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

Production Code Administration. This was to bring to an end the model of self-regulation
that had existed in the “pre-Code” cinema of the late twenties and early thirties, 43
embodied in the Hays’s advice to filmmakers:
Speaking to the directors, I appealed to their ingenuity and artistic pride, hinting
that it takes vastly more to be interesting while observing decent limits than being
risqué. I told them, for example, that instead of seeing how far they could get an
actress to lift her skirt and still stay within the law they might try seeing how low
she could leave her skirts and still maintain audience interest. (Will Hays)
The Code was basically a set of film regulations governing Hollywood productions,
with three General Principles which attempted to ensure that films would show “correct
standards of life”, including the injunction that crime should always go punished, as shown
in Principle 2 of the table below. The Code was therefore an effort to make films endorse
family values and defend American legal, political and religious institutions and operated,
as Maltby has noted, as a “determining force on the construction of narrative and the
delineation of character in every studio-produced film after 1931” (Maltby 1993:37).
General Principles
1 No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of
those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be
thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
2 Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama
and entertainment, shall be presented.
3 Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy
be created for its violation.
In this chapter, I intend to refer to the noir productions that were often a paper-thin
edge away from the wrath of the censors or comment on those which were subjected to
important changes or even banned in some parts of the US because they violated the
strictures of the Code. I have also included the complete list of “particular applications” of
the Code in Appendix II at the end of this work to make it easier to understand references
43 These films are normally characterised as raw, subversive, and precisely uncensored.
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