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

Raymond Chandler not only agreed with this but also added that:
My own opinion is that the studios have gone in for these pictures because the
Hays Office is becoming more liberal. I think they’re okaying treatments now
which they would have turned down ten years ago, probably because they feel
people can take the hard-boiled stuff nowadays. Of course people have been
reading about murderers, cutthroats, and thieves in the newspapers for the past
hundred years, but only recently has the Hays Office permitted the movies to
depict life as it really is. (Hanson 2008:42)
The Hays Office, named after Will Hays, former head of the Republican National
Committee and self-appointed arbiter of national morality, was in fact set up in 1922 to
censor what could go into the movies. Section 2 will analyse the mechanisms of
censorship, dealing with both the ways the studio heads would challenge the banned
subjects of the Production Code, and how A and B productions managed to resist and
operate in the face of taboo restrictions. I will also investigate the reasons why the Hays
Office was so active in retarding the release of noir films, taking into account what Will
Hays constantly claimed, that “entertainment is the commodity for which the public pays at
the box office. Propaganda disguised as entertainment would be neither honest
salesmanship nor honest showmanship” (Schwartz 1983:192).
In this context of censorship, it is also important to note that the reason why it took
such a long while for the hard-boiled tradition to penetrate into the film industry (until the
mid- forties) is because these writers developed an understated vernacular style and their
stories often promised a crime thriller tied up with graphic sex and violence. Since
Hollywood films were intended for a family audience, they were subject to close
censorship which prose fiction escaped. Whatever is the case, nearly twenty percent of noir
thrillers produced during the forties were direct adaptations of hard-boiled novels and short
stories, and so the work of the American hard-boiled writers, such as the ones discussed in
this chapter, constituted the essential and immediate influence on film noir’s subject matter
and characterisation.
Above all, these engaging magazines contained some of the best of American
detective and hard-boiled fiction as a way of moving away from the older conventional
detective story, “to reflect the violence of American society and the vivid colloquialisms of
American speech” (Symons 1977:21). Beyond the legacy of such successful and
entertaining stories - judging from their longevity, circulation, and profitability - pulp
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