Anita and the Hays Code

Lorelei and Dorothy, Two Pre-Code Girls, If Ever There Were

You’ve likely heard of the Code, or perhaps the Hays Code. Or, perhaps you’ve tuned into Turner Classic Movies and seen a film advertised as Pre-Code.

If you’ve found yourself uncertain about what these labels mean, that’s understandable.

The “Code” has come to stand for film censorship. But the Code was never just one thing, nor did it appear at a singular point in time. Moreover, if you take the Code to mean censorship, it also never had a solo author nor emanated from a one place in the country.

Further confusing things: Tangled up in the Code are questions of money, censorship, morality, government regulation, the question of what kind of an object a movie might be, and even antisemitism. Different parties involved in implementing the Code had their own reasons for doing so.

To be sure, there were concerns about morality coming from various social organizations, including religious and women’s uplift groups. These bodies held concerns about movie-obsessed children and the young working women and working class immigrants they viewed as particularly susceptible to criminality.

While the social organizations complained to local and national governments about immoral films and called for censorship of the pictures playing at local theaters, theater owners, too, wanted to exert more control and blamed studios for forcing them to show salacious pictures under the practice of block booking. Finally, studios had their own problems before the Code, with individual state censorship boards that made it challenging for filmmakers to decide how or whether to meet local demands.

One aspect of Hollywood film censorship that the casual film buff may misunderstand is that, like any slasher ready to slice away at sexy young things (in this case, pre-Code films, not co-eds), the call was coming from inside the house. With all the various calls to censorship, film industry leaders knew something needed to be done. Studio heads such as MGM’s Irving Thalberg understood that if the film industry did not self-regulate, the government would likely step in, and that would be worse.

Better to comply yourself than have Uncle Sam come in as enforcer. In 1927, Thalberg headed a committee for Will Hays to develop an initial list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” as a sort of instruction manual to filmmakers.

One other common confusion: although his name is popularly attached to this era of censorship, Will Hays was only one among many authors of the code. Hays had a background in politics, having served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. He performed his work for the Motion Picture Production Producers and Distributors of America as a sort of go-between, representing the film industry as a business and negotiating public relations with politicians, religious leaders, and theater owners. Also important to the Code’s implementation were Joseph Breen, who headed the Production Code Administration, and Jason Joy, who headed the earlier Studio Relations Committee (SRC)—it was these men who oversaw the application of the Code to films. In some ways, these two men did more of the work that we typically ascribe to Hays.

While the 1927 list of cautions offered advice based on common concerns of various local censorship boards—a gathering of the nation’s moral sensitivities and prejudices—it was administered without any real teeth and following these cautions was largely voluntary.

In 1930, a more elaborate version of the Code was drafted, pulled from a version written by Thalberg and a version written by Martin Quigley.  Films that “passed” received a PCA stamp of approval. However, this Code’s implementation was still largely a matter of goodwill between studios and the SRC. Some studios did collaborate, but various film cycles focused on sex and criminality such as “gold digger” and fallen women films and gangster films appeared during this time.

It was not until 1934 that the Code went into full effect, partly in response to these scandalous film cycles, which included movies such as Baby Face and The Public Enemy, but also the economic woes of the Depression. In order to keep government and public goodwill toward the industry in a time of struggle, Hays and his colleagues argued that the Code now needed stricter enforcement. The SRC became the Production Code Administration (PCA). In order to receive distribution, films now needed a PCA seal of approval. Hollywood was fully in the Hays Code era.

However, the distinction between pre and post is not as sharp as some would have it.

Fans of classic Hollywood films sometimes fetishize pre-Code naughtiness. But 1930s films described as Pre-Code were already being made with an eye to the list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” and even a scandalous film like Red-Headed Woman, which Loos wrote as a vehicle for Jean Harlow, was subject to back-and-forth negotiations between the studio and Joy’s SRC. Box sets like this one overstate the case. (Also, this particular boxed set produced by Hugh Hefner, something I’m always going to be skeptical about.)

This is not to say that the Code’s increased and more official implementation in 1934 didn’t have real effects. For example, the 1931 film Iron Man couldn’t meet with Code approval for a re-release in 1936, largely due to the presence of Jean Harlow. (For more detail on Harlow, Anita, and the Code, see the previous post.)

A February 20th 1936 letter from Joseph Breen to Harry Zehner regarding the re-issue of  Iron Man, finds the film ineligible for PCA certification, citing specific moments across the reels, but opening and closing the letter with broader concerns about Harlow’s body, first noting “the great number of scenes throughout the picture in which Miss Harlow’s breasts are indecently exposed,” and then concluding with the judgment that reworking Iron Man was nearly impossible because of Harlow’s presence: “It would, of course, be possible to make several of the above eliminations successfully, but the objectionable costumes worn by Miss Harlow, and the shots exposing her person, are so numerous throughout the picture that it would seem to us to be an almost impractible job to attempt to delete them. However, unless they are deleted it is our opinion that we could not issue a certificate for the picture.”

While not a libertine, Anita hated hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), she created a character to satirize the men who ran local censoring boards. The foolish Henry Spoffard character is a wealthy dullard-hypocrite of whom Lorelei recounts: “he really does not seem to enjoy anything so much as senshuring photoplays and after a photoplay has once been senshured he seems to lose all of his interest in it”

Although Anita and Irving Thalberg worked with the SRC to get approval for Red-Headed Woman, Anita’s general distaste for censors remains in the film. When relaying her encounter with married boss Bill Legender to her friend Sally (Una Merkel), Harlow’s character recounts: “And there we were like an uncensored movie when in walks Mrs. William Legender, Jr. and catches us.”

The result of the Code was not perfectly sanitized filmmaking. Instead, the 1940s saw a wave of dark, often amoral films that pressed adult material into the subtext. Later, French film critics would begin referring to these as noir. 

Obviously, Anita was no noir screenwriter. By the 1940s, she was on her way to the Broadway phase of her career.

For a more detailed history of the Code, visit the University of Flinders archive, which I relied upon to construct this abbreviated history:

https://library.flinders.edu.au/mppda