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Sex, Religion And Politics: How The Hollywood Production Code Shaped American Film

MGM
A scene from the 1932 film Gabriel over the White House.

For the most part, we don’t make political films – at least not films that are about the nature of politics or political systems. We make films about political events. Films like All the President’s Men, The Candidate, The Best Man, Advise and Consent, Seven Days in May, or even trifles like Dave or The American President are not really about politics, political ideas or philosophies. They’re about action, like The Washington Post uncovering the Watergate scandal. Or they’re about things like an attempted coup, or a Senate confirmation or a political contest in which at least one of the candidates has to confront the temptations to corruption.

There are reasons American filmmakers are wary of political films. Hollywood has mocked and rejected message movies for over a century. We Americans are also typically stand-offish about anything that smells of social or political theory. Beyond these tendencies, though are a couple of major events in film history.

In 1930, the Hollywood studios gave in to pressure to control both the content of the movies and the scandalous behavior of people who made movies by producing a censorship document called The Hollywood Production Code. The Code curtailed sex on screen, and also political material – the movies were required to uphold the honor and legitimacy of civil and religious authorities. BUT, the producers thought simply writing the code was enough. They didn’t want to enforce it – until the various censorship groups around the country insisted. That came in the summer of 1934, so films made between 1930 and mid 1934 are now called pre-Code pictures, and for about four years they had something of a field day with sex and politics.

On the political front, in 1933, William Wellman made Heroes for Sale, about the miseries of the Great Depression, the country’s lack of concern for the millions in poverty and in particular about how the country had betrayed the veterans of World War I. At the climax, the police confront veterans on a protest march and via bullhorn tell them to go home. The veterans reply, “We have no homes,” a line that carries a potent political load and would frankly never show up again in American movies, even now.

But the 1932 film Gabriel over the White House, also a picture of the Great Depression, goes well beyond the protest of Heroes for Sale. A callow young man becomes president. Next thing, his girlfriend shows up at the door of the White House – things were simpler then – to spend the night with her man. This president, played by Walter Huston, mostly carouses until he crashes his fancy car one afternoon, gets a head injury and comes out of the hospital with a new-found concern for the state of the union. Apparently, the president needs a conk on the head to become a decent person. Except he turns into a fascist, dismisses Congress and governs the country by fiat, not democracy. The Code would not approve either of these films.

The other event that shut down any real politics in American film came after World War II, when the House Committee on un-American Activities of the Congress investigated supposed Communist influence over the movies. There was none; it was a witch hunt, but enough people in Hollywood were blacklisted and denied work that it put a longtime fright into the movie community as a whole. And that was pretty much the end of genuine politics in our movies.

Warren Beatty managed to make Reds in 1981, in which there’s a lot of political talk, but the characters are safely identified as kindly relics who had little or no influence on America. Other than that, though, our political movies validate the ultimate goodness of our political system. There may be corruption or even crime, but honest people prevail, and the system responds to make things good again. The free press uncovers the Watergate perpetrators and American democracy is rescued. It’s a little smug.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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