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

to these specific restrictions and see more clearly how they were observed and applied in
certain cases.
Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity may be taken as a fairly representative example to
describe the practical effects of censorship. In the first version of the movie, insurance
agent Neff (Fred MacMurray) was featured as being sent to a gas chamber which created
some uneasiness among the members of the Breen office. It was declared that both the
novel and its cinematic treatment were most unsuitable 44 and so Wilder had to come up
with a new ending. According to the director, Neff’s death was among “two of the best
scenes I’ve ever shot in my whole life [the other being the original opening to Sunset
Boulevard]”. It did not take too long for Wilder to consider that an execution was perhaps
“unnecessary” and so apart from a different ending, Billy Wilder was also obliged to take
into account some other points and softened them to pass the sieve of censorship. For
example, Neff does not commit suicide and only dies after confessing to a Dictaphone that
he was the one who set up the whole scheme. Regarding the love scenes, as I have already
mentioned elsewhere, directors had to camouflage them through the art of omission or
recur to suggestive camera movements to ascribe certain meanings. In the case of Double
Indemnity, the adulterous sequences had to be disguised so, for instance, when Phyllis
visits Walter’s apartment and kisses him for the first time, he instantly lights up a cigarette,
and gets ready to discuss the murder plan. The audience gets to infer, however, that they do
go to bed with each other while the rain falls on the bedroom windows. These scenes were
then developed to ensure that the rule from the Code would be followed: “The sanctity of
the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low
forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing” (see p. 465). Adultery and
illicit sex, although recognized as sometimes necessary to the plot, could not be explicit or
justified and were not supposed to be presented as an attractive option. Cain’s quote from
the introduction seems to make much sense here: “A studio can obey every one and be
salacious” since by means of symbolism and ellipsis (we know that time has passed when
Walter and Phyllis get together again after that scene back in the living room where he is
seated at one end of the sofa smoking a cigarette, and she is retouching her makeup),
Hollywood’s enforced morals could be preserved.
44 The PCA established that the “whole sequence in the death chamber to be very questionable in its present
form (…) specifically the details of the execution (…) are unduly gruesome to the Code.”
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