Look closely at the Golden Age of Hollywood, and you’ll see the darker, more complicated layers beneath all that glitz and glamour. The era coincided with the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, a series of restrictions on what movies were and were not allowed to show.
How could creativity thrive in an age of self-censorship? Let’s dig into the history of the Hays Code, as well as all the clever ways filmmakers found to imply what couldn’t be said outright.
In the early 20th century, the relatively new Hollywood movie-making industry was coming under fire as a den of sin, a public opinion compounded by a series of high-profile scandals. In 1920, press speculated over the death of silent film star Olive Thomas, who accidentally ingested a fatal dose of syphilis medication prescribed to her husband, actor Jack Pickford. A year later, beloved comic actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was charged with rape and manslaughter in connection with the death of actor Virginia Rappe. And in 1922, director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered, an unsolved case that made national headlines.
“To the boys and girls of the land, these mock heroes and heroines have been pictured and painted, for box office purposes, as the living symbols of all the virtues…. Privately they have lived, and are still living, lives of wild debauchery,” read a 1922 anonymously published pamphlet titled “The Sins of Hollywood,” which sought to expose the wild-partying ways happening behind the scenes.
7 Silent Film Stars Who Transitioned to Talkies Between 1914 and 1922, seven states—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Kansas, New York, and Virginia—formed film censorship boards. Meanwhile, across the country, calls for government regulation of the motion picture industry grew—which would, of course, lessen the power of the studio moguls.
To avoid such an outcome, William H. Hays, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, was named the first president of the newly formed Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). The goal was for Hays to play traffic cop for the studios, and more importantly, show his friends in Washington that Hollywood was cleaning up its act.
However, Hays’ arrival didn’t immediately mean a new Hollywood. The first attempt at self-regulation was a laborious list crafted in 1927 called the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” which contained 36 rules filmmakers should abide by. Two years later, Motion Picture Herald editor Martin Quigley and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord submitted an even more extensive code of standards to the studio heads—and as the threat of government regulations grew, the studios listened. In 1930, Hays’ MPPDA officially adopted the code.
And yet, with no mechanism in place for enforcement, salacious material like Wesley Ruggles’ seductive black comedy “I’m No Angel” (1933) and Alfred E. Green’s controversial noir “Baby Face” (1933) still reached cinemas. It wasn’t until 1934 that Hollywood truly gave over to the Code, thanks to an amendment that stipulated films needed to receive approval before distribution.
Under the Code, movies had to be morally upright; any instances of evil and transgression should be punished by the time the credits rolled. “No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it,” reads the document. In the 1930s, of course, that meant adhering to a way of life amenable to a white, heterosexual, cisgender populace.
The Code included a wide range of restrictions on items like nudity, obscenities, ridicule of religion, and “lustful kissing.” Evil characters could never appear sympathetic to the audience, and crime could not pay (or even be explained in great detail). Scenes set in bedrooms were only OK if they did not “suggest sex laxity and obscenity.”
With these restrictions in place, how could anyone tell a decent story?
In 1934, the same year the Code went into effect, Frank Capra directed one of the greatest movies of all time, “It Happened One Night.” The film is a quintessential romantic comedy starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. All of the sexual tension in the film—and even the release of that tension—is implied through clever direction. Perhaps the most famous example is when the two leads erect a blanket barrier in their shared room, dubbed “the Walls of Jericho,” to show they will not engage in coitus. In the film’s conclusion, the walls come tumbling down.
Other instances were, let’s say, less subtle—such as the ending to Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959).
It wasn’t only in playful moments that filmmakers found ways to turn the Production Code to their advantage. The regulations coincided with the rise of film noir, a genre that made the most of the mandate that sin must be punished to fatalistic ends. In 1941, John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon” gained pathos for its hard-boiled private detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), who must send the woman he loves, Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), to jail for her involvement in his partner’s death.
There were some creative choices that the Code would not abide. “Miscegenation” was banned outright, so any stories of interracial couples were out (the studios also knew that such films would never get played in Southern theaters). And although homosexuality was not mentioned outright, it was generally understood to be included in the Code’s rules on “sexual perversion.” For decades, stories had to dance around diversity; in a country of immigrants, only certain minorities were deemed worthy of stardom.
“Through the 1930s, Hollywood also reinforced their distorted version of Blackness by restricting Black actors to comic and subservient roles and through direction that demanded that Black actors perform stereotypically exaggerated expression and movement,” wrote critic Carole V. Bell.
Difficult topics like addiction or sexuality had to be treated gingerly. There may be nods here and there in movies, but the dominant mores of the country were also the dominant mores onscreen, regardless of how much they reflected reality.
It wasn’t so much a great moral awakening in the U.S. that led to the Code’s downfall as much as the studio system’s collapse in the 1950s and 1960s. Only a united power could enforce the Code. However, in these post-war decades, the studios faced too many threats, including the rise of TV, the 1944 “de Havilland law” that gave movie stars freedom from onerous contracts, and the 1948 “Paramount decrees” that broke studios’ grip on theatrical releases. Beyond that, older moguls were retiring and dying, and their replacements sought to appeal to younger viewers looking for more daring material. (And they’d certainly get it, in the form of New Hollywood.)
By the late ’60s, everything about the Code was hopelessly outdated and no longer conducive to studio profits. In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), under the leadership of Jack Valenti, switched to a ratings system:
- G: All ages admitted
- PG: Some material may not be suitable for children
- PG-13: Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13
- R: Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian
- NC-17: No one 17 and under admitted
Now, with these ratings in place, audiences know how appropriate a movie is and can make their own decision on whether to see it, rather than the studios cutting out any potentially offensive material before production even begins. Although there is still an element of self-censorship (NC-17, which replaced an X rating, basically guarantees theatrical distributors won’t show a movie), it is a far more relaxed system.
As for the Hays Code—while it was absolutely an exercise in self-censorship for economic reasons, it nevertheless yielded (albeit unintentionally) some of our greatest cinema. To this day, it’s impressive to see how directors successfully navigated restrictions to cleverly tell the stories they wanted to tell. Still, we must also acknowledge the stories that never got a chance to be told in the first place, as the standards put in place worked to uphold the pervasive levels of discrimination in America. Both legacies belong to the Hays Code.
