Film Censorship

Definition: Suppression of film content through industry self-regulation or through legislation

Significance: As film developed into one of the dominant mass media of the early twentieth century, it became a principal battleground between forces advocating censorship and those demanding freedom of expression

In 1894 an Atlantic City peep show production of Dolorita in the Passion Dance aroused the first U.S. protest against film immorality. In 1897 Orange Blossoms was banned in New York as offensive to public morals. In the socially and politically turbulent decades following the Civil War, government, religious, and civic spokespersons for conventional standards feared the spread of socially, sexually, and politically subversive ideas among the increasingly literate masses, who included freed slaves and their descendants, women agitating for rights, and unprecedented numbers of immigrants. Silent films posed even more of a threat than did printed materials, since literacy, or literacy in English, was not necessary for understanding silent films. A similar controversy stirred in Great Britain, then experiencing agitation from Irish nationalists and suffrage fighters, as well as marked class division. The British Board of Film Censors was created in 1912.

Local attempts to censor films spread rapidly. Chicago set up a municipal censorship board in 1907; the city’s police chief was empowered to withhold a permit from any film he deemed offensive or obscene. In the first court censorship case, Block v. City of Chicago (1909), the court upheld the Chicago ordinance. That case involved two films perceived as glamorizing crime. In 1908 New York City’s mayor closed all motion picture theaters; exhibitors obtained court injunctions and reopened, but could not admit children under sixteen unaccompanied by adults. In 1911 Pennsylvania passed the first state censorship law, followed in 1913 by Ohio and Kansas and, in 1916, by Maryland. In 1915 deciding the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the validity of the state censorship laws by ruling that First Amendment freedom of expression did not protect motion pictures, which were a business, not an organ of the press or public opinion.

Industry Self-regulation

Since New York was then the center of film production, as well as entertainment, New York exhibitors and filmmakers created a self-censorship body in 1909—the New York Board of Censorship of Programs of Motion Picture, renamed the National Board of Censorship later that year. In 1915 they created the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, in the hope that self-regulation would eliminate local censorship and efforts, beginning in 1914, to create a federal system of censorship. In 1916 film producers and directors formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), again to forestall censorship efforts.

Reasons for Censorship

Early film censorship was unpredictable. In 1912 Congress used interstate commerce laws to prohibit films showing boxing; this law was passed after African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson beat the white former champion Jim Jeffries. Fear of race riots was the stated reason for the legislation. Educational birth control and venereal disease films, including reformer Margaret Sanger’s film, were banned in New York in 1917. Sanger’s film was banned not only because of its topic, according to New York City license commissioner George H. Bell, but also because it promoted contempt for existing law and emphasized the contrast between the lives of the rich and the poor.

Most famous of the pre-World War I attempts at censorship involved D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which, because of its racist depictions of African Americans, was challenged more than one hundred times between 1915 and 1980 and was banned or cut in about sixty cases. In Great Britain early restrictions against representing nudity and the figure of Jesus Christ were, by the outbreak of World War I, augmented by restrictions limiting, for example, the kind of dancing portrayed, the disparagement of public institutions and characters, and native customs, if offensive by British standards. No successful interracial marriages could be shown.

Censorship efforts became more vigorous with the outbreak of the war in 1914 and, by the end of the war, the fear that the successful Russian Revolution of 1917 would spread communism worldwide. European production cutbacks during the war, among other factors, made Hollywood the leader in film production, but Hollywood was strongly influenced by postwar fears of social change. Russian revolutionist Vladimir Ilich Lenin believed that film was the art form most important to revolutionary success; Russian cinema turned to the celebration of communist ideology. This reinforced fears in Western nations that film would become a vehicle for communist propaganda. In 1918 David Niles, chief of the film section of the U.S. Department of Labor, threatened federal censorship for studios that failed to consult him about representations of socialism or labor unrest. In 1919 Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane met with producers and distributors to discuss ways of controlling radicalism, Bolshevism, and discontent with American values. In 1926 the International Motion Picture Congress, affiliated with the League of Nations, ruled that the government and conditions of life of Soviet Russia were to be ignored.

Hollywood scandals further intensified fear that films would subvert traditional values. Although viewers demanded sensational pictures, conservative forces reacted against them and against Hollywood lifestyles, as suggested by the sensational trial of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle for manslaughter in 1921 and the murder of William Desmond Taylor the following year. During 1921, almost one hundred censorship acts were introduced into the legislatures of thirty-seven states. In response, the industry organized the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America (MPPDA) to replace NAMPI, and requested Will H. Hays, postmaster general of the United States, to be president. Hays was effective in defeating local and state legislation; despite repeated efforts, no state passed censorship legislation after 1922.

The Hays Code

Hays's name would eventually become synonymous with the various rules and codes that would dominate film censorship for decades, popularly known as the Hays Code. In 1924 Hays presented MPPDA with a formula by which the Hays office would judge the suitability of each work considered for filming. In 1926 he created a Studio Relations Department to draw up a code of subjects unsuitable for filming. This permissive system changed in 1929 (by which time the silent film had been superseded by sound) with the writing of the Motion Picture Production Code by two Roman Catholic spokespersons, Martin Quigley and the Rev. Daniel A. Lord, foreshadowing the increasingly potent Catholic Legion of Decency (1934), which threatened organized Catholic film boycotts. At a 1934 rally in Cleveland, fifty thousand persons applauded Bishop Joseph Schrembs’s vow to purify or destroy Hollywood; some priests and Catholic periodicals declared that going to the theater was a venial sin and that attendance at a film condemned by the church a mortal sin. The twenty-two-million-member Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America threatened to seek federal censorship.

Hays, a noted conservative, welcomed the production code. In 1930 he hired publicity agent Joseph I. Breen from Quigley. In 1934 the Studio Relations Committee of MPPDA became the Production Code Administration (PCA) under Breen’s leadership; apart from a brief period of employment with RKO studio, Breen remained PCA censor until 1954. PCA enforced the code through its seal of approval, without which films could not be released, exhibited, or distributed. Existing films had to be submitted for approval. Breen blocked, for example, reissue of Mae West’s 1933 She Done Him Wrong in 1935 and 1949. He barred Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar (1931) and James Cagney’s Public Enemy (1931) until 1953. Other films were to be cut or remade.

The 1934 code was modified several times, with codes on crime (1938), costume (1939), profanity (1939), and cruelty to animals (1940) added or modified. Its basis remained three principles: No film should lower the moral standards of the audience, only correct standards of life should be shown, and no natural or human law should be ridiculed, nor should sympathy be created for law’s violators. Specifically banned were portrayals of the drug traffic, sex perversion; white slavery, miscegenation, childbirth, and sexual diseases. Films about crime could not teach criminal methods, justify criminals, or inspire imitation.

Political Issues in the 1930s

By the mid-1930s, political changes created new censorship issues in the United States and abroad. After protests from the Nazi German government, for example, Breen tried to get MGM to cancel production of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades (1937), since Remarque was among the authors banned in Nazi Germany. If the production continued, Breen urged that the story’s action be changed to pre-Nazi times. He urged removal of references to anti-Semitism and book burning and asked that Nazi agitators be changed to Communists. In 1941 a Senate committee accused Hollywood of offending Germany with anti-Nazi films. Pro-Soviet films were locally banned, as were films, such as Walter Wanger’s Blockade (1938), sympathetic to antifascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. The Knights of Columbus and the Legion of Decency opposed Blockade, after which the Legion proposed screening films for false political, religious, and moral doctrine.

These issues mirrored international developments. Blockade was banned in eleven countries. Many countries banned American gangster films, and in the 1930s political issues gained significance. In 1938 for example, France banned films apt to shock foreign sensibilities and provoke diplomatic incidents, while demanding advance approval of films relating to national defense, public institutions, and French or foreign officials. In Italy, ruled by Fascist powers under Benito Mussolini after 1922, the privately owned L’Unione Cinematrografia Educativa (LUCE) was taken into state control and directed to make and distribute patriotic films designed to correct public taste. Screening of LUCE films became compulsory in Italian movie houses. In Germany, governed by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler after 1933, state control was comprehensive. After 1936, the film industry was purged of Jews, film criticism was abolished, and the industry was nationalized. American films were banned in 1939. In England, at the outbreak of war in 1939, a Censorship Division of the Ministry of Information imposed security censorship.

The 1940s

With U.S. entry into World War II in 1941, a law enacted during World War I went into effect again. The law dictated that all foreign films be screened and granted permits before entering the country. No national censorship law for U.S. films existed, although one was briefly proposed under the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, but, in June, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Office of War Information (OWI). While OWI claimed to oppose censorship, its Bureau of Motion Pictures attempted to prevent release of films deemed harmful to war policy or to relationships with U.S. allies. Studios were asked to submit all scripts for review. When OWI asked for review of synopses and cuts of films immediately before prints were made, the studios rebelled. OWI backed down. Nevertheless, in 1942 OWI banned exportation of films that predicted a long war, portrayals of labor or class conflict since World War I, and scenes of ungoverned lawlessness.

In 1945, at the war’s end, Hays resigned as MPPDA president and was replaced by Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who changed MPPDA’s name to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). It was based in Washington, D.C. The PCA office in Hollywood was known as the “Breen Office.” While Breen upheld prewar principles of censorship in demanding changes and banning sexually explicit advertising in such films as Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw (completed in 1941; released in 1946), new forms of self-censorship emerged as a result of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

House Committee on Un-American Activities

Committee hearings on communist involvement in Hollywood began in 1947 under J. Parnell Thomas and were revived in 1951 under Senator Joseph McCarthy. Best known among those condemned by the committee, also known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC, were the Hollywood Ten—seven writers, two directors, and one producer who were blacklisted. Hundreds more suffered directly as a result of HUAC activities and of a related “gray” list of suspected communists established by the American Legion. At a November 24, 1947, meeting of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, studio heads committed themselves to refusing employment to communists or other suspected subversives. Denied work, those accused of communist activities left the country, left the profession, or found work under pseudonyms or friends’ names. Although the postwar public showed interest in mature social themes, under HUAC pressure, social-problem themes in film decreased precipitously from 1947 to 1953.

Postwar International Films

As Hollywood themes narrowed, international films developed, many displaying the social realism and sexual openness prohibited in the United States. In Japan, U.S. occupation forces from 1945 to 1952 encouraged the development of Japanese productions for an international market. Japan’s film industry, before the war, had been second in size to that of the United States but Japanese films were rarely seen outside Japan and Japanese-dominated territories. Although U.S. occupation forces censored films, some Japanese producers found such censorship less burdensome than prewar Japanese censorship. Postwar Italy, between 1945 and a new set of censorship restrictions in 1949, offered neorealist films, which took up the serious social issues demanded by postwar audiences. One of the most important to U.S. censorship issues was Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), condemned by Breen because it portrays a child urinating and a bordello. Film distributor Joseph Burstyn defied Breen, releasing the film without a seal of approval; the film won the 1950 Academy Award for best foreign film. Major theaters showed the film, although it lacked a seal, the first successful, major defiance of the code since 1934.

The Decline of the Hays Code

The collapse of the studio system helped limit censorship. In 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. Paramount Pictures, ruled that studio control of production, distribution, and exhibition violated antitrust laws. As studios divested themselves of theater holdings, theater owners had greater freedom in selecting films. In 1942, as the Department of Justice pursued antitrust charges, Will Hays, on advice of attorneys, stipulated that theater owners could no longer be fined under the code; only producers and distributors could be penalized. This opened the way to the showing of films such as The Bicycle Thief and Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle (1951), in which parallels between the heroine and Mary, mother of Christ, provoked attack by the Legion of Decency, picket lines, and bomb threats. The film was banned in New York. Distributor Burstyn appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court (Burstyn v. Wilson), which reversed the Mutual Film decision of 1915. In 1952 the Supreme Court ruled that films were protected by the First Amendment.

Further Challenges

In 1953 the code was again challenged when Breen opposed release of The Moon Is Blue (1953) because of specific words, including “virgin” and “pregnant,” and the suggestion that someone can be both immoral and likable—an impossibility under the code. Producer Otto Preminger released the film. Its banning in Kansas led to a 1955 Supreme Court case (Holmby Productions, Inc. v. Vaughan) that overturned the Kansas censorship and invalidated the state’s censorship law. The six existing state censorship boards also were called into question when New York banned Walt Disney’s The Vanishing Prairie (1954) because it depicted a buffalo giving birth. Other challenges to censorship followed, both because of the increasing audience for foreign films and because Hollywood was beset by labor problems and by competition from television as well as from film imports. Studios, and increasingly important independent producers, needed to compete with European sexual openness and social realism.

Breen retired in 1954. Geoffrey Shurlock, Breen’s chief assistant since 1934, became PCA director. During his fourteen-year term, he allowed expansion of what was permissible. The success of Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) pointed to the need for code revision; while approved by the Legion of Decency, the film, which deals with drug addiction, could not be passed under the code. The 1956 code revisions dropped the prohibition of miscegenation, drug addiction, abortion, prostitution, and kidnapping.

The 1960s and Beyond

In 1966 Jack Valenti succeeded Eric Johnston as MPAA president. When Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was denied a seal that year, Valenti recommended that the film be released as appropriate for mature audiences only. This opened the way to the MPAA rating system formally adopted November 1, 1968. The original ratings were G for general audience, M for mature audience, R for restricted, with no admission to young people under sixteen unless accompanied by an adult, and X, which barred persons under sixteen from admission. A Code and Ratings Administration replaced the PCA. The age of admittance for R- and X-rated films was raised to seventeen in 1970, and M was changed to PG, for suggested parental guidance.

State and local censorship efforts continued in the United States, with court cases focusing on obscenity as in the censorship of Deep Throat (1972), banned in twenty-three states and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), banned in eleven. In 1984 the ratings system gained the PG-13 category as a guideline for material that parents might object to for children under thirteen, but no admittance restrictions were included. Strong censorship also continued to exist in other nations, especially in the Middle East. Censorship efforts, however, were increasingly frustrated by the internationalism of filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as by technological advances, including the easy reproduction and transportation, legal or illegal, of films.

Yet although total censorship became more difficult, the suppression of certain content in the mass market remained in place through economic and cultural pressures. Boycotts became a popular way for interest groups to protest the availability of films they considered offensive, as in the case of religious groups demonstrating against The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. In 1990 the MPAA's X rating was replaced with the NC-17 category, mainly as a way to distinguish between artistic films that may contain explicit content from outright pornography labeling itself XXX, but conservative interest groups prevented many large retailers from stocking copies of NC-17 films. Retailers Blockbuster, Walmart, and K-Mart all refused to sell the director's cut of the violent film Natural Born Killers (1994). NC-17 and unrated films continued to be of limited availability to most audiences into the twenty-first century, with no such films becoming a major box-office hit. Because of this, directors often feel pressured to cut potentially offensive content in order to obtain an R rating.

Another method of economic suppression of films is the denial of the incentives that many states offer to productions that film in those states. For example, the Texas Film Commission denied incentives to Robert Rodriguez's films Machete and Machete Kills because it felt that the films portrayed Texas and its citizens in a bad light; Rodriguez's production company, Machete Productions, sued the commission, claiming that the incentives were denied because of anti-immigrant sentiment.

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Geltzer, Jeremy. Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures: Film and the First Amendment. Austin: U of Texas p, 2015. Print.

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