Basically what I meant was, when watching a crime film in the code era, you know for a fact that the criminal at the end is either going to be dead or in jail, or in a monastery (Brother Orchid), or a crazy homeless person wandering the streets (Scarlet Street). These movies are great fun to watch regardless, but it would be good if you didn’t know for a fact this would be the resolution every single time.
Yeah, that’s what censorship does for you. But I think the way to really understand how badly censorship treated American film, you need to compare what was going on in literature at the same time. There’s just no comparison between the intensity and power of American literature and American film during this period. American literature was an 800-pound gorilla and film was a 90-pound weakling. If there’d been no censorship, the gap wouldn’t have been so great.