Book Review: Hollywood's Censor

Joseph Breen

Thomas Doherty's Hollywood Censor: Joseph Breen and the Production Code Administration is more of a history of the PCA under Breen than a biography of the man. Doherty scantly records Breen's personal life and chiefly recounts his career as a PR wiz and administrator. It was Breen's successful promotion of the Eucharistic Congress of 1926, a Papist hoedown held in Chicago's Soldier Field, and his ties to the Roman Catholic hierarchy that made him seem to be a wise choice to enforce what was commonly known as the Hays Code. Will Hays, part of the shady brain trust behind Warren Harding, was President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The Production code had been formulated under Hays' auspices in 1930, but was not enforced until Breen took the reins of the PCA in 1934. Thus, the blessed Pre-Code era.

Doherty aptly illuminates how Breen's job was to run interference for an industry beset by various forms of local censorship. Six states already had censor boards as well as a host of municipalities. In devising a uniform censorship mechanism controlled by the industry, Hollywood producers wanted to vitiate the power of local censors. In this they were largely successful as Hollywood's Censor ably shows. Doherty is an academic and that has its good points and bad. Doherty's research is impressive. It is one thing to cite the Hollywood trade papers, but it is impressive to see such defunct magazine names as Liberty, New World, The Sign, Extension, America, and that grizzled survivor Yankee. Doherty also does a good job of combing through the Catholic press. He steers clear of academic jargon. I particularly enjoyed  him calling Columbia Studios head honcho Harry Cohn a "noted vulgarian". On the other hand, the book's detailing of the byzantine negotiations between the PCA, film producers, special interest groups and local censor boards, limits the appeal of this tome to only the hardiest of film buffs. 

Doherty's focus is often facile, we read pages on the wrangling with David O. Selznick over Rhett Butler's use of the word damn in Gone with the Wind (which has been written about extensively), but nothing about the inclusion of rape, Butterfly McQueen or the Klan in that chestnut. Most of the censorship battles recounted by Hollywood's Censor will be pretty old hat to film mavens. However, Doherty is strong on the Breen office's enforcement of racial guidelines. Most of its racial strictures would not have been considered progressive at the time, the prohibition against portrayals of miscegenation for example, but the Breen office also sought to eliminate the racial stereotypes (Stepin Fetchit, Fu Manchu) and epithets (#!&*) of the era. (A prime example is Raoul Walsh's The Bowery, unreleaseable today) By picking a Catholic for the job, the largely Jewish film magnates were cognizant that they aligning with a minority group based, as most Jews were, in urban areas rife with movie palaces.

Catholics, in this century, are lumped under the rubric White, but they were breeds apart from WASPs in the early 20th century. The revitalization of the Klan after World War had reignited anti-Catholic fervor to its highest point since the Know-Nothing era. One purpose of the Breen shepherded Eucharistic Congress was to show that Catholics in the US were also good patriots. The event was wrapped in the American flag, a strategy Hollywood often emulated. Jews were also targeted in the rising tide of bigotry, yet, like the Catholics, they craved assimilation.

I am a Catholic, but am ambivalent, at best, about the Church. The reason I bring this up, besides divulging my biases, is that I had a front row seat for a late show of censorship in this country. Growing up in Baltimore, I lived in a state with a censor board, formed in 1916 and disbanded to celebrate my twenty first birthday in 1981. I enjoyed reading about the board's misadventures in The Sun and the Catholic Review. Budding film buff Biff always eagerly opened the Catholic Review to find out which new films got the dreaded C rating. Films like A Clockwork Orange, The Damned, The Devils, The Exorcist, I endeavored to see all of them ASAP. I knew that Forever Amber had been Condemned in its day, but learned from reading Hollywood's Censor that Black Narcissus had met the same fate. What a tribute to Rumer Godden and the Archers!

A good look at the Maryland Censor Board from the other side of the lens is fellow lapsed Catholic John Waters first memoir, Shock Value. In it, he describes his battles with the Board and his pint-sized and vituperative nemesis, Mary Avara. Not shy about talking to the press, Avara did more to further Waters' career than any press agent could have. Shock Value, like all of Waters' books, is trenchant and witty.

In my experience, lapsed Catholics are easy to get along with, it is the relapsed one you need to look out for.

Mary Avara strikes a pose in her son's barber shop