|
Article Excerpt
Two of the most influential men in mid-twentieth century cultural history were film czar Will Hays and philosopher Mortimer Adler. Little, if any, scholarly attention has been paid to the professional relationship between these two men, but the effect of their collaboration in preparing the film industry's Hays Office policies for public approval shaped the representation of race relations in this country for generations.
In 1927, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) codified its position on sensitive issues, including race relations, in a document actually entitled "Don'ts and Be Carefuls." Among the "Don'ts" were prohibitions against display of pointed profanity, nudity, drug trafficking, sexual perversion, white slavery, sex hygiene and venereal diseases, childbirth, children's sex organs, ridicule of the clergy, and, of particular interest to this study, miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) and, somewhat paradoxically, "willful offense to any nation, race or creed." (1)
Will Hays, the MPPDA's film czar and namesake of the famous Hays Office, in an address to the Harvard Business School that same year, stressed the importance that motion pictures would play in shaping social norms. "Just as you serve the leisure hours of the masses," he said, "so do you rivet the girders of society." (2) His words were prophetic of the ironclad policy upon which the MPPDA would soon embark.
The "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" evolved into a second codification. "Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures," more commonly known as The Code, in 1930. Its twelve subdivisions included crimes against the law, sex, vulgarity, obscenity, profanity, costume, dances, religion, locations (confined to the treatment of bedrooms), national feelings, film titles, and "repellent subjects" (such as hangings, brutality, the sale of women, and surgical operations). Adherence to the Code, in principle, was universal; but in response to national fiscal chaos in 1933, the film industry determined it necessary publicly to reaffirm its allegiance in 1934 to these middle-class, core values.
The Code did not vary greatly from its paternalistic predecessor, the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls." Once again, miscegenation was included as a subtopic of sex; this time, the words "is forbidden" were added. And once again, the Code admonished its members to demonstrate consideration for the national feelings of the "history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations," but notably lacking were formerly expressed cautions against "willful offense of any ... race."
Appended to The Code was a lengthy explication of the philosophy of art and morals that undergirded it. This document, prepared in 1930 by Martin Quigley, a Catholic layman who edited Motion Picture Herald, and Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest, was the Hays Office's means of placating a host of critics including the powerful Legion of Decency, a Catholic lobby which, in the early 1930s, threatened to cripple the industry by galvanizing supporters in worldwide boycott of the film industry. In a subsection entitled "Reasons Underlying Particular Applications," released to the public in 1934, the authors explain the necessity of respecting the sanctity of marriage and of avoiding those scenes of passion that might arouse "dangerous emotions on the part of the immature, the young or the criminal classes." The authors then embark on the distinctions between pure and impure love, distinctions that deserve close inspection because of their implications for interracial relationships as well as for their excessive use of italics as emphasis type:
Even within the limits of pure love, certain facts have been universally regarded by lawmakers as outside the limits of safe presentation.
In file case of impure love, the love which society has always regarded as wrong and which has been banned by divine law, the following are important:
1. Impure love must not be presented as attractive and beautiful.
2. It must not be the subject of comedy or farce, or treated as material for laughter.
3. It must not be presented in such a way as to arouse passion or morbid curiosity on the part of the audience.
4. It must not be made to seem right and permissible
5. In general, it must not be detailed in method and manner
With the authority of both human and divine law, the Code left little doubt as to the reasons for forbidding the depiction of miscegenation. After all, as the Scriptures say. "If God be for us, who can be against us?"
With the Code in place, the Hays Office focused its attention on other, more-publicized fronts. One such battle followed the publication of Henry James Forman's Our Movie-Made Children, (3) the premature popularization of the 1933 Payne Fund Studies. The book, both anti-industry and pro-censorship, undermined scholarly publication and discussion of the Studies, which were to provide a social science perspective on the influence and effect of films on children and adolescents. One scholar who objected to this use of science for the judgment of the moral and political consequences of an art form was Mortimer Adler.
Adler was only thirty-five years old and a relatively new Ph.D. member of the Chicago University Committee of Social Thought, when he penned Art and Prudence, a neo-Aristotelian response to Forman's industry indictment and investigation of the "moral and social obligations of an art as popular as motion pictures." The work, republished as Poetry and Politics, (4) "put a scholarly, philosophical foundation under the self-regulatory structure which the Association had built up within the industry," according to Hays. (5) Adler conceded that the book's reviews were "largely unfavorable and even hosthe," because his examination of the history of censorship of the arts emphasized the "restraint that the prudent man must exercise in his concern with the moral content of a work of art or with its effect on the moral character of an audience." (6)
Initial reaction to this statement might conceive it as a contradiction of the Production Code and all that it represented, but the concept actually supported Hays's position that self-regulation was preferable to federal censorship. But Adler argued for First Amendment protection of the screen as a logical corollary to protection of the press, etc. It was a position of little value to an industry which saw itself as the purveyors of entertainment only; but as the unrest in Europe began to work its way to American...
|
