Pre-Code Hollywood was an era in the American film industry that occurred between the widespread adoption of sound in film in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines (popularly known as the Hays Code) in 1934. Although the Hays Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor, and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934, with the establishment of the Production Code Administration. Before that date, film content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than by strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.
As a result, some films in the late 1920s and early 1930s depicted or implied sexual innuendo, romantic and sexual relationships between white and black people, mild profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence, and homosexuality. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions. For example, gangsters in films such as The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface were seen by many as heroic rather than evil. Strong female characters were ubiquitous in such pre-Code films as Female, Baby Face and Red-Headed Woman, among many others, which featured independent, sexually liberated women. Many of Hollywood's biggest stars, such as Clark Gable, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Edward G. Robinson, got their start in the era. However, other stars who excelled during this period, like Ruth Chatterton and Warren William (who is sometimes referred to as the "King of Pre-Code" and who died in 1948), would be largely forgotten by the general public within a generation.
Beginning in late 1933 and escalating throughout the first half of 1934, American Catholics launched a campaign against what they deemed the immorality of American cinema. Known as the Legion of Decency (formally, the National Legion of Decency), the campaign exerted intense pressure on the studio system to adopt the strict enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. This, along with a potential government takeover of film censorship and social research seeming to indicate that movies which were seen to be immoral could promote bad behavior, was enough pressure to force the studios to capitulate to greater oversight.
Origins of the Code (1915–1930)
Earliest attempts for the Code
In 1922, after some risqué films and a series of off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars, the studios enlisted Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays to rehabilitate Hollywood's image. Hays, later nicknamed the motion picture "Czar", was paid the then-lavish sum of $100,000 a year (equivalent to $1.5 million in 2025 dollars). Hays had previously served as U.S. Postmaster General under president Warren G. Harding and as the head of the Republican National Committee. At the time of his hiring, he was president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA); he held the position for 25 years and "defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing nostrums, and negotiated treaties to cease hostilities". Hollywood mimicked the decision Major League Baseball had made in hiring judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as League Commissioner the previous year to quell questions about the integrity of baseball in the wake of the 1919 World Series gambling scandal; The New York Times called Hays the "screen Landis".
In 1924, Hays introduced a set of recommendations dubbed "The Formula", which the studios were advised to heed, and asked filmmakers to describe to his office the plots of films they were planning. The Supreme Court had already decided unanimously in 1915 in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that free speech did not extend to motion pictures, and while there had been token attempts to clean up the movies before, such as when the studios formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI) in 1916, little had come of the efforts.
Creation of the Code and its contents
In 1929, Catholic layman Martin Quigley, editor of the prominent trade paper Motion Picture Herald, and Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, created a code of standards (of which Hays strongly approved) and submitted it to the studios. Lord's concerns centered on the effects sound film had on children, whom he considered especially susceptible to the medium's allure. Several studio heads, including Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), met with Lord and Quigley in February 1930. After some revisions, they agreed to the stipulations of the Code. One of the main motivating factors in adopting the Code was to avoid direct government intervention. It was the responsibility of the Studio Relations Committee, headed by Colonel Jason S. Joy, to supervise film production and advise the studios when changes or cuts were required.
This movement, soon formalised as the National Legion of Decency, in 1934 mobilised parishioners through sermons, printed leaflets and pages, and mass boycotting of all films deemed immoral. This economic pressure suffocated the studios to the extent that they accepted the new set of standards informally imposed upon them. By mid 1934 the campaign had become a significant national movement which triggered a transformation of the constraints within cinematic curation for years to come.
The Code was divided into two parts. The first was a set of "general principles" that mostly concerned morality. The second was a set of "particular applications", an exacting list of items that could not be depicted. Some restrictions, such as the ban on homosexuality or the use of specific curse words, were never directly mentioned but were assumed to be understood without clear demarcation. Miscegenation, the mixing of the races, was forbidden. The Code stated that the notion of an "adults-only policy" would be a dubious, ineffective strategy that would be difficult to enforce. However, it did allow that "maturer minds may easily understand and accept without harm subject matter in plots which does younger people positive harm." If children were supervised and the events implied elliptically, the code allowed what Brandeis University cultural historian Thomas Doherty called "the possibility of a cinematically inspired thought crime".
The Code sought not only to determine what could be portrayed on screen, but also to promote conservative traditional values. Sexual relations outside of marriage could not be portrayed as attractive and beautiful, presented in a way that might arouse passion or be made to seem right and permissible. All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience. Authority figures had to be treated respectfully, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear that they were the exception to the rule.
The entire document contained Catholic undertones and stated that art must be handled carefully because it could be "morally evil in its effects" and because its "deep moral significance" was unquestionable. The Catholic influence on the Code was initially kept secret, owing to the Anti-Catholic bias of the time. A recurring theme was "throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong and good is right." The Code contained an addendum, commonly referred to as the Advertising Code, that regulated film advertising copy and imagery.
Enforcement
On February 19, 1930, Variety published the entire contents of the Code. Soon the men obligated to enforce the code – Jason Joy, who was the head of the Committee until 1932, and his successor, Dr. James Wingate – would be seen as generally ineffective. The first film the office reviewed, The Blue Angel, which was passed by Joy without revision, was considered indecent by a Californian censor. Although there were several instances where Joy negotiated cuts from films, and there were indeed definite, albeit loose, constraints, a significant amount of lurid material made it to the screen.
Joy had to review 500 films a year using a small staff and little power. The Hays office did not have the authority to order studios to remove material from a film in 1930, but instead worked by reasoning and sometimes pleading with them. Complicating matters, the appeals process ultimately put the responsibility for making the final decision in the hands of the studios themselves.
The Payne Fund Studies (1929–1933) provided scientific support for the enforcement of the code. The series of research projects evaluated the effects of motion picture on children, conducted by academic psychologists and sociologists. The findings acted as scientific support for the Code, they concluded that films had an impact on a child's sleep patterns, social behavior and attitudes due to repeated exposure to immoral themes such as sexual content and crime. The studies received widespread recognition and played an indispensable role in shaping societies concern of film content, despite the criticisms of methodological flaws. Their findings were cited by religious groups, policymakers and academics and formed a large pressure for stricter regulation of Hollywood prior to the enforcement of the Production Code Administration in 1934.
One factor in ignoring the Code was the fact that some found such censorship prudish. This was a period in which the Victorian era was sometimes ridiculed as being naïve and backward. When the Code was announced, The Nation, a liberal periodical, attacked it. The publication stated that if crime were never presented in a sympathetic light, then, taken literally, "law" and "justice" would become the same. Therefore, events such as the Boston Tea Party could not be portrayed. And if clergy were always to be presented positively, then hypocrisy could not be examined either. The Outlook agreed.
Additionally, the Great Depression of the 1930s motivated studios to produce films with racy and violent content, which boosted ticket sales. Soon, the flouting of the code became an open secret. In 1931, The Hollywood Reporter mocked the code, and Variety followed suit in 1933. In the same year as the Variety article, a noted screenwriter stated that "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's just a memory."
Early sound film era
Although the liberalization of sexuality in American film had increased during the 1920s, the pre-Code era is either dated generally to the start of the sound film era, or more specifically to March 1930, when the Hays Code was first written. Over the protests of NAMPI, New York became the first state to take advantage of the Supreme Court's 1915 decision in Mutual Film vs. Ohio by instituting a censorship board in 1921. Virginia followed suit the next year, and eight individual states had a board by the advent of sound film.
Many of these boards were ineffectual. By the 1920s, the New York stage, a frequent source of subsequent screen material, had topless shows; performances were filled with profanity, mature subject matter, and sexually suggestive dialogue. Early during the sound system conversion process, it became apparent that what might be acceptable in New York would not be so in Kansas. In 1927, Hays suggested studio executives form a committee to discuss film censorship. Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Sol Wurtzel of Fox, and E. H. Allen of Paramount responded by collaborating on a list they called the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls", based on items that were challenged by local censor boards, and which consisted of eleven subjects best avoided, and twenty-six to be handled very carefully. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the list, and Hays created the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) to oversee its implementation. However, there was still no way to enforce these tenets. The controversy surrounding film standards came to a head in 1929.
Director Cecil B. DeMille was responsible for the increasing discussion of sex in cinema in the 1920s. Starting with Male and Female (1919), he made a series of films that examined sex and were highly successful. Films featuring Hollywood's original "It girl" Clara Bow such as The Saturday Night Kid (released four days before the October 29th, 1929, market crash) highlighted Bow's sexual attractiveness. 1920s stars such as Bow, Gloria Swanson, and Norma Talmadge freely displayed their sexuality in a straightforward fashion.
Hollywood during the Great Depression
The Great Depression presented a unique time for filmmaking in the United States. The economic disaster brought on by the stock market crash of 1929 changed American values and beliefs in various ways. The myths of rugged individualism, material progress, upward mobility, frontier opportunity and American exceptionalism wilted before a landscape of breadlines and Hoovervilles, forgotten men and fallen women. Due to the constant empty economic reassurances from politicians in the early years of the Depression, the American public developed an increasingly jaded attitude.
The cynicism, challenging of traditional beliefs, and political controversy of Hollywood films during this period mirrored the attitudes of many of their patrons. Also gone was the carefree and adventurous lifestyle of the 1920s. "After two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the war", F. Scott Fitzgerald commented in 1931. In the sense noted by Fitzgerald, understanding the moral climate of the early 1930s is complex. Although films experienced an unprecedented level of freedom and dared to portray things that would be kept hidden for several decades, many in America looked upon the stock market crash as a product of the excesses of the previous decade. In looking back upon the 1920s, events were increasingly seen as occurring in prelude to the market crash. In Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), lurid party scenes featuring 1920s flappers are played to excess. Joan Crawford ultimately reforms her ways and is saved; less fortunate is William Bakewell, who continues on the careless path that leads to his ultimate self-destruction.