That’s probably true.
Oh, come now.
I disagree, lissener; I think you’ve gotten it backwards. US culture has always had some degree of puritanical undertone, and the Hays Code was more an expression of this - a symptom, as it were - rather than a cause.
Blue laws, scarlet letters and other public punishments the purpose of which was to shame offenders into “proper” behavior, Prohibition…all of these predated the Code and were yet part of America’s Puritan heritage.
Now, I’m not defending the Code. But I think that others in this thread have expressed an incredible narrowmindedness by simply dismissing nearly four decades of American cinema because of it.
I disagree. There is nothing about the ability to express something directly that inhibits doing so subtly. I would make the analogy of someone who is injured in a terrible silo accident and must teach themselves to walk and feel pain again. It’s gratifying that people are able to accomplish such feats, and morally uplifting and so forth, but you have to wonder what all that effort and will would have accomplished had they not been using it to teach themselves stuff they already knew how to do. Let the Hayes code equal a terrible silo accident and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
I disagree. There is nothing about the ability to express something directly that inhibits doing so subtly, other than the fact that most of the time, direct expression is easier and works a lot better. I would make the analogy of someone who is injured in a terrible silo accident and must teach themselves to walk and feel pain again. It’s gratifying that people are able to accomplish such feats, and morally uplifting and so forth, but you have to wonder what all that effort and will would have accomplished had they not been using it to teach themselves stuff they already knew how to do. Let the Hayes code equal a terrible silo accident and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Movies with layers of meaning can be more interesting than movies with everything all out on the surface. The Hays Code drove certain subject matter into the shadows. In the hands of some directors, this translated to increased depths of “art.”
This is only one aspect; one interesting phenomenon that resulted from the Hays Code. Like, if there had been no predators in evolutionary history, it’s possible that flight might never have evolved.
The single silver lining in a pretty cloudy situation. Overall, as you would understand if you read my other posts above, I see the Hays Code as an abomination whose repercussions are still being hugely felt in today’s culture. Just because I point out one interesting silver lining doesn’t mean I’m celebrating the cloud.
I just meant to point out that the story was more complex than you seemed to suggest. The larger point, as I tried to make above, is that the Hays Code was not simply, one-dimensionally, all about preventing “The Thin Man” from being the masterpiece it would have been if Myrna Loy had worn crotchless leather panties and a ball gag.
But . . . you have a problem with the first part? You have no interest in reading a book on a subject to purport to have some knowlege of?
K.
Well, the ones that made it into my “life list” are:
The Crowd (1928)
Dead Man (1995)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
The General (1927)
Gilda (1946)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
The Naked Spur (1953)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Sunrise (1927)
Track of the Cat (1954)
Of the rest, there have been only 3 or 4 that I didn’t like, but that someday I’ll watch again to try to “get” why Rosenbaum included them. And these are the ones I have not been able to find:
Bigger Than Life (1956)
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974)
11 x 14 (1976)
Laughter (1930)
Lonesome (1929)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Man’s Castle (1933)
My Son John (1952)
Park Row (1952)
Scenes From Under Childhood (1970)
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Thunderbolt (1929)
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969)
Wanda (1971) [just released on DVD, so will see soon]
Some of the rarities that I have tracked down, I was reduced to finding through . . . questionable means. I remain hopeful that some day soon all of these titles will be easily available to anyone who wants to see them.
Disregarding the personal stuff, it’s interesting to note that the Hayes Code ushered in the area of Damsels in Distress who never fought to save themselves from attackers – because they weren’t supposed to. Fighting women were verboten. So of course they just stood around helplessly during fights. They weren’t SUPPOSED to fight. I would guess, though I don’t have any numbers to back it up, that this probably led to an increase in the number of mainstream bondage scenes, since if the villain couldn’t subdue the good girl by fighting her, he probably just tied her to a nice, comfy chair to show he was in control.
I find your theory intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Yes, like the original Father of the Bride – an absolutely horrible movie. Not that Steve Martin’s remake was much better on pure artistic terms, but at least it wasn’t quite as dumb-as-rocks sexist
No, you’re misunderstanding me. I have “no problem with” my familiarity of “great movies” because I’ve probably already seen them. Most of them two or three times. For instance, I’ve seen several hundred (300+) features from the 1930s.
On second thought, make that 400+ features from the 1930s.
I think the more powerful way to understand the damage wrought by the Hayes Code is to imagine the films that might have been made based on contemporary written works of the time, or rather, to imagine how badly bowdlerized they would have had to have been in order to be made under the Code. “Catcher in the Rye” anyone? “Lady Chatterley Lover” anyone? (Oh, hell you could pack practically everything D.H. Lawrence ever wrote in here.) “Strange Fruit” anyone? (I don’t think the Code looked kindly on miscegenation, which was still a crime in many states in Code days. Plus, they still lynched people for being black.)
And Hollywood MIGHT have made decent films out of controversial novels of the time, it wasn’t the timid place people imagine it to have been prior to the Hayes code. Here’s an interestng piece about pre-Hayes Code Warner Brothers.
Warning: the article cited above is not noticeably gay, but I’m pretty sure the site that hosts it is gay, or at least real gay friendly, not gay porn just gay outlook, so to speak, so you might want to be careful where you click if you’re at work or have kiddies reading over your shoulder. Yes, I’m talking to you, ex-Congressman Foley!
Sounds like a classic case of misspent youth to me.
I didn’t really complete my thoughts on that earlier post about the novels vs. the movies, which is that when you think about the really heavy stuff that was being written at the time, it sure makes the movies under the code look … lightweight … by comparison. They had a problem you see. The good guys had to win. And the bad girls couldn’t be bad in any of the ways that would explain the appeal of their badness. Really limits you. I’m reminded of one of the best critiques of my favorite playwright: “You can learn everything there is to know about human nature from reading Shaw, except that men and women are different sexes.”
The Production Code didn’t stay static over its 39-year history; it was modified from time to time. The prohibition against miscegenation was dropped in 1954, along with the taboo on some profane words (e.g., goddamn). Couples began to be seen in bed together around this time, too.
Even if there had been no ban on miscegenation, it’s unlikely any studio would have portrayed it in a movie before then; no general audience theater in the South would have shown it.
OK, I’ll try to be fair here. I’ve yet to see a color movie equivalent that had nearly the visual power of the old black and white noir films. (The closese I can think of is “The Usual Suspects” and it isn’t really a noir film.) The confluence of lack of technology (no color tech) lack of money (very little money to spend on lighting) and brilliant direction resulted in a genre that may well be timeless. And the Hayes Code may have contributed to that to some extent, as the directors tried to express the brutality of their characters and the darkness of the motives with lighting and dramatic camerawork rather than in more direct ways.
But I still think there was a whole lot more bathwater than baby in that Hayes Code cultural mix.
True enough, the Hayes ban on miscegenation was a product of the culture of the times and probably reflected the popular culture all too well. My problem with censorship generally is that most art is a dialogue between artists and audiences, and censorship is the more timid members of the audience saying, “You can’t have that dialogue, you must not say that, we are not ready to think it, we will put you in a cage if you say such things.” Once these feelings get passed into law (and it’s all too easy for it to happen, for governments love censorship, it broadens their powers remarkably) then the dialog is frozen, there are things the artist cannot say, and the audience cannot hear, much to everyone’s great loss, except for the timid, who also lose, but are generally too stupid to understand how they lose.
Reminds me of what a friend-of-a-friend and veteran of the McCarthy years once told me: “The blacklist wasn’t about Commies. It was about Jews, queers, and New Dealers.” He spoke with authority: he was all three.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there are still people on the right in this country who would rather we didn’t learn about, or from, the Thirties – if only because those three groups loom so large among the history, and historians, of that time. :rolleyes:
One of my fondest childhood memories was attending a Charlie Chaplin film festival with my grandfather. This would have been in the late '70s or very early '80s. We were both laughing so hard… and at times, not laughing. There are parts of Gold Rush that I can’t watch without crying, for example. BRILLIANT films… how could you not like those??