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摘要
摘要
After a series of sex scandals rocked the film industry in 1922, movie moguls hired Will Hays to clear the image of movies. Hays tried a variety of ways to regulate movies before adopting what became known as the production code. Written in 1930 by a St Louis priest, the code stipulated that movies stress proper behaviour, respect for government, and 'Christian values'. The Catholic Church reinforced these efforts by launching its Legion of Decency in 1934. Intended to force Hays and Hollywood to censor films, the Legion of Decency engineered the appointment of Joseph Breen as head of the Production Code Administration. For the next three decades, Breen, Hays, and the Catholic Legion of Decency virtually controlled the content of all Hollywood films.
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This excellent study explains how Hollywood movies came--in Ben Hecht's words--to slip "into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade." Black (communications, Univ. of Missouri--Kansas City) uses studio and Legion of Decency records to demonstrate how in the 1930s film, the most democratic art, became America's most censored. Film censorship began in 1907, but the Roaring '20s provoked the conviction that films should promote the simplest idealism at whatever cost of realism and principle. Films veered toward one of two puerilities, the naive or the sanctimoniously tawdry. Black's documented case studies establish the political conservatism and fear behind the censorship forces' "morality." The author roots the movement in the Catholic church's institutional interests and in antisemitism. The censors stifled the ur-feminism of Mae West; eviscerated literary and dramatic adaptations; obscured the problematic realities of domestic, political, and economic life and ethics; and inhibited thoughtful treatment of the Depression, the country's political issues, and the rise of fascism. Even Fritz Lang's classic antilynching drama Fury (1936) was hobbled by the studio's racism and timidity. This particular censorship movement ended with WW II. Black's study is most welcome now, when serious artists quail before the revived charges of being "liberal" or even "humanist" in the face of family and patriotic values. Ideas remain an endangered, because feared, species. All levels. M. Yacowar; Emily Carr College of Art and Design
目录
List of Illustrations | p. viii |
Acknowledgments | p. ix |
Introduction | p. 1 |
1 Restricting Entertainment: The Movies Censored | p. 3 |
2 The Hays Office and a Moral Code for the Movies | p. 21 |
3 Sex, Sex, and More Sex | p. 50 |
4 Movies and Modern Literature | p. 84 |
5 Beer, Blood, and Politics | p. 107 |
6 Legions March on Hollywood | p. 149 |
7 Sex with a Dash of Moral Compensation | p. 198 |
8 Film Politics and Industry Policy | p. 244 |
9 Conclusion | p. 292 |
Appendixes | |
A Working Draft of the Lord-Quigley Code Proposal | p. 302 |
B Films Condemned by the Legion of Decency | p. 309 |
Selected Bibliography | p. 311 |
Filmography | p. 321 |
Index | p. 327 |