Red-Headed Woman, 1932

I had always believed, naively, that the Hays Code came about because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of film: Hollywood censors, stupidly assuming that film’s purpose was to entertain the masses, failed to accord the medium the liberty accorded to art. In fact, the issue was never about art at all. It was much simpler and stupider – instigated by a movie company, Mutual Film Corporation, that sued the state of Ohio for its censorship which the company felt kept it from making the kind of sexy movies that would make serious money. The 1915 Supreme Court decision, Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, was based on whether movies were a “business” UNLIKE the press, which was free under the first amendment. Yes, movies were a mere business and therefor not entitled to the protection that the media enjoyed: “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit … not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion.” This decision forced Hollywood to pursue the lesser of two evils and create its own code to keep the serious oppressor at bay.

On what planet are newspapers not also businesses? The truly sinister thing, of course, is that this early collusion of filmmakers and the courts by pretending that film was a business and therefore not new media quietly made the industry into a political arm, a silent purveyor of perverted values (racist, sexist, classist). The Motion Picture Commission created a code in 1921, but it was fairly ineffectual – Hollywood, after all, had a lot to lose. However, in June, 1934, supported by the “Catholic Legion of Decency,” invented just for the occasion, an amendment to the Code required all films released after July 1, 1934 to be approved. This time the Code was applied with the brutal precision under the direction of Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA). Benjamin had not yet alerted the world to the dangers of the aestheticized politics – not that America would have listened! The ludicrous state of affairs continued until 1952, when in Joseph Burstyn, Inc., versus Wilson, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision. Film was now entitled to First Amendment protection, and the New York State Board of Regents was not permitted to ban The Miracle.

So I have been watching films that slipped in before the code went brutal, wondering what Hollywood might have been. The answer is violent earlier on with bad gangsters coming out on top. And bizarrely obsessively interested in prostitution.

Why all the interest in the murky boundary between legitimate relationships and prostitution? The 1932 Jean Harlow vehicle Red-Headed Woman (where her hair looks like Barbie doll hair) has Lil pimping herself to move ever higher on the income scale. First she steals an incredibly stolid rich young guy away from his wife, then after they get married, she bags the guy’s father-in-law. Much humiliation for poor Lil from the New Yorkers who won’t accept her as part of their crowd, then the whole things ends in Paris where we are given to know that she has nabbed an even richer guy.

Irving Thalberg, apparently worried that the screenplay as originally written by F. Scott Fitzgerald (what??) was too ponderous, had Anita Loos re-do the thing into a punchier, more playful version. One assumes that this accounts for the insane careens of tone – are we meant to laugh or cry at Lil’s ability to snap her fingers and make men grovel? Is her sexual power a joke or the product of male phantasmagoria? An effort to contain the danger of female sexuality through ridicule or demystification? Apparently the censoring powers were nervous that Lil got away with her astonishing social climb, and the film led directly to greater control even though it was a big box office success because of the controversy that it generated.

Watching this and a series of other films from before the big crackdown makes one wonder if we really missed anything, anyway? How much musing over the immediate and uncontrollable male attraction to prostitutes do we need? And if we slip over to consider what the women in the audience were watching, how many times do we need be told that it’s a tough life – the only way up is to sell yourself? The themes continued just slightly less obviously (it is after all the big Hollywood story that a beautiful young woman snags a big rich guy). As far as I can see, pre-censorship Hollywood was not producing serious meditations on these issues – or any other social issues – anyway. Had Hollywood remained uncensored we would have seen more beautiful young women lying around in obvious post-coital positions, but their stories would have been no more probing than they turned out to be in post-code Hollywood.