 One of the fascinating things about watching old movies
-- and we mean, really old movies from the first
third
of the twentieth century, is the "throw-anything-against-the-wall"
feeling that the creators are making up a whole new art form as they go
along.
There's an impression that the earliest features were silly comedies featuring people who moved jerkily at high speeds.
But as early as the 1910s, directors like Lois Weber
were making films about controversial topics like capital punishment, drug addiction, and abortion. Such strong subjects were accompanied by equally strong
language, but until the movies learned to talk, intertitles
were able to shield the more sensitive members of the audience (or at least,
those who couldn't read lips)
from that language.
When technology finally allowed patrons to hear
as well as see actors, moviemakers were faced with tough choices: how to
maintain the grittiness and realism audiences had come to expect without
making the dialogue so raw that films would be censored by regional film
boards or condemned by the powerful Catholic Legion of Decency. (This was an era when the epithet "son of a
bitch" caused an uproar when it was used in the 1928 play The Front Page.)
The solution was to tone down most of the language while keeping the themes
the same. Movies like Baby Face
or Employees' Entrance (featuring the hard-boiled
Barbara Stanwyck and the delightfully sleazy Warren William sleeping their way to the top) were as popular as they
were scandalous.
But even that taming was too much, and on March 31, 1930, Will H. Hays,
president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America released a codified rule book
designed to ensure that movie producers self-censored their films. That way,
not only would filmgoers of all ages be spared anything the least bit
unsavory, but it ensured that "American" values would be
promoted and upheld. So strong was the Hays Code that, in 1939, when producer David O. Selznick wanted to keep Rhett Butler’s final line
in Gone With the Wind intact, he had to pay a $5,000 fine for using the
word "damn."
For the next 35 years, the Code remained virtually inviolate. One of the
first directors to subvert it was Otto Preminger, who fought to use such verboten words as "virgin" and "rape" in his films, making them strictly "adults
only" fare.
As society changed in the 1960s, the code became unenforceable. Keeping
mature themes and language out of the movies became increasingly absurd, so
the Code was abandoned in favor of the rating system
(G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17) we know today.
While it's now possible to go to the movies and see and hear virtually
anything, there’s still a thrill in watching a pre-Code movie like Night Nurse and finding out that our grandparents and great-grandparents were a lot more
interesting than we thought.
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