Jane Russell's breasts were a constant concern to Hollywood's censors. In 1941 she starred in a movie called The Outlaw. The director, Howard Hughes, wanted to make the most of her generous cleavage, so he designed a cantilevered, underwire bra to give it additional screen time. Russell hated the contraption, found it painful and secretly threw it away but, even without the extra lift, the Production Code Administration (PCA – Hollywood's censors) still felt there was too much on show. Hughes, however, decided not to fight them. He calculated that a campaign to ban The Outlaw could be just the publicity it needed, so he actively encouraged conservatives to demand that it be denied an audience. The result: The Outlaw was held back in 1941; shown for one week in 1943; and then given a final, eagerly anticipated release in 1946. As Hughes predicted, erotic expectation turned it into a box office hit.
The cleavage controversy did not end there. In 1954 Russell appeared scantily clad in The French Line – a movie that posed an additional problem for the PCA because it was in 3-D. What was merely titillating in 2-D, said the censors, was downright outrageous in 3-D: ‘The costumes for most female characters and especially Jane Russell were intentionally designed to give a bosom peep-show affect beyond extreme décolletage and far beyond anything acceptable under the [studios'] Production Code.' Flouting the Code's official list of dos and don'ts, the poster for The French Line carried the tagline: ‘JR in 3-D: Need We Say More?' An alternative was: ‘It'll Knock Your Eyes Out!' The PCA refused The French Line a certificate and the Catholic National Legion of Decency called for a boycott. As you might have guessed, it was one of the most successful films of the year.
On the one hand the Russell scandals confirm the view of the old Hollywood Production Code and its enforcers: puritan, silly, authoritarian. On the other hand, they challenge aspects of the traditional narrative. After all, these movies were not banned or even censored – the industry simply refused to endorse them. And the success they subsequently enjoyed in the cinemas that showed them suggests that the so-called sexual McCarthyism of the 1940s and 1950s was not as all-pervasive as we might think.
It is usually believed that the anti-sex, anti-violence Code was harmful to art, intellectually unsophisticated, imposed from above and un-American in its disregard for First Amendment Rights. This is far from the full picture. Often the Code encouraged greatness, was intellectually nuanced, self-regulated and conformed to American values of Judeo-Christian ethics and free enterprise. For good and bad, it was as American as apple pie.
Pre-Code movies did not go uncensored. They were covered by local laws and edited in deference to public opinion – or at least whatever the movie makers thought they could get away with without triggering an angry backlash. Films produced in the 1920s and early 1930s were made in an era of social change and economic uncertainty. The boom of the Roaring Twenties gave black Americans and poor whites new spending power and provided consumer goods to a generation of women, who wanted to be as socially, even sexually, liberated as men. The sudden, devastating poverty of the Great Depression necessitated a cinema that reflected the struggles of the audience and examined those who resisted the power of greedy bankers. Studios that favoured lavish musicals in the 1920s did poorly in the early 1930s. The more socially realist producers, particularly Warner Bros, survived the worst years of the Depression far better.
You can get a flavour of the pre-Code ethic from a handful of surprisingly bold movies. Local state censors complained that when Little Caesar (1931) depicted Edward G. Robinson going down in a hail of bullets, the kids in the stalls were cheering the gangster rather than the cops. Homosexual characters were on parade in Our Betters (1933), Sailor's Luck (1933) and Calvacade (1933). In Morocco (1930) Marlene Dietrich played a cabaret singer who dressed as a man in a white tie suit and kissed a girl in the audience. ‘I'm sincere in my preference for men's clothes', Dietrich once explained. ‘I do not wear them to be sensational. I think I am much more alluring in these clothes.'
Read Full Article »