Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.2 Censorship and Politics
In the first half decade of the Great Depression,
Hollywood’s movie-makers perpetrated one of the
most remarkable challenges to traditional values in
the history of mass commercial entertainment. The
movies called into question sexual property; social
decorum and the institutions of law and order.
(Sklar 1975:175)
I think the whole system of Hays censorship, with its
effort to establish a list of rules on how to be decent
is nonsensical. A studio can obey every one and be
salacious – violate them and be decent. (James M.
Cain, Daily News, 1944)
On inspecting the censorial mechanisms governing Hollywood’s wartime activities,
it is essential to consider wartime production restrictions in order to understand the way the
industrial environment of World War II advanced film noir style. While the informal codes
of practice that governed the film industry had been operative ever since the appearance of
cinema, always concerned to make sure that audiences would not be shocked or offended
in any way, it was in the decade of the thirties that films started to be more carefully
scrutinised and submitted to stronger external regulation. In fact, it was back in 1934 that
the Production Code was created, and in order to enforce its guiding principles, Joseph
Breen was appointed as Head of the Production Code Administration (PCA). Breen was a
powerfully anti-Semitic conservative who thought he had to protect traditional morality
and so came forward with a set of specific rules against miscegenation, the
misrepresentation of law and religious officers in film, among other related issues.
The Hays Code, after Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America (MPPDA) first started to monitor scripts on the West Coast on a
regular basis in 1929 and adopted the Production Code, founded by Father Daniel Lord and
Motion Picture Herald publisher Martin Quigley as its moral blueprint for Hollywood
films in 1930. When the National Catholic Legion of Decency threatened to proscribe
indecent Hollywood films at the beginning of 1934, Hays established the above mentioned
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