Hollywood was feeling the pressure in the early 1930s. Too much sex. Too much booze and drugs. Too much violence.
Too many things certain people in American society didn’t want to see or deal with on the movie screens of America. Congress and religious groups talked of bans and boycotts and silencing the movie business just a few years after the invention of “talkies.” It was clear: Censor yourself or be censored.
Hollywood took the first option. And the infamous Hays Code — also known as the Motion Picture Production Code — was born. Officially instituted in July 1934, it required any film made in Hollywood to get an official certificate of approval from the Hays office to be released.
Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, had largely authored the code, but left Joseph Breen, an influential Catholic troubleshooter for Hays, to enforce it. And Breen did, until his retirement in 1954.
American films took a step backward in what they showed and what topics could be addressed on the screen. But it forced filmmakers to get clever. To imply. To symbolize. At worst, it kept filmmakers from warning American audiences and making anti-Nazi movies in the 1930s until World War II had actually begun. At best, it kept incidents of animal abuse and cruelty on the set to a minimum.
It has been cynically described as “a Jewish-owned business selling Catholic theology to Protestant America.”
All genres got the restraints, but probably none more than horror. Films that had pushed the boundaries a few years earlier, like Frankenstein, would face cuts to get a theatrical re-release (what studios did in the days before TV), while other films, like 1933’s darkly violent Murders in the Zoo would disappear from screens and couldn’t be made in Hollywood again until the 1960s.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Breen’s retirement, as well as a handful of films that were successful despite defying the code, the growing influx of foreign films, and the competition from television all weakened and eventually ended the code. It was replaced by the rating system in 1968.
But the Code clearly defined Hollywood films for decades. Here’s how:
