CHAPTER 4
SENSE AND SENSORSHIP
CHIEF INVESTIGATOR STRIPLING: Mr Menjou,
if a picture is produced, as for example Mission
to Moscow, which gives a false portrayal or which
has propaganda in it, who do you hold responsible
in your own mind as a veteran actor in the motion-
picture industry?
MR. MENJOU: Well, I believe that the manufac-
turer of any product is responsible in the end for
the quality of his product.
MR. STRIPLING: In other words, the producers
should be held responsible?
MR. MENJOU: They should be.
House Committee on Un-American Activities,
October 1947.
The producers, the studio executives, never attempted to deny their public responsibility for the quality of their product, nor for its content. Their films, of necessity, existed in the public domain, and were therefore subject to the critical comment not only of their audiences, but also of the socially opinionated. As a pervasive mass entertainment, the cinema was exposed to a more intense examination of its social implications than either more conventional non-durable consumer goods or forms of expression generally seen to operate independently of commercial pressures and the responsibilities of the mass audience.
The unique position of the film industry made it vulnerable to a particular kind of public threat.
...
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...
In dealing with those who took an undue interest in their merchandise, the producers invariably placed a premium on their own financial interests.
The crucial threat to the majors' interests came from the raising of the anti-trust issue; compared to the maintenance of their economic hegemony, questions of the political or artistic freedom of the screen dwindled into insignificance.
The only threats industry leaders took note of were financial ones. Nothing
else could persuade them to act in concert, and nothing would make them acquiesce so fast as a threatened boycott. Equally, they saw no purpose in challenging a status quo which worked to their financial advantage. ...
since both the most severe restriction of the cinema's freedom of expression and the greatest opportunity to expand that freedom took place at times of financial crisis in the industry, the majors' preference for their short-term economic interest was never revealed so clearly.
WILL H. HAYS AND THE PRACTICE OF BETTER BUSINESS
The constitutional position of film as a medium of expression was defined by the Supreme Court in a ruling on the case of Mutual Film Corp. vs. Ohio in 1915. ...
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...
The movies were entertainment, not vehicles for ideas, but because of the particularly affecting nature of the medium, they were deemed to have a peculiar capacity for evil influence. Not only, therefore, did they not qualify as constitutionally protected speech; those responsible for the maintenance of public order and morality were bound to regard them warily because of their potential for harm.
The producers had to don a cloak of respectability not as a direct result of this decision, but because of its consequences: the rapid proliferation of state and local prior censorship boards,...
The studios' consciences were reached through their pockets,...
The production companies' eager response to the opportunities for more permissive subject matter provided by the dawning of the Jazz Age in 1921 lent weight to the reformers' demands for a system of federal censorship in the name of public morality. The Arbuckle and Taylor scandals exacerbated the public's increasing hostility towards Hollywood's decadent extravagances in a period of economic recession. ...
To maintain their business freedom the companies needed a cosmetic gloss that would make them appear as conventional businessmen.
It might be argued that the company heads, as individuals, felt a similar need.
The studio moguls were almost all of extremely humble origins, and had little or no formal education. None of them were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the majority being immigrants or the sons of
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immigrants, and further hampered in their strivings for the trappings of social respectability by being Jewish in a period when anti-Semitism was a common business practice and a respectable belief.
...Loew, Mayer, Zukor, the Schenks and the rest may well have comprised the most socially disadvantaged group of industrial magnates in the economic history of America. By 1921 the industry was moving out of its initial phase of meteoric expansion, in which business ethics were a polite irrelevance, into a period of consolidation, stabilization, the formation of vertically integrated companies and the establishment of the film factory. But corporate respectability was not yet theirs.
Business generally looked down a sensitive nose at its new companion. The world of banking sniffed at it. The royalty of industry regarded it as something faintly unsavoury, untoward, hooliganish, though it could not be brushed aside as unimportant.
[Moley, The Hays Code]
When they founded the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in March 1922, the industry leaders chose as their figure-head the most respectable man their money could buy.
...he became "the spokesman for the Association in all communications to the public," but he was also in a position from which he could, to a degree, impose his political outlook upon the producers.
...Hays worked to implement his maxim ["more business in government and less government in business"] with the ultimate intention of converting the film industry into a model of business
self-regulation.
Initially, at least, he was considerably more successful in restraining external opposition
...
than he was in controlling the internecine disputes of his employers. The evident failure of Prohibition, Republican policies of minimal government implicit in the return to "nor-
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malcy," and the semantic hostility the word "censorship" aroused (particularly in Hays' persistent use of the phrase "political censorship') weakened the reform lobby. The producers, however, were reluctant to accept even self-imposed limitations on their freedom of content. Their rhetorical interest in freedom of expression failed to disguise their principal objection:
the assumption that the most obviously censorable content was also the most profitable
. Frequently during the 1920s they passed what amounted to good resolutions promising
to establish the highest possible moral and artistic standards of motion picture production
and
to prevent the prevalent type of book and play from becoming the prevalent type of picture ...
but they never required themselves to take more than token
notice of these resolutions.
It was this failure on Hays' part that led the reform groups to link the questions of censorship and antitrust legislation in the proposals they brought before Congress. [e.g.] In 1928 the Brookhart Bill...
The Hudson Bill, first introduced in 1930 (and re-introduced several times thereafter),...
The Neely-Pettingill Bill of 1936 (revived as the Neely Bill of 1938, and introduced for a third time by Senator Harvey M. Kilgore in 1943)...
The legislative relation of antitrust and censorship questions, however, provided Hays with evidence to support the strategy he was attempting to impose on the M. P. P. D. A. It involved accepting the validity of public concern over content, but avoiding interference by the adoption of a code of
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self-regulation as stringent as that which the moral conservatives in the vanguard of the reformers would themselves wish to implement.
...if the M. P. P. D. A. companies could be seen to be enforcing a respectable code of conduct in their choice of content, they could claim not only that they were providing adequate evidence of self-regulation; they could also argue that block booking helped to keep films of dubious moral quality, made by non-affiliates of the M. P. P. D. A., out of the theatres
. The loss of creative freedom was a small price to pay for the enormous advantages of monopoly profit.
Hays' strategy received its first articulation in the list of "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" adopted in June 1927 by the Association of Motion Picture Producers.*
...the list was based on material about which objections had been received by the M. P. P. D. A. Department of Public Relations, or which had been cut by local censors. The
determining principle behind the inclusion of each item was not a consideration of morality or public taste, but the practical application of Hays' argument.
...
The working abstract of the 1930 Production Code made the rationale behind Hays' actions even more apparent. As originally written by Martin Quigley and Father Daniel Lord, S.J.,** the Code was an argument in Catholic moral philosophy which contained no specific catalog of material deemed unsuitable for the screen. When the Code was adopted as binding by the M.P.P.D.A. in 1934, what Quigley and Lord had written was designated as "The Reasons
__________
*A West Coast organization of the major producers, established in 1924, the A. M. P. P. was a separate body from the M. P. P.D. A., but in practice had much the same member ship. Policy seldom varied between the two Associations.
**Martin Quigley was the staunchly Catholic editor and publisher of the Motion Picture Herald. Father Lord was Professor of Dramatics at the University of St. Louis.
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Supporting the Preamble of the Code," and was, for all practical purposes, ignored. The Code itself was Hays' compilation of the prohibitions in Quigley/Lord together with those of the A. M. P. P. "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" that they had omitted. It was dominated less by a specifically Catholic moral stance than by Hays' requirement that it should preclude the necessity of any further censorial controls.*
It was not an easy strategy to sell to a group of men who had made their fortunes in exploitation. Neither their own good resolutions nor the threat of legislation gave it the force to become more than a paper policy.
...
M. P. P. D. A. members successfully resisted attempts to have the Production Code included in the 1933 National Recovery Administration Code of Fair Competition for the Motion Picture Industry, which would have made violation of the Code subject to the punitive clauses of the N.R.A. code.** Their reluctance to accept self-regulation gave support to charges that the industry would not and could not control itself in the public interest, and to Senator Brookhart's allegations that
Mr. Hays has done nothing towards improving the
__________
*For example, nothing in Quigley/Lord required a prohibiion on the depiction of miscegenation, which was carried over from the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," since it would obviously be excised by local censors in the Southern States.
**The NRA Code merely acknowledged the existence of the Production Code in terms reminiscent of the industry's prevous pledges of good behavior:
The industry pledges its combined strength to maintain right moral standards in the production of motion pictures as a form of entertainment. The industry pledges itself to adhere to the regulations made within the industry to attain this purpose.
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moral tone of the movies.... The truth is that Hays was employed primarily as a "fixer" to protect the industry against any sort of regulation through public action.
The companies' refusal to adopt the Code in the early 1930s was based on economic circumstance.
While the post-sound expansion had carried the industry over the first years of the Depression, it had involved them in expensive conversion of facilities, and had doubled production costs.
The industry's slump came in 1932-1933, when both Universal and R. K. O. were in receivership and Paramount was near bankruptcy as annual audience attendance figures declined for the first time in the industry's history.
...
Hays recognized their financial problems and relaxed his internal campaign for self-censorship for the duration of the crisis. But if he was forced to accept this situation, others, less concerned with the economic well-being of the movies, were not.
In particular, the Catholic Church reacted strongly to the industry's failure to observe the Catholic-composed Code. During 1933 there were a number of moves by Catholic clergy threatening boycotts of films and theatres,...
...the formation, in April 1934, of the Legion of Decency, whose members were pledged "to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality." The threat of mass boycott, which gained additional support from Protesant, Jewish and other voluntary organizations, was astutely timed. It came at a period of economic insecurity, when movie stocks were at their lowest, and it reached its peak of activity...
while plans for the new production season were being made. The producers capitulated immediately. ...
On July 1 [1933] the Studio Relations Committee was replaced by the Production Code Administration, which would vet all script drafts and
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release prints of every film produced, distributed or exhibited by the member companies of the M. P . P. D. A., who contracted not to distribute or exhibit any film not bearing the P. C. A. Seal of Approval. ...
KINDER CUTS
...the M. P. P. D. A. members
...took to the Code not because they believed, as Hays claimed to, that audiences had been gradually educated to accept higher moral standards in their entertainment, but because of the threatened boycott. And in giving in to a threat, they also accepted the principle by which Hays had constructed the Code's working abstract. The strength of the entire system of prior censorship was that it operated on the basis of a series of undefined relationships, rooted in the producers' acknowledgment that the P. C. A. was a necessary intermediary to give them protection from the undesirable assaults of organizations more morally scrupulous than they themselves might care to be. The P.C.A. in practice operated as
a mechanism for the maintenance of a necessary predictability in the subject matter of movies
and the manner of its handling, in much the same way that the formulae of genre pictures did. ...
Concern about the movies went well beyond the merely censorable, and Hays frequently had to deal with protests from trade associations over a film's representation of their business. The industry's response to such complaints was strongly related to the amount of economic pressure the complainant might
exert, either directly or through influence in Washington. ...
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...
Above all the industry wished to manufacture an acceptable product: since its audience was undifferentiated, and since the product had to achieve mass consumption before it became profitable, it seemed to make economic sense to pitch film content fairly consistently at the lowest common denominator of its audience, and equally, to adopt the line of least resistance in dealing with protests about content, insofar as these were compatible with successful corporate economics.
In such
circumstances
,
it would have been naive to expect the M. P. P. D. A. to challenge governmental prior censorship institutions.
The Production Code was one element of a diffuse censorship system...
To challenge the legitimacy of one element in that system was to challenge the whole construct. Since that construct came to serve the economic interests of the majors, challenging it would serve neither their short- nor their long-term interests.
...they wanted to appear both responsible and responsive to pressure,...
This attitude reaped its rewards in the form of a greater reciprocal co-operation from the censors in their dealings with the major distributors. The preferential treatment afforded to the majors made up for the occasional inconvenience brought on by erratic censorship decisions. Equally, the Legion had at least a tacit interest in the preservation of oligopoly. In his 1945 thesis on the Legion, Paul Facey observed,
The Department of Justice has tried to break up the monopoly of the film industry. Should it carry its attack to the point where it would force the dissolution of the Hays Office, the Legion of Decency would face a situation fraught with real problems. Instead of a single focus for its pressure, the Hays Office, it would have as many as there are producers.
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...
The system of control was enhanced by the practical operation of the Code, which was
frequently accused
by independent producers and distributors of showing a greater leniency in its decisions over the content of films produced or distributed by the major companies than in cases involving independent productions. Since provisional P. C. A. approval was a vital factor in obtaining the outside financing necessary for independent production,
this alleged bias helped ensure that
the independents
were unable to compete on equal terms with the studios.
The majors also found the P.C.A. Seal of Approval a useful additional tool in maintaining their effective exhibition monopoly.** It was, for example, helpful in restricting the
__________
*The coincidence of the Production Code's implementation shortly after most of the major companies were taken over by Wall Street interests has not yet been examined in any detail. Although evidence to establish a direct causal relationship would be almost impossible to obtain, the Code's standardization and neutralization of film content would be likely to appeal on both economic and ideological grounds to Morgan and Rockefeller interests. It is also the case that, in the later stages of their negotiations with the M. P. P.D. A., the Legion of Decency abandoned their dealings with the producers and concentrated their attention on the executives in New York. On June 15, 1934, Variety reported,
Switch of all moral problems from the West to the East is revealed to have been motivated by an understanding that the crusaders have lost patience with the studio heads, but still believe in the judgment and good intentions of the
Eastern executives.
**Prior to 1948, films distributed by M. P.P.D.A. companies, all of which had to have a P. C. A. Seal, accounted for 97 per cent of films obtaining releases in the United States.
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import of foreign films. The distribution companies, reluctant to handle product that was partially outside their economic control (and hence less profitable), used the Code as a weapon with which to question their suitability for American audiences. Though not originally responsible for associating European films with dubious subject matter, they were content to allow the relationship to permeate the public consciousness. Raymond Moley, in his laudatory account of the Hays Office, published in 1945, concluded his final chapter by emphasizing Hays', and the M. P. P. D. A. 's, intention of adhering to the standards laid down in the Code:
There will, of course, be critical questions of enforcement to meet, since the present standards prescribed by the Code are the highest in the world. These high standards are now so completely taken for granted by American public opinion, in fact, that little or no public pressure is any longer exerted to support them.... Of course there will be demands from some countries for
more piquant entertainment than the Code allows, but as far as present prospects indicate, these countries will have to supply their own spice.
...
A LIMITED EXPRESSION
"It is therefore evident, gentle-
men, that there never was a
real issue in this controversy."
Government mediator at the
end of Black Fury.
The Code enshrined in its prohibitions the common
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wisdom of Justice McKenna's 1915 ruling that film had a special capacity for evil. It stated, in "General Principles.
1.":
No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil, or sin.
That regulation, more than any other, controlled the nature of the subject matter, plot and characterization available to the filmmakers. In practice, Breen and his staff would analyze stories primarily in relation to their theme.
For such
evaluative purposes
, the
theme
of a picture can be determined by
asking
what problem confronts the leading characters
and
stating
how the problem is solved
. If the characters find their answers in moral ways, the theme of the picture is usually acceptable. If the characters find it necessary to steal or commit adultery or break some other social taboo or law, the story is unacceptable unless proper and compensating moral values and element of punishment are present.
"Compensating moral values" were defined by Breen in a letter to Hays in March, 1936:
Time and again there occur in the decisions of the P. C. A. the words:
"Compensating moral values." The Code demands "that in the end the audience feels that evil is wrong and good is right." To satisfy this requirement of the Code, stories must contain, at least, sufficient good to compensate for any evil they relate. The compensating moral values are: good characters, the voice of morality, a lesson, regeneration of the transgressor, suffering and punishment.
The bulk of the P.C.A's activities was concerned with the detailed administration of the Code, which operated on the principal of judicial precedent, cases being filed by subject, from "abdomen" to "zipper." But since none of the correspondence or decisions of the P. C.A were published, the Code was open to re-interpretation, and special dispensations might always be granted, as in the case of Clark Gable's last line in Gone with the Wind, which specifically contradicted Part V of the Code, as amended November 1, 1939.
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There was, further, a large peripheral area of the P.C.A.'s work which involved making suggestions about material not specifically forbidden by the Code itself, but liable to incur the displeasure of either local or foreign censors (such as the British Censor's persistent practice of deleting the Lord's Prayer from any film), or of interest groups. It was in this context that comment about the overtly political content of films might occur. Such advice was not infrequent among the potentially socially controversial films of the 1930s, at least. Colin Shindler cites the case of the drastic altering of the story line of Black Fury (1935, Warner Bros.; dir. Michael Curtiz), from an indictment of working conditions among Pennsylvania coal miners to a gangster melodrama about an innocent's exploitation by racketeering union leaders. Walter Wanger, producer of Blockade (1938; dir. William Dieterle) was advised that it might be as well not to identify his characters with either
side in the Spanish Civil War, and that even to identify the locale as Spain was dangerous. ...
Ruth Inglis quotes from a letter from Breen to Samuel Goldwyn regarding Dead End (1937; dir. William Wyler):
We would like to recommend, in passing, that you be less emphatic, throughout, in the photographing of this script, in showing the contrast between the conditions of the poor in tenements and those of the rich in apartment houses. Specifically, we recommend you do not show, at any time, or at least that you do not emphasize, the presence of filth, or smelly garbage cans, or garbage floating in the river, into which the boys jump for a swim. This recommendation is made under the general heading of good and welfare, because our reaction
is that such scenes are likely to give offense.
Inglis' conclusion, borne out by Shindler, "that, upon occasion, the Production Code Administration does try to exert a conservative influence,"* would almost certainly not
__________
*"The tribulations of Black Fury, Gabriel Over (continued)
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have been contested by Breen. Moley quotes him as saying:
Without going into the philosophical discussion of whether or not revolution or violence are ever desirable, and without raising the question of the role which the arts may or may not have played in the dissemination of political ideas, the Code Administration maintains that it is unwise for any producer to expose the industry to the charge of fomenting political and social unrest. It emphasises the point that when this is done by a book, the reader who takes violent exception to the content is merely outraged at the author, not at the
publisher or at the entire art of the printed word. But the motion picture spectator, when he is annoyed, is annoyed at "the damned movies," and, likely as not, at the theatre where he saw the offending picture.
He defended the P. C. A. against charges that its moral, social or political conservatism interfered with the artistic potential and social responsibilities of the American film by claiming that it was protecting the industry and its workers as a community because it prevented them damaging their own public esteem. Its rigid standards were necessary because large forces of articulate and powerful opinion threatened economic sanction if they were not adhered to.
Because the industry was particularly vulnerable, it had to take particular care. The Code Administration was merely the industry's mechanism for establishing the exigencies, restrictions, and conventions within which the medium's artists might legitimately operate. If the limitations on narrative development imposed by the system of "compensating moral values" prevented the forceful articulation of explicit social criticism, it merely reflected the public will of Justice McKenna and the Legion of Decency that the cinema should ensure that its mass entertainment was "harmless."
Despite its predominantly conservative effects, the Code was a rich source of contradictions. Its impact on the crime film was immediate. Gangster films, which had
__________
the White House, of Dead End and Blockade, are clear indicators of the political bias and crucial deployment of the power of the Hays Office."
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been one of the principal objects of the reformers' criticism, had been closely modeled on the genre's first success, Little Caesar. They depicted the flamboyant rise and abrupt fall of a figure usually modeled on Al Capone, usually of Italian or Irish extraction, usually deriving his income from bootlegging, and always limited in his area of operation to a city, usually a thinly disguised studio version of Chicago or New York.* Despite their inevitable morally compensating violent death in the streets, the films' protagonists were presented as heroic in their assertiveness and determination
to get to the top, offering an attractive if left-handed version of the myth of Success. By its stipulation that
Crimes against the law ... shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire for imitation.
the Code obliged the studios to convert their individualist outlaw heroes into equally heroic embodiments of benevolent federal authority, but it failed to remove the moral ambiguities of the genre. Warners remodeled Public Enemy James Cagney as a G-Man, but left his behavior unmodified: despite a specific prohibition in the Code against the law resorting to unlawful means to gain the ends of justice, Cagney's previous violence against the law was simply replaced by an equal violence in the name of the law. A 1935 amendment to the Code, that
Crime stories are not to be approved when they portray the activities of American gangsters, armed and in violent conflict with the law or law-
enforcing officers,**
__________
*It is, however, worth noting Capone's personal hostility to gangster movies. "They ought to take them and throw them in the lake," he declared. "They're doing nothing but harm to the younger element of this country. I don't blame the censors for trying to ban them. These gang movies are making a lot of kids want to be tough boys and they don't serve any useful purpose."
**In large part this Amendment was designed to prohibit films about Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Public Enemies of J. Edgar Hoover.
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directed against G-Men and its sequels, appears to have been less than strictly enforced as the cycle continued into 1937, to both praise for its responsible presentation of governmental power and condemnation for its devious circumnavigation of the spirit of the Code.
The contradictions inherent in the studios' solution to the prohibition on gangster films were most concisely indicated in a title change by which Warners' second G-Man film, Public Enemy's Wife, was renamed G-Man's Wife for its British release. The depths of the contradictions, however, emerged with their next film, Bullets or Ballots, in which "Edward G.
(Little Caesar) Robinson moves in on the modern mobs." The Robinson character, Johnny Blake, is a New York detective who joins a crime syndicate in order to discover who its secret bosses are. The film manages to follow closely the established plot structure of the gangster film, depicting Robinson's rise in the criminal hierarchy and his battle with Humphrey Bogart for control
of the rackets. It even provides him with the archetypal gangster's ending: fatally wounded by Bogart, he staggers out of his last meeting with the bosses to die in the street. At a plot level, the contradictions are apparent. As a cop, Robinson denounces racketeers and declares, "I don't like to see decent people pushed around." As a gangster, he introduces the numbers racket to New York. There is, too, a contradiction between the moral fervor with which the film denounces the rackets and the corruption that permits them and
its generic impulse to provide an
individualistic
, heroic solution to the problem it poses
. On the one hand, Robinson is depicted as a thoroughly honest man, made very uncomfortable by the duplicity of his role as undercover agent where he has to "double cross" criminals rather than give them the "even break" he has always done in the past. His moral qualms are made a central issue by the presence of
Joan Blondell, who loses faith in him when he takes the numbers game away from her. In tension with the film's foregrounding of Robinson's conscience is the strident attack on the racketeers contained in the imitation March of Time documentary with which the film opens, and expressed with particular clarity in an early script treatment:
The purpose of the picture is to arouse public indignation and to stop public support of every racket chronicled herein, for without public support, the rackets will die!... Besides presenting entertainment the picture's mission will be to
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leave a flaming question mark in the minds of American audiences. What can be done to stamp out rackets and racketeers as effectively as Repeal stamped out bootleggers and rum-runners?
In its advertising the film avowed the educative purpose which came with its acquisition of a documentary mode of expression. One ad declared,
Watch the cops crack down on the Secret Friends of the Public Enemies ... the higher-up Dictatorship of Modern Gangdom that's still sticking up America to the tune of $15,000,000,000 a year!
But having proposed a factual basis behind the story, both the advertising and the film itself abandoned documentary for the individualist moral concerns of its plot. The same ad asked,
Will "Little Caesar" rat on this secret Syndicate of Crime? ... can he save his own skin by turning in the Big Bosses?
Although the individualist narrative was Hollywood's conventional mode of expression it was rarely placed in such direct tension with an explicit use of the documentary form, even in "social consciousness films."
Bullets or Ballots is clearly a fissured film, in the category that Comolli and Narboni argue should be examined because their cracks expose the ideology they express. What is noteworthy about it is that the film's internal tension is directly attributable to the operation of the Hays Code: from the visual details by which a man firing a gun and the man he shoots are not presented in the same shot, to the underlying stress between the objective of entertainment and the claim to social consciousness,
the film's
contradictions
are products of
its obligation to abide by the Code
rather than arising from any
creative tension
in its production
.
Its presentation of its principal villains is particularly revealing.
The film's Secret Syndicate of Crime is actually run by a Wall Street banker, an ex-Senator, and a third man unidentified in the film but described in the script as young millionaire, socialite and clubman. This elite triumvirate appears in evening dress, and there is a clearly
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generic convention, community responsibility and individual direct action, social consciousness and entertainment, that permeate Bullets or Ballots and leave it open in detail to a wide range of ideological interpretations are largely present because of its conformity to the Production Code. [sic] The ambiguity of Robinson's status, in particular, was revealed by the ending. He dies, as a gangster must, in the street, but in doing so he contravenes a Code regulation that "law-enforcing officers should not be shown dying at the hands of criminals."*
The Code provided a restrictive framework for film narrative that was not only in tension with the generic impulses of much of Hollywood's product but itself contradicted its conservative purposes.
The conflicting elements within individual narratives can in retrospect be used
to point up the films' implicit ideologies, while the Code itself can be seen as the source of Hollywood's confused solutions to such problematic areas of content as crime, sexuality and ethnicity. In having to avoid offending any group and compensate for immorality, Hollywood perpetrated stereotypes and made a fetish of "glamor" that corresponded only obliquely to the world outside itself.
