Mount TBR #56

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code – Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons

Before the sound era ushered them out, silent movies became more daring in themes and risqué in content. A couple of Hollywood scandals and high-profile OD deaths fired up the bluenoses and government at the federal, state and municipal levels started making ominous growls about censorship. To police themselves, Hollywood moguls hired General Will Hays to enforce his Motion Picture Production Code, a set of guidelines as to what content was acceptable and unacceptable in movies. The Code ruled from 1930 to about 1968, when it was replaced by the ratings system we are familiar with today.

This book is a fairly readable account of the rise and fall of the Code, with a special emphasis on the Breen era. The authors are sympathetic to Joseph Breen. He was caught between the movie makers, who naturally wanted to push the boundaries of content and theme, and the censorship boards, who naturally wanted to protect citizens from salacious content and choke off material that might provoke independent thought and subsequent social change. I think Breen sympathy is appropriate and I came away from the book with a more tolerant view of the rough row Breen and his successors had to hoe. 

The prose is wordy in places, so much so that even a hard-core reader wonders if the point is coming any time soon. This is off-putting to the general reader and probably maddening to film / media studies students. With the student market in mind, what is probably more frustrating to youth is that the authors make the expert’s error because they seem to assume the reader knows more than she really does. Fatty who scandal?!.