exhibition. In New York City the film was at first banned. After a court challenge the ban was revoked on condition that two scenes were removed — “the bawdy house ‘flashes’ and those wherein police protection is alleged to shelter such dens”. An appeal court subsequently overturned this decision, and the ban was re-imposed. [17]
Public dissatisfaction with the lax morals of Hollywood (on-screen and off) came to a head in 1921, a year of notorious scandals, when renewed pressure for stricter controls on movie content led to the introduction of almost a hundred censorship bills in thirty-seven states. To head off the tide, film industry representatives prevailed on Postmaster General Will H. Hays to preside over a new body, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which would supersede NAMPI. Hays, a leading Republican and elder of the Presbyterian Church, took office in March 1922, and immediately set about soothing public sensibilities. Promoting a “gentlemen’s agreement” in the industry, he called on producers to abide by a code of thirteen points, which were intended to eliminate pictures which, among other things, “dealt with sex in an improper manner”, “were based on white slavery”, or “made vice attractive”. [18]
This code lacked any means of interpretation or enforcement until 1924, when Hays introduced the “Formula”, placing a moral obligation on MPPDA members to notify his office regarding pre-existing story material of a questionable nature which was under consideration for adaptation. A ban could then be put in place. Within several years Hays was claiming that “more than a hundred and fifty books and plays, including some of the best sellers and stage successes, have thus been kept from the screen.” [19] This was nonetheless a comparatively lenient form of self-censorship, compliance with which was voluntary and which did not apply to original screenplays. (It also had no direct impact on production by non-members of the association, which comprised 20% or more of total feature output.) In response to continued reformist pressure Hays strengthened the Formula in 1927 by introducing the so-called “Don’ts and Be Carefuls”. Based on the original thirteen points, these comprised eleven topics which MPPDA members specifically agreed to avoid — including white slavery — and twenty-six others — including “the sale of women, or a woman selling her virtue” — which were to be treated with special care, “to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized.” [20]
On rare occasions an MPPDA ban could be sidestepped. A notorious case of this occurred with Gloria Swanson’s production of Sadie Thompson (1928), in which she plays a prostitute who is the cause of the downfall of a puritanical reformer in Samoa. Swanson got around Hays and the furious producer members of the association by basing her screenplay technically not on the hit play Rain, which was on the taboo list, but on the original W. Somerset Maugham story from which the play was derived. Though censorship concerns would primarily have centred on the character of the reformer (a minister in the original — the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” outlawed “ridicule of the clergy”), the fact that it was a prostitute who awakened his carnal desires in the struggle to save her soul would have signalled scandal to the moral guardians of the screen. The producers were forced to make concessions — the exact nature of Sadie’s shady past life in San Francisco was left open — and the film’s release was delayed while Hays Office inspectors minutely scrutinized the picture. But it became a box-office success. (Swanson had a less felicitous experience on her next production, Queen Kelly: when she discovered the director, Erich von Stroheim, was shooting scenes in an African brothel which would be censorable, she stopped production, and the film was never commercially released in the United States.) [21]
Under the combined influence of industry self-regulation and state and municipal censorship regimes during the 1920s there was a considerable diminution in films dealing with white slavery (it may also have been that with the closing down of red-light districts the subject was no longer topical). But there was no blanket taboo in force against the depiction of non-coercive prostitution, and a number of major stars did play prostitutes on the screen in this period, including Pauline Frederick (Madame X, 1920), Blanche Sweet (Anna Christie, 1923), Enid Bennett (The Red Lily, 1924), Dorothy Mackaill (The painted lady, 1924), Norma Talmadge (The lady, 1925), Dolores Del Rio (Resurrection, 1927), Lillian Gish (The enemy, 1927), Janet Gaynor (Seventh heaven, 1927), Mary Astor (Romance of the underworld, 1928), and Betty Compson (The docks of New York, 1928).
Details of the prostitute’s work were not, of course, explicitly presented, and euphemism was sometimes employed: Brownlow (20-1) gives the instance of the shot of a woman dusting foot powder into her shoes to signify that she is a streetwalker. However, there was usually little doubt about the true nature of the woman’s profession. Anna Christie says: “I was in a house, that’s what! The kind sailors like you goes to in port.” The stoker in Docks of New York puts banknotes on the bedside table after spending a night with his “bride”. This would change with the advent of the Production Code in 1930, and particularly after the implementation of a stricter enforcement regime in 1934.
At first the impact of the Code was to make it more difficult for prostitutes to be firmly identified as such. In Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (1932), for example, direct references to soliciting were dropped at the scripting stage, in deference to concerns expressed by the Studio Relations office. As a result the actions of the provocatively-attired Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) in luring the detective who is on her trail up to her room become ambiguous: she might be playing an elaborate practical joke, a masquerade, to make fun of this “Sherlock Holmes”. The fact that she can’t be pinned down is important, a facet of her construction as elusive object, enigma. She slips from our grasp, just as she earlier slips out of reach of Detective Wilson in Baton Rouge, Savannah and other points south. Lea Jacobs, in her study of the influence of 1930s Production Code censorship on the representation of women who transgress sexual norms, argues that the process of negotiation over what was allowable here suited Sternberg:
The director demonstrated a decided proclivity for indirect modes of representation, and in particular for highly elliptical presentations of the action, which was largely complicit with the Studio Relations Committee’s strategy for dealing with offensive detail. [22]
The strategy led to greater suggestiveness and innuendo. In Red dust (1932) Jean Harlow plays a woman who comes up river from Saigon to get away from a little trouble with the gendarmes, and has to stop over at a rubber plantation run by Clark Gable. Quickly slipping into a flimsy fur-trimmed robe, she intimates that the nocturnal temperature isn’t going to worry her: “Guess I’m not used to sleeping nights anyway.” The next morning, when her host offers to pay her, she demurs, saying “This wasn’t like that” — and allows him to tuck some money down her front anyway. Lady Lou of She done him wrong (1933) is no longer explicitly the Bowery prostitute of Mae West’s original play, Diamond Lil, but she is still — in her own words — “one of the finest women ever walked the streets.” Paramount played on the ambiguity by publicizing the film, as quoted in Muscio (35), as the “hilarious ribald story of a gal whose intentions were strictly commercial”. The Hays Office insisted that Miss Reba’s establishment in The story of Temple Drake (1933), based on Faulkner’s Sanctuary, be portrayed as a boarding-house, but in the film the place was crowded with nude statuary and Temple (Miriam Hopkins), so the angered censors declared, was “attired as a lady of the evening.” (They were successful in having the producers remove a shot panning over a rack of men’s hats.) [23]
The Studio Relations executives were only too aware that in a state of financial crisis caused by the Depression the studios were pushing the sex limits hard in a bid for audiences. In his Annual Report for 1932, quoted in Muscio (35), its then head James Wingate wrote:
Recently there has been some criticism to the effect that writers and directors are becoming adept in getting over by suggestion what the Code prohibits actually showing on the screen. It has been stated that while the scenes presented contain nothing actually offensive, they nevertheless are portrayed in such a way as to allow the audience to do its own imagining from that point onward.
A case in point was Baby Face, released the following year. Its story was that of a golddigger (played by Barbara Stanwyck) who uses her body to rise from a sordid steel-town speakeasy background to wealth and prominence as wife of a New York banker. Numerous negotiations between Wingate’s office and Warner Bros., the producers, at scripting stage resulted in the details of her sexual transactions being elided; nevertheless the film was still rejected by the New York state board of censors, which argued, as quoted in Jacobs (74), that “the story as a whole and the philosophy back of it contravened the New York statute.” Further revisions were made before the film was given general release, but even then Variety commented: “Anything hotter than this for public showing would call for an asbestos audience blanket.” [24]
Baby Face was one of a group of films released in the 1932-33 period, including the Harlow vehicles Red dust, Red-headed woman and Bombshell and Mae West’s She done him wrong and I’m no angel, which portrayed a sexually independent woman, and in doing so aroused the wrath of religious groups in the United States. As Robertson recounts (151), the Roman Catholic hierarchy in particular was incensed: the presidential address to the National Council of Catholic Women in October 1933 warned that movies were “a menace to the physical, mental and moral welfare of the nation.” Leff and Simmons note (42-3) that the Episcopal Committee on Motion Pictures was formed in November in response to an address by Archbishop Amleto Cicognani, who had declared that “Catholics are called by God, the Pope, the Bishops and the priests to a united and vigorous campaign for the purification of the cinema.”
The upshot, after intensive organisational efforts in which Joseph Breen, Catholic layman and Hays Office employee, was heavily involved, was the establishment in April 1934 by the Catholic bishops’ committee of the Legion of Decency. The nation’s Catholics were invited to sign a pledge to join in the condemnation of “vile and unwholesome” motion pictures. Catholics comprised twenty per cent of the population (and also, of course, a much higher percentage in some major export markets), and the Legion’s decision to call for a boycott of films which did not gain its stamp of approval constituted a major threat to the financial viability of the industry.
The MPPD’s reaction was to give the Studio Relations office some teeth. In June 1934 it was renamed the Production Code Administration, with Breen appointed as its head. Any MPPDA member who released a film without a PCA certificate — the seal of approval confirming that the film conformed to the Code — could be fined up to $25,000. In addition to vetting scripts in development (which had been obligatorily submitted since 1931) and edited films, the PCA would have the power to examine original source material (novels, plays, etc.) and veto the production of adaptations it considered likely to violate the provisions of the Code.
Meanwhile millions of Catholics took up the Legion of Decency’s call and pledged to “condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which . . . are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land,” or in the less colourful language of the version adopted in November 1934, promised to “do all that I can to strengthen public opinion against the production of indecent and immoral films” and to “stay away altogether from places of amusement which show them as a matter of policy.” [25]
The Legion brought in its own rating system –“A” for unobjectionable, “B” for objectionable in part, and “C” for condemned — and in practice any movie gaining a C rating was most unlikely to have been granted a PCA certificate. [26] As a pressure group ensuring that the industry’s self-regulatory body could not become lax in its interpretation and enforcement of the Code, the Legion of Decency was to prove extremely successful, imprinting its mark on the American cinema for decades to come.
Sometime during the course of the renewed agitation against the corrupting effects of motion pictures and the tightening up of pre-censorship provisions, the Hays Office must have begun to take the view that prostitution was simply too dangerous a topic for representation on the screen, no matter in what light it was shown or what degree of circumspection was applied. This may have been partly in response to the morals campaign, but it was also clearly part of an attempt to avoid difficulties with local censorship authorities further down the line. The Chicago police department had shown its hand in the Waterloo Bridge case; the New York state board of censors blocked Baby Face; and The story of Temple Drake was banned or heavily cut in Pennsylvania and Ohio and, abroad, in the UK, the Netherlands, Latvia, India, Australia and Trinidad. [27] Many censorship authorities were signalling to Breen and his team that they would not permit any hint of prostitution at all. Advising Pandro S. Berman of RKO on Of human bondage (1934), for example, Breen wrote: “Some censor boards may delete the shot in which Mildred is seen attempting to pick up a man in front of the shop window. It has been our experience that any action of this type is pretty generally deleted, and we suggest you protect yourself on it.” Berman took the advice — unsurprisingly, given that Breen’s office would shortly have the power to withhold the PCA Certificate the film required.[28]
A clear indication of the tougher line the PCA would take with prostitution is the decision it took in 1934 with regard to the rerelease of pictures which had previously been passed. Leff and Simmons (59) describe how The story of Temple Drake, Baby Face and She done him wrong were among films which were ordered withdrawn immediately, never to be rereleased. Later, the PCA Office turned down applications for the reissue of The sin of Madelon Claudet (1931), Bondage (1933), and Mandalay (1934), all on grounds related to their depiction of sex for monetary gain. [29]
For over two decades, Hays Office correspondence and memos of meetings with studio representatives reiterated with monotonous regularity the theme that prostitution could not be shown, or even suggested, despite the fact that nowhere in the Code itself was this actually stipulated. The following are typical comments: “Ruby is no longer a prostitute or ex-prostitute” (Belle of the nineties, 1934); “In order to make this story acceptable under the provisions of the Production Code, and to escape serious mutilation, if not rejection, at the hands of political censor boards, it is imperative that you establish it quite clearly that the girls, Mary, Emmy Lou, et al. are merely hostesses in a night club and not, by any stretch of the imagination, prostitutes” (Marked woman, 1937); “This scene 129, as written, seems to us to be definitely a scene of prostitutes soliciting, and hence unacceptable” (Waterloo Bridge, 1940); “Care will be needed with the characterisation of the girl Ivy to avoid characterising her as a prostitute” (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1941); “Generally speaking, it would be necessary to change the characterizations of Yvonne and Lulu from prostitutes to something else” (Scarlet Street, 1945); “It is our thought that it might be possible to tell this story if you were to establish it early that Alicia is, possibly, a lady who lives by her wits — a gold-digger, perhaps, but not specifically a prostitute” (Notorious, 1946); “Mr Edelman . . . understands that it will be necessary to remove all references to prostitution” (Flamingo Road, 1949); “We feel that the girls could be characterised as B-girls, but it should be quite clearly and affirmatively established that they are not prostitutes” (From here to eternity, 1953); “The essence of the discussion consisted in our emphasis once more that Sadie should not be a prostitute” (Miss Sadie Thompson, 1953); “Any scene suggestive of prostitution could not be approved under the Code” (East of Eden, 1954); “Certain further changes and emendations will be necessary, if the finished picture is to be approvable under the Code as not dealing with prostitution and white slavery” (The revolt of Mamie Stover, 1956); “In order to avoid the impression that these girls act as ‘call girls’ we suggest that Moore’s line ‘After that you’re on your own’ be omitted” (Party girl, 1958). [30]
Likewise, the identification of a locale as a brothel was prohibited, and here the Production Code was more specific. It stated:
Certain places are so closely and thoroughly associated with sexual life or with sexual sin that their use must be carefully limited.
(1) Brothels and houses of ill-fame, no matter of what country, are not proper locations for drama. They suggest to the average person at once sex sin, or they excite an unwholesome and morbid curiosity in the minds of youth. . . . [31]
The Studio Relations office had already battled with producers over the representation of a bordello in The story of Temple Drake. In Citizen Kane (1941), the newspaper party was to have continued at a high-class brothel: the PCA objected, Welles shot the scene anyway in defiance, but it was not included in the final cut.[32] The issue was raised again in the case of Flamingo Road (“It will, of course, be absolutely essential that, in the finished picture, Lute-Mae’s place be free of any possible suggestion of being a brothel or house of assignation”), From here to eternity (“As we explained the other day, we feel that this club has all the appearances of a house of prostitution”), East of Eden (“This unacceptable material has to do with the various scenes laid in a brothel”), The revolt of Mamie Stover (“We think that the two or three scenes of servicemen cueing [sic] up to get into the ‘Bungalow’ will lend an unconvincing flavour to our protestations that this is not a brothel”), and Sanctuary (1961), a remake of The story of Temple Drake (“A good portion of the sequences takes place in a house of prostitution. There is no equivocation about the setting. It is clearly identified as such. This will have to be changed so as to make the house something else, and in a legitimate sort of way.”) [33] Breen was tenacious in upholding the brothel ban, and fought (and won) a much-publicised battle over a brief scene in the Italian film The bicycle thief (1949), refusing to grant the import a certificate [34].
A few years later, Elia Kazan argued strenuously for the retention of brothel scenes in East of Eden, fashioning them in the unappealing way which he believed would be acceptable to the PCA:
As we have treated the brothel scenes in the present script, we have made the brothel dismal, unattractive and not at all glamorous. This is what I understood was desired. The house is dingy, the girls unattractive and the whole set-up one that is repellent. If now we change the brothel so that it is just part of a “club” where there is drinking, gambling, dancing, pretty girls etc. the whole moral intention is changed. It becomes an exciting place to go to. It becomes “immoral” rather than an honest, straightforward picture of how dingy and disgusting a brothel really is.[35]
This plea did not wash with the censors, who conceded that Kazan’s arguments were “impressive” and “plausible”, but only “if one were talking about a stage play or some other medium besides the movies.” The brothel scenes had to go.[36]
The PCA remained anxious to ensure that the act of repression in cases like this left no trace to be deciphered by an alert audience. In 1935 it insisted that a shot of falling rain on a door be deleted from The Devil is a woman because, the censors claimed, it signified prostitution. [37] Words which might hint at the tabooed topic, including “broad”, “Madam (relating to prostitution)”, “slut (applied to a woman)”, “tart” and “whore”, were explicitly banned in a 1939 amendment to the Production Code.
Curiously, Breen and his men very occasionally relented and did allow a character to be openly identified as a prostitute. This was the case, for example, with the 1940 remake of Waterloo Bridge, in which the office agreed that “the lead, one of her associates, and a third girl, could be prostitutes,” on condition that “there would be no details of the business of prostitution.” [38] But such exceptions were extremely rare. For nearly forty years after the adoption of the Code and the creation of the Production Code Administration to implement it, prostitutes and their place of business were effectively banished from the American cinema.
In their place were singers, dancers, dress models, nightclub hostesses, chorus girls, “B-girls”, “party girls”, virtuous strippers. They frequented bars, saloons, roadhouses, gambling dens. You might suspect, from the way they dressed and carried on, what these women were “really” up to (“a reasonable doubt is left with the customers as to just what Anna is doing while patrolling those Brooklyn waterfront streets,” wrote Variety of the 1949 Anna Lucasta ), [39] but such suspicions could never be confirmed — indeed, writers and directors often went to great lengths to confound spectators confident they had cracked the disguise. As late as 1960 with Butterfield 8, a female protagonist might have the film named after her phone number, and still elude all audience attempts to pin her down as a call girl (the opening scene in which Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria wakes alone in a man’s apartment and indignantly rejects the $250 which has been left for her is celebrated).
Sustaining the fiction that prostitution didn’t exist took a heavy dramatic toll. Many films derived from novels and plays featuring prostitute characters were watered down in their adaptation for the screen, including Of human bondage, Nana (1934), The bride wore red (1937), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Scarlet Street, Flamingo Road, Anna Lucasta (1949 and 1958), Miss Sadie Thompson, From here to eternity, East of Eden, Gaby (the 1956 remake of Waterloo Bridge), and The revolt of Mamie Stover (1956). Marked woman, an exposé of the involvement of organised crime in controlling prostitution (based on the 1936 conviction on vice charges of New York mob boss “Lucky” Luciano on the testimony of prostitutes who had worked for him) was reduced to incoherence when the racket was switched to crooked gambling, the crime to murder, and the prostitutes to “nightclub hostesses”. From here to eternity and The revolt of Mamie Stover both portrayed women making remarkably good money (and developing a surely unjustified guilty conscience about it) by offering US servicemen polite conversation and nothing else at their highly respectable (and unbelievably popular) Honolulu nightspots prior to and during World War II. Unless a dramatic advantage was to be gained from adding to the mystery of the female character, as with Marlene Dietrich, performances also suffered from the censorship regime: Parish, for example, observes (291) that Rita Hayworth in Miss Sadie Thompson “looks alternately bewildered and indifferent, walking through her paces, but unsure whether she is playing a hard-as-nails prostitute or, as her character claims, merely a songstress entertainer from Hawaii’s Emerald Club who got a few bad breaks along the way” .
Only in low-budget independent productions which escaped the jurisdiction of the MPPDA, but which were very limited in the exhibition outlets open to them, could prostitution be dealt with explicitly during this period. Most of these “quickies” were exploitation films — heady cocktails of seduction, drug addiction and white slavery — and often encountered censorship problems at the state or local level: they included The pace that kills/Cocaine fiends (1935), Gambling with souls/Vice racket (1936), Crusade against rackets (1937), Slaves in bondage (1937), Smashing the vice trust (1937) [40], The wages of sin (1938?) and Mad youth (1939?). There were also dramatized sermons against the dangers of venereal disease, such as Damaged goods/Marriage forbidden (1937), a new version of the Eugène Brieux play about a young man who contracts syphilis from a prostitute, and No greater sin/Social enemy no. 1 (1941), which again sounded the syphilis warning (topically, since the armed forces were at the time running an anti-prostitution public health campaign) in its tale, set in an industrial and military town, of gang-run dance halls frequented by infected sex workers.
The Legion of Decency condemned No greater sin as it had done Damaged goods, not because it disapproved of the aim of disease prevention, but because it considered such films should not receive general theatrical release as entertainment. Archbishop McNicholas, quoted in Facey (114), argued:
The motion picture theatre is not a clinic; nor is it a doctor’s consultation room or a classroom. It is not the sanctum of the minister of religion; nor is it the sanctuary of the home. Sex instruction does not come within the function of the motion picture theatre. On the contrary, to assume this grave responsibility would be a perversion of the principal function of the theatre. Instead of rendering any real service to the public welfare, the influence thus exercised must be progressively degenerating in the moral order.
Such an attitude towards censorship and the cinema was diametrically opposed to that taken some twenty years earlier by the liberal National Board of Review towards “propaganda pictures produced obviously for social betterment,” but was very much in tune with the blanket ban policy which had come to be adopted at the Hays Office.
The breakdown of film censorship in the USA occurred slowly. The first significant challenge to the power of the industry watchdog organisation was the withdrawal of United Artists from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America, successor to the MPPDA) in 1955, after the PCA refused a certificate to the UA film The man with the golden arm. There was a threat that the censorship system might unravel, which was countered by a 1956 revision to the Code to permit the depiction of prostitution along with other contentious subjects such as drugs, abortion and miscegenation. It was far from open slather, however. The revised clause read:
The methods and techniques of prostitution and white slavery shall never be presented in detail, nor shall the subjects be presented unless shown in contrast to right standards of behaviour. Brothels in any clear identification of such may not be shown.[41]
PCA staff were kept busy interpreting these provisions in the years to come.
The result was that while prostitute characters could now be identified as such, the stories remained laundered. Critics were scathing of the diluted versions of powerful literary originals which continued to appear. Thus Film daily , on 21 February 1961, wrote of Sanctuary: “Major liberties have been taken with the novel and its subsequent appendage, Requiem for a nun, to make the frank original material, often shockingly incisive and appalling . . . suitable for the screen. The deletions are understandable and mandatory, but too much has gone out of Sanctuary. Not enough of the original flavour and vitality has been retained and not enough of value, insight, or purpose has been added.” Walk on the wild side (1962), adapted from the Nelson Algren novel and set predominantly in a New Orleans bordello, was described by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times on 22 February 1962 as a “sluggish picture” which smacked of “sentimentality and social naïveté.” “It’s as naughty as a cornsilk cigarette,” he concluded. The Variety critic opined on 31 January 1962, that “it’s obvious that in their treating of prostitution and lesbianism they did not want to be offensive to anyone. The result is a somewhat watered-downing of the Nelson Algren story . . . the absence of boldness in treatment renders the completed product just a little sterile.”
The negative impact which censorship considerations were having on the artistic integrity of American films was certainly one factor which was undermining the Code. Another was the influence of foreign films which could now obtain much wider distribution without a PCA seal than had been the case previously with, for example, Bicycle thief. Pote tin Kyriaki/Never on Sunday (1960), the Greek film about a Piraeus prostitute released successfully in the United States (its title song won an Oscar) caused much soul-searching among PCA officials. Geoffrey Shurlock, Breen’s successor as head of the agency, wrote an agonised letter to Eric Johnston of the Motion Picture Association:
In Never on Sunday, our leading lady revels in being a prostitute. She never for a moment seems to think there is anything wrong with it (except on Sunday) although the young American does think so and tries to reform her. By the end of the picture, he has been made a complete fool of. Thus, from the Code standpoint, sinful living is made to seem attractive throughout. The fact that at the very end she is going off to get married (probably) is subject to the same criticism as a “hackneyed” reformation that Mr Youngstein applies to the death of Gloria in Butterfield 8. . . .
What I am about to say presents a real dilemma which comes up quite often in the application of the Code. It is that the great public appears not to like to have its nose rubbed in the fact that adultery and prostitution are fundamentally sordid and should be so presented. In our Code attempt to deglamorize sin, we often end up making it look exactly the way it should, repulsive and degrading. This is a valid and proper moral judgement; but a lot of people don’t seem to like pictures with repulsive elements, even when valid.
They much prefer to see sin treated sentimentally, as in Suzie Wong, or in that old classic Camille, or gaily, as in Never on Sunday. They don’t enjoy such deglamorized and, let’s face it, sordid treatments as in that other old classic Nana, or to come up to date, Butterfield 8 or Girl of the Night. Our other recent “cause celebre”, Go Naked in the World, seems to have been clobbered for two completely opposing reasons: at one and the same time it seems to have been treated too glamorously and too sordidly, and the result was disastrous. . . .
One last observation about Never on Sunday. I have been in terror lest someone decide to submit this picture for a Code seal. I am afraid we would have to reject it. But the horrible part is that, in rejecting it, we would probably have to adduce perforce exactly the same reasons as did the Atlanta censor board. And I shudder at the idea . . . .[42]
A partially permissive regime was throwing up very similar dilemmas to those which had been faced by Dinneen and Breen back in the early 1930s.
Meanwhile changes in the motion picture industry and shifts in social attitude were occurring which would bring about the ultimate demise of the Code. The breakup of the studio system made for a much greater number of independent producers, distributors and exhibitors who could choose whether or not they wished to abide by industry self-regulation. For the film companies, there was in the end just too much money to be made from the merchandising of sexual fantasy. The interests of capitalism and patriarchy diverged, and with the waning power of the churches and a liberalization of sexual mores, the floodgates could no longer be held back. When a major loosening of censorship provisions occurred in 1966 with the introduction of a new, more general Code (which replaced prohibitions with advice to use “caution”) and, along with it, a classification system including the label “Suggested for mature audiences,” there remained little to inhibit the free depiction of prostitution in the American cinema.
Why was so much energy expended, over so many years, in banishing the prostitute, or particular representations of her, from the screen? As Father Lord was soon to find out, prostitution in the movies was not the equivalent of arson or murder. While the figure of the criminal — so long as he was brought to justice, poetic or otherwise, at the end — was of minor concern to the censors, that of the prostitute was often troublesome, and she clearly generated acute anxieties well into the 1960s.
The reasons that were proffered officially for the rigid exclusion policy, to do with the effect of such images of immorality on the immature, [43] tell only half the story. They do not indicate why the depiction of prostitution should be repressed even when the story being told teaches a valuable moral lesson. And they do not account for prostitution being treated differently from other forms of immorality or crime, as if the moral guardians of the movies were attempting to convince audiences not that prostitution was wrong, but that it did not exist (perhaps the closest comparison is homosexuality, which suffered a similar blackout).
The difficulty of sustaining the more liberal censorship point of view promoted initially by Breen and Dinneen suggests that a number of anxieties were condensed on the image of the prostitute, and that not all the undesirable effects of her depiction could be contained by the force of a didactic narrative. A supercharged, polyvalent figure, electric with meanings as soon as her feather boa flicked into camera range, she simply could not be fully neutralised by a narrative strategy requiring her redemption or death. Representing many things, few if any of which were complimentary to the patriarchal moral order, the prostitute was a threat — or rather a multitude of threats combined into one, like a multiply-acting poison for which treatment is impossible since the antidote for one toxin only intensifies the action of another.
Show a prostitute enjoying the life, for example, as in Red dust, and you encouraged young women to take up the profession; but show her miserable, and immediately you drew attention to the social system responsible for her condition. The dilemma is symptomatic of the acute difficulty the patriarchy has had in accommodating the institution of prostitution within its explanatory scheme: it would prefer, if it could, to repress all mention of it, to keep it out of sight and out of mind.
For a start, the prostitute symbolises excess sexuality, an immediate flashpoint in societies with a heritage of puritanical Christianity which aims to extirpate the passions. There is some variation, of course, here between Protestant and Catholic attitudes: in the Protestant tradition there is a belief in the possibility of sexual restraint (and hence the prostitute is more liable to be viewed as an evil temptress leading men astray), whereas Catholicism tends to regard sex as an ineradicable human (male) need, and to look on the prostitute favourably for catering to it. [44] Still, the danger which the figure of the prostitute could pose by inflaming erotic desires, and the need for that reason to hold her in check, was felt universally.
As a provider of extramarital sex the prostitute was seen as a threat to the cornerstone of patriarchal power, the family. Here there was a shift from predominant discourses of the 19th century, in which the prostitute had been seen under the aspect of protector of the family. Then, it had been thought the carnal appetites of the male, unmatched by those of his wife who properly had no desire for sex at all, needed to be appeased by the woman of the street; but after the social purity campaigns in the latter part of the century, the dominant ideology in the United States now proposed that male sexuality be contained — contained within the person (by means of abstinence), if he were single, within the family, if he were married. The prostitute took on a different colouring; not necessary to the sexual economy of patriarchy — and as a carrier of venereal disease, a potential menace to it — she could be driven out of town, driven off the screen. The very image of a prostitute could give impressionable minds wrong ideas: young men, that it was legitimate to seek sexual satisfaction outside the bonds of marriage; young women, that there was an alternative to the official path laid out to her of virginity, courtship, and chaste domestic servitude in marriage.
Further, the image of the prostitute could suggest a disturbance in the field of gender-power relationships. The prostitute selling her body engages in a commercial transaction, which invokes the free-market ideology of equivalence of buyers and sellers, of the autonomy of market forces. If buyer/client/male is equal in status to seller/prostitute/female, then what of the subordination of women? Whatever the actual status of the prostitute within society, the celluloid image could carry a potent symbolic charge, that of the woman who has come out from under the wing of the patriarchy and, having turned sexuality to her financial advantage, achieved independence.
The prostitute also aroused anxiety in the patriarchal mind centring on the female body as a site of sexual pleasure. While her suggestive attire and provocative gestures inflamed male desires which society’s moral guardians would have preferred to keep subdued, even more subversive was the idea which she came to incarnate (especially in the person of Mae West) of women initiating and enjoying sex. One of the Payne Fund studies of the early 1930s, Motion pictures and standards of morality, had found that “Aggressiveness of a girl in love-making” was one area in which the movies diverged dramatically from “current standards of morality” [45], while censorship historian James C. Robertson identifies the “forward sexual antics and snappy dialogue of Mae West and Jean Harlow” as primary targets for the Catholic-led crusade climaxing in the Hollywood crackdown of 1934. Revealingly, Robertson (139, 150-1) slides in one paragraph from “prostitution and the ‘fallen woman’ image” to “the woman who enjoyed her sexuality without guilt”, reinforcing the idea that what is at stake here is female sexual autonomy.
Finally, picturing prostitution could expose a corrupt male power structure profiting through the vice business in the exploitation and oppression of women. This was particularly the case in films made as social documents, such as The finger of justice. But even in films of less crusading zeal, any tie-in of prostitution with organised crime, as commonly occurred in the white slave genre, inevitably suggested victimisation of women by men. When two stage plays on the topic of white slavery were closed down by New York police in 1913, it was the Women’s Suffrage movement which came to their defence (one of them was The lure, filmed the following year by Alice Guy) [46], and it is hard not to see the suppression by censorship of white slave films in the USA after 1916 as partly motivated by a desire not to lay open the patriarchy to any further attack.
“The very essence of the reflexive idea of hiding something from oneself,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “implies the unity of one and the same psychic mechanism and consequently a double activity in the heart of unity, tending on the one hand to maintain and locate the thing to be concealed and on the other hand to repress and disguise it.” [47] If, like the passage from Freud quoted at the head of this article, Sartre’s remark can be read on the societal as well as the individual level, then there are significant implications for a regime such as patriarchy which seeks to hide embarrassing features of its social organisation from the public eye. That which is to be repressed cannot simply be driven out of the societal consciousness and forgotten; repression requires constant activity, and awareness of that activity; and the act of censorship draws attention to that which needs to be concealed or disguised. It is this I believe which, along with changing social patterns, made the censorship policy of total suppression, after thirty to forty years, ultimately untenable.
Footnotes
[1] Sigmund Freud, “Repression” (1915), in General psychological theory: papers on metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 108-9.
[2] Quoted in Leonard J. Leff & Jerold L. Simmons, The dame in the kimono: Hollywood, censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 63. Further references to this work appear as page numbers in brackets.
[3] Waterloo Bridge (1931) PCA File. The Production Code Administration Files are held in the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
[4] Quoted in Richard Maltby, “The genesis of the Production Code” in Giuliana Muscio, ed., Prima dei codici 2: Alle porte di Hays/Before the Codes 2: The gateway to Hays: XLVIII Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica &endash; La Biennale di Venezia (Venice: Edizioni Biennale/Realizzazione Fabbri Editori, 1991), 71. Further references to Muscio are to this work and appear as page numbers in brackets.
[5] Waterloo Bridge (1931) PCA File.
[6] Eileen Bowser, The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 41. See also Charles V. Tevis, “Censoring the five-cent drama” (1910), in Gerald Mast, ed., The movies in our midst: documents in the cultural history of film in America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 63-72.
[7] Charles Matthew Feldman, The National Board of Censorship (Review) of Motion Pictures, 1909-1922 (New York: Arno, 1977), 65. Further references to this work appear as page numbers in brackets.
[8] Shelley Stamp Lindsey, “Wages and sin: Traffic in souls and the white slavery scare,Persistence of vision 9 (1991), 98.
[9] Autobiographie d’une pionnière du cinéma, 1873-1968 (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1976), 143. Translation by RC. Note that Guy does not identify the censorship body she is referring to, but it is most likely the National Board of Censorship.
[10] Kevin Brownlow, Behind the mask of innocence (New York: Knopf, 1990), 6. Further references to this work appear as page numbers in brackets.
[11] Moving picture world, 30 September 1916, 2087. See also Feldman, 126-7.
[12] Copyright description, cited in Patricia King Hanson, ed., The American Film Institute catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States. Feature films, 1911-1920 (Berkeley: University of California, 1988), 463. See also Brownlow, 88.
[13] W. Stephen Bush, “An appeal to exhibitors,” Moving picture world, 30 September 1916, 2083.
[14] “In a nutshell,” Moving picture world, 30 September 1916, 2083.
[15] “Against ‘white slave’ subjects,” Moving Picture World, 23 December 1916, 1792. See also Feldman, 126-7.
[16] Variety, 29 November 1918. See also Hanson, 278, and Brownlow, 87.
[17] Brownlow, 62. See also Hanson, 281, and Annette Kuhn, Cinema, censorship and sexuality, 1909-1925 (London: Routledge, 1988), 62.
[18] See James C. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors: film censorship in Britain, 1896-1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 147. Further references to this work appear as page numbers in brackets. See also Richard Koszarski, An evening’s entertainment: the age of the silent feature picture, 1915-1928 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 206-7.
[19] Quoted in Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson (Feltham, Middlesex: Hamlyn, 1981), 299. See also Koszarski, 207.
[20] The ‘Don’ts and Be Carefuls’ are included in Mast, 213-14.
[21] See Swanson, 296-313, Brownlow, 21-3, and James Robert Parish, Prostitution in Hollywood films: plots, critiques, casts and credits for 389 theatrical and made-for-television releases (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1992), 370-1. Further references to Parish appear as page numbers in brackets .
[22] Lea Jacobs, The wages of sin: censorship and the fallen woman film, 1928-1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1991), 88.
[23] The Story of Temple Drake PCA File.
[24] Quoted in Muscio, 325. On the censoring of Baby Face, see Jacobs, 70-81, and Muscio, 325-6.
[25] From the original and revised versions of the Legion of Decency pledge, quoted in Paul W. Facey, The Legion of Decency: a sociological analysis of the emergence and development of a social pressure group (New York: Arno, 1974), 145. Further references to this work appear as page numbers in brackets.
[26] Of the 53 movies which the Legion had placed on its condemned list by 1943, only one (the Howard Hughes production The outlaw, which had not been given a general release nor granted a PCA seal of approval) came from a major studio. With this exception, all the condemned films were “quickies” produced and distributed independently (i.e. by non-MPPDA members) for showing in “less respectable” theatres, or were foreign imports. Between 1936 and 1943 the Legion condemned six productions of major Hollywood studios, but all these films were revised by the producing companies and reclassified. See Facey, 93, 101.
[27] The Story of Temple Drake PCA File.
[28] Of Human Bondage (1934) PCA File.
[29] See references to the PCA Files in the entries for these films in Patricia King Hanson, ed., The American Film Institute catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States. Feature films, 1931-40 (Berkeley: University of California, 1993).
[30] PCA Files for respective films. The comment on Belle of the nineties is as quoted in Carol M. Ward, Mae West: a bio-bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989), 28, and that on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is from Gerald Gardner, The censorship papers: movie censorship letters from the Hays Office, 1934 to 1968 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987), 63.
[31] “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930” as included in Olga J. Martin, Hollywood’s movie commandments (H.W. Wilson, 1937), and excerpted in Mast, 331.
[32] See Robert L. Carringer, The making of “Citizen Kane” (London: John Murray, 1985), 28, 135-6.
[33] PCA Files.
[34] Leff & Simmons, Chapter 7
[35] Elia Kazan, letter to Steve [Trilling?], January 3, 1954, in East of Eden PCA File.
[36] East of Eden PCA File.
[37] See Tino Balio, Grand design: Hollywood as a modern business enterprise, 1930-1939 (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 66.
[38] Waterloo Bridge (1940) PCA File.
[39] quoted in Parish, 24
[40] This is probably the film which Facey, 93, refers to as Smashing the vice racket, with a 1940 date. The American Film Institute catalog, 1931-1940, does not list any film under the title Smashing the vice racket. The film was condemned by the Legion of Decency for “prostitution and white slavery . . . ; immodest dress and costume; double-meaning lines; obscene dancing and implications.”
[41] Quoted in Trevelyan, 248. See also James C. Robertson, The hidden cinema: British film censorship in action, 1913-1972 (London: Routledge, 1989), 118.
[42] Geoffrey Shurlock, letter to Eric Johnston, 25 May 1961, in Butterfield 8 PCA File.
[43] The brothel scene in The bicycle thief was dangerous, Breen said, invoking the Production Code, “because such locales inescapably suggest commercialized vice and human depravity, and arouse unwholesome interest and curiosity on the part of youth [quoted in Leff & Simmons, 158])
[44] The Catholic Church’s position has been strongly influenced by St. Augustine, who declared: “Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.” (Quoted in Nickie Roberts, Whores in history: prostitution in western society [London: Harper Collins, 1992], 61). The Church’s accommodation with prostitution came under fire during the Reformation. In Beyond power: of women, men and morals (New York: Summit, 1985), 173, Marilyn French notes that early Protestants opposed the system of clerical concubinage whereby priests paid a tax to the Church for their traditional right to maintain concubines and prostitutes.
[45] Charles C. Peters, Motion pictures and standards of morality (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 86.
[46] See Gary S. Luter, “Sexual reform on the American stage in the Progressive era, 1900-1915” (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1981), 115-17.
[47] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology (New York: Washington Square, 1966), 64.