The History of Sex in Cinema

Led by the Legion of Decency, the Forces of Suppression Excoriate Hollywood's earlier eroticism and finally expunge it from the screen

During the first few years of the cataclysmic Depression of the Thirties, Hollywood began to play dangerously with the fires of censorship by reaching new peaks of sensationalism and new lows in vulgarity. Although film attendance withstood the paralyzing effects of the stock-market crash of 1929, it was at the cost of slashing box-office prices. But as times grew tougher, even this drastic measure wasn't enough to offset ebbing receipts; so moviemakers began to hypo their pictures with sex and violence in the hope of persuading the public to part with the hard-earned price of a ticket. One way of doing this, they found, was to place new emphasis on certain hard facts of Thirties life. Through the late Twenties, Prohibition-bred crime-syndicate gangsterism had become big business—by 1930, on screen as well as off, in movies featuring gangsters and their molls, crooked politicians and their fancy women, tarts plying their trade for a profit and, a little later, even once-respectable wives taking to the streets to earn the wherewithal for their children and their out-of-work husbands. None of this, of course, must be understood as any sincere attempt on Hollywood's part to more candidly reflect the facts of life. It was simply a capitalization on the public's fascination with the seamier side of their society. If anything, the onset of the Depression led to a general repressiveness toward movie subject matter, rather than the reverse. Upholders of the cinematic status quo preferred to think of life in terms of old clichés rather than new realities: ex–white-collar workers selling apples on street corners, and soup kitchens for the hungry jobless. This economic and social upheaval was only dimly reflected in the films of the early Thirties.

The only upheaval to be discerned in Hollywood, as a matter of fact, was that brought about by sound. The silent film had disappeared into history by the early Thirties, and screen dialog, no longer dependent upon euphemistic captions, became saltier. "Go out and get the lay of the land," Sergeant Edmund Lowe barked to Private El Brendel in The Cock-Eyed World. A few reels later, Brendel returned with Fifi D'Orsay, one of the new sexpots of the Thirties. To script the new talkies, writers from Broadway had been brought in, along with novelists and newspapermen, most of them accustomed to a long tradition of literary freedom and realism. Thus the language of movies began to take on an unfamiliar naturalism, and the events they depicted were a lot closer to newspaper headlines than formerly. But the movies themselves did not grow more realistic in the sense that we understand that term today. If anything, they retrogressed and became stagier and more static, for the cumbersome sound techniques of the early part of the decade did not allow for the mobility possessed by the silent camera, which was free of the confining sound boom. Indeed, some film critics professed to see in the talkies the death of the cinematic form as an artistic medium; the use of sound cramped the inventiveness of directors, they said; it was clear to them that movies were becoming merely a branch of the theater. By the mid-Thirties, however, a good many of the technical difficulties involved in handling sound had been overcome, and year by year the increasing mobility of the camera restored the faith of those fainthearted critics.

Even without these technical improvements, the gangster films of the early Thirties brought an increased realism to the depiction of crime and violence on the screen. Jail riots, bloody strikes, the gang wars of Prohibition-bred beer barons to augment their empires—all these quickly found their way to the screen. Indeed, so many gangster films came along in the early Thirties (over 50 in 1931 alone) that censors and church groups—often one and the same—got the alarming notion that the public was accepting gangsterism as a normal part of the American scene.

The gangster film brought an unprecedented authenticity to movies: the ring of common speech, the look of ugly slums. Studios often proudly proclaimed that their pictures were based on actual people and documented cases. The gangster films brought better actors to the movies, too, many of them recruited from the stage, such as Paul Muni, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. All played gangsters in Scar-face, Public Enemy and Little Caesar; and all of them treated their various molls—Glenda Farrell, Joan Blondell, Mae Clarke, Ann Dvorak—in a way that clearly foreshadowed a pronounced change in American attitudes toward women. The most dramatic instance of this was the moment that James Cagney, the gangster in Public Enemy, shoved a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face—he was simply bored with her yak-yak. Warner Brothers felt that in this kind of material they had the stuff of which box-office dreams are made, and Cagney was encouraged to continue roughing up the girls. In Taxi he gave Loretta Young a black eye; in Winner Take All he kicked Virginia Bruce in her fetching rear; in Lady Killer he dragged Mae Clarke (again) out of bed by the hair and clouted her with her own purse.

An alarmed assessor of the movies of the Thirties, Margaret Thorp, wrote: "Today a star scarcely qualifies for the higher spheres unless she has been slugged by her leading man, kicked downstairs, rolled on the floor, cracked over the head with a frying pan, dumped into a pond, or butted by a goat." What the films were selling to the movie public was sexual sadism thinly disguised as the topicality of Prohibition-era gangsterism—although some have viewed the turnabout as simply the logical retribution of the male for the damage inflicted upon his ego by the heartless vamps of the previous two decades. In any case, there is little doubt that the males in the movie audience heartily endorsed this new treatment of women and identified themselves with its perpetrators. As for women, there is no doubt at all that Cagney and his imitators quickly became erotic figures to them, or that their films titillated their sadomasochistic proclivities. Perhaps half-consciously stimulated themselves, the censors reacted to the gangster films with vindictive vigor.

Early in 1930, Will H. Hays, Hollywood's own highly paid and ever-watchful guardian of movie morals—and usually a failure at it—called a meeting of studio (continued on page 208)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 156) heads to consider what to do about the rising tide of sex and violence. He brought with him to the meeting an Easterner, Martin Quigley, editor of Motion Picture Herald and a prominent Catholic layman. Quigley treated the group to a reading of the draft for a proposed Motion Picture Production Code. Hollywood was already adhering, more or less, to a brief set of do's and don'ts relating to moral behavior in movies; but Hays felt that something stronger was needed. He had listened in rapt admiration as Quigley told him of a plan to bring the movie producers to heel. There should be a code of commandments, Quigley insisted, and it must have all the trappings of the articles of war, complete with penalties for disobeying it. With blessings from the Hays Office, and with the help of a Jesuit priest, Reverend Daniel A. Lord, who published a religious magazine called The Queen's Work and also taught dramatics at St. Louis University, Quigley prepared a document: "A Code to Govern the Making of Motion and Talking Pictures."

After several sessions with the producers, the adoption of the Code was bulled through. It was a gamy document that Quigley and Father Lord had concocted, and they must have had quite a time writing it. All the explicitness of the earlier do's and don'ts had been retained, but to them were added paragraphs that spelled out in deliciously graphic detail the "thou shalt nots" of the new puritanism. One large section was headed Sex and contained separate classifications for Adultery, Scenes of Passion, Seduction or Rape, Sex Perversion, White Slavery, Miscegenation, Sex Hygiene and, for some strange reason, Children's Sex Organs. Other sections dealt with Vulgarity, Obscenity, Profanity, Costume, Dances and Repellent Subjects. Life was evidently viewed through very prurient lenses indeed by Quigley and Father Lord, for fully three quarters of the Code had to do in some manner with sex—and well spelled out, too. Under Scenes of Passion, for example, it was specified that "(a) They should not be introduced when not essential to the plot. (b) Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures are not to be shown. (c) In general, passion should be so treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element." The authors tipped their antidemocratic, holier-than-thou hand with that last caution.

Producers, faced with economic debacle from the combined forces of the threatened Federal censorship, already prevalent state censorship, and the increasing wrath of predominantly Catholic church groups, knuckled under to this Hays-sanctioned form of so-called self-regulation. They were cagey enough, however, to appoint themselves as a final board of appeal from Code provisions; and they made sure they were the ones to pay the salary of Colonel Jason Joy to look over their scripts in advance to see that they were free of offending matter. Colonel Joy wielded his bluenose pencil forthrightly, but dwindling exhibition profits, as well as the mass public's evident eagerness to accept more frankness on the screen and the inability (not to mention unwillingness) of the producers to clamp down on their writers and directors, all mitigated against his efforts to bring more Joy and less joy to the screen. It wasn't long before he threw up his hands in defeat and resigned.

For all his prestige, Colonel Joy had discovered that he could, in effect, do little more than waggle a finger at the mounting tide of what was stigmatized as "the suggestive and lascivious." Even after passing a script as safe for public consumption, there was no way for him to prevent actors, directors or writers from "improving" on it. "Can you go for a doctor?" Myrna Loy was asked in a musical called Love Me Tonight. "Certainly," responded the pleased lady, who added, "Bring him in!" (In the same film, Jeanette MacDonald had her slipcovered bosom tape-measured by a roguish Maurice Chevalier.) A hatcheck girl gaped at the diamonds decorating the fingers of Mae West in Night After Night and exclaimed, "Goodness, what diamonds." Upon which, the diamond wearer observed tartly, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." And Barbara Stanwyck, applying for a job in Baby Face, is asked: "Have you had any experience?" The jauntily clad Miss Stanwyck swings a provocative leg and replies with studied sophistication, "Plenty." No one mistook her meaning.

Miss Stanwyck was one of a new wave of young actresses who, not long after the introduction of sound, replaced many of the sex queens of the previous decade. Clara Bow, bouncy and beautiful, read her lines with the aplomb and intonation of a BMT platform attendant; she made three talkies, then disappeared into oblivion. Lovely Vilma Banky spoke in accents that were unmistakably guttural and mid-European. Pola Negri also had a profound accent, and her exaggerated playing of sophisticated European sexual tigresses went against the prevalent mood. Indeed, virtually the whole gallery of sirens and flappers went into discard when the nasal-voiced, sleek-bodied Jean Harlow came along and demonstrated that simple willingness was preferable to cute flirtatiousness or hard-breathing seduction. There was a new cynicism au courant, not merely about love but about the sexual act itself. Ginger Rogers, for example, when asked by her bridegroom in Professional Sweetheart whether, in addition to smoking and drinking, she had gone in for promiscuity, replied firmly in the affirmative. "How many men?" asked her appalled husband. "Hundreds," she replied, with a flick of the ash of her cigarette. The outraged fellow knocked her stone cold, then pleaded with God for her survival. "She is wicked, but I love her," he explained.

But while these Depression-born parvenus were pushing their way toward top billing on the nation's marquees, another kind of actress was raking in Hollywood's top salaries. Broadway actresses such as Constance Bennett and Ruth Chatterton, along with the veteran ingenue of silent films, Norma Shearer, were sought out because of their ability to handle convincingly the newfangled dialog despite the stagy conventions of most early sound films. Voices were needed even more than physical allure, although a lowered décolletage was no hindrance. Miss Chatterton, on the verge of retirement when talkies began, gamely removed her brassiere and emoted in a series of pictures that became part of a cycle termed the confession film. The confession film provided vicarious pleasure and avid wish fulfillment for working girls pondering the problem of how best to make use of their sex for social advancement in an increasingly unpromising economic world.

In their book The Movies, Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer wrote: "The composite heroine of the confession films ... was a woman who gave up her chastity in cold blood. Sometimes she did it for money, sometimes ... out of self-sacrifice, sometimes she was simply talked into it, but she rarely did it for the fun of it, and she always got paid off in some fashion. But her payments grew smaller and her gains greater as the cycle rolled on. In fact, making these films became an elaborate game in which the problem was to invent new ways for the heroine to eat her cake and have it, too."

In Female, Ruth Chatterton played the president of a giant corporation who refused to marry and thus lower herself in the economic scale—but she was not in the least averse to having her junior executives drop in for summit conferences in her boudoir. Svelte Constance Bennett portrayed women even more symptomatic of the revolution in feminine morals under the duress of economic hard times. Seen as a stenographer or an artist's model, she would invariably be seduced by a rich and/or unscrupulous man in an early reel; but instead of bemoaning her fate, or settling for the poor but honest boy next door, she would grimly use all her wiles to lead her seducer to the altar. Not infrequently, her seduction would leave her with child, which she bore with such bravery that the reluctant father was won over out of sheer admiration. In fact, for a time Miss Bennett enjoyed the questionable distinction of becoming the screen's most prominent unwed mother. One movie poster of 1933 read: "Constance Bennett in Bed of Roses, with Joel McCrea." The public was conditioned enough by then to know that a child would emerge from that bed of roses; that she would involve the hero in a breach-of-promise and paternity suit; and that ultimately she would get him to the altar, if not in time, at least better late than never. Others weren't so lucky. As the decade's best-known girl "in trouble"—the simple-minded factory worker made pregnant by a predatory social climber in the 1930 movie version of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (remade in 1951 as A Place in the Sun with Shelley Winters as the girl and Montgomery Clift as her seducer)—Sylvia Sidney pleads with the unwilling father (played by Phillips Holmes) to give the child, and her, a name; but he decides to drown his troubles—both of them—in a lake.

The problem of how much sexual freedom the Depression woman was rightly entitled to was cannily exploited by Hollywood in dozens of films. Once virtue was gone, these films asked implicitly, what was left? Material advantage was the answer proffered in many of them. Helen Twelvetrees, seduced by no less than five men in Millie, may have descended ever downward in moral degradation, but she certainly improved her standard of living. She may not have looked happy about it, but to the poorly paid working girl of those dismal days, total happiness must have seemed a petty price to pay for such luxury.

In spite of the stand taken against adultery by the Production Code, producers continued to deem it indispensable plot material, and scores of films dealt with the intriguing subject. Perhaps the most famous of them was Back Street, in which Irene Dunne fell in love with John Boles, though he was married and the father of three children. The back street in which she lived as his mistress for much of her life was not uncomfortable by 1933 standards, and the audiences' sympathy was discreetly directed less toward the betrayed wife than toward the two unhappy victims of society's middle-class morality. Adultery was given artful, if somewhat arch, treatment in The Animal Kingdom (1932), in which Ann Harding pondered the problem of what to do about her errant husband, Leslie Howard, who found himself unduly attracted to a sexy career woman played by Myrna Loy. The film shows his animal instincts coming to the fore when Miss Loy is seen climbing a staircase to her guest bedroom, while from below the sorely tempted Leslie Howard watches her undulating derriere. Prostitution, listed as a "repellent subject" by the Code, was a perennial favorite, too, and frequently hearts of gold beat beneath the sequined peignoirs worn by the heroines of such films as Faithless, Safe in Hell and The Blonde Venus. Ironically, perhaps, but accurately, nevertheless, Liberty magazine headlined its review of the 1933 Baby Face "Three Cheers for Sin!" In it, Barbara Stanwyck made her way upward floor by floor through a bank skyscraper until, quite literally, she reached the top by making herself readily available to lecherous assistant treasurers, account managers, vice-presidents, and finally to the chief executive himself. Miss Stanwyck seemed no worse for wear.

She was usually cast in roles that showed her responding to the Depression's numerous vicissitudes with a hardbitten cynicism that seemed to say: Get what you can while you can, or as long as your face and your figure can take it. The titles of her movies, Illicit, Forbidden, Ten Cents a Dance, told customers fairly clearly just what to expect. In Night Nurse, a seamy Warner Brothers item of 1931, she was the amorous pal of a bootlegger, and roomed with another new star, Joan Blondell, playing a cute nurse on the make. Both girls stripped to their underwear several times in the film, for no other reason than that the director guessed—correctly—that their audiences might prefer to see them that way. Indeed, Joan Blondell, especially, spent this early phase of her long and varied career mostly in black-lace lingerie. Her perfect figure was rightly deemed her most important asset as an actress, and in 1939 she attained something akin to immortality when officials of the New York World's Fair sealed a sculptured replica of her nude body in a time capsule so that generations several thousand years hence could know just what Americans of the Thirties regarded as an ideal female specimen.

Nudity in films of the Thirties was almost exclusively concerned with the ever-developing public interest in the female bosom, although one full-length nude shot did manage to slip by the censors in The Yellow Ticket, a 1931 movie about prostitution in czarist Russia, based on a play of the same title. For one candid moment, a prostitute in prison is viewed through a wire screen as she is being examined from head to toe for possible disease by a nurse-keeper. In one of the most successful Biblical spectacles of the day, The Sign of the Cross, Cecil B. De Mille provided students of ancient Rome with a good deal more than bread and circuses. Claudette Colbert, as the Empress Poppaea, was shown at her sybaritic bath, her breasts pleasantly buoyed on a sea of asses' milk. But the exposure of breasts in the films of the Depression years was usually done artfully through black-lace and low-cut slips. Many of these pictures never managed to make late-show television because of the failure of costume designers to include brassieres as a wardrobe item. In The Cat Creeps, a comedy chiller, the frightened heroines chase through the rooms of a haunted house, seldom wearing more than slip and garters, their bosoms plainly bobbling under the loose silk. Dance, Fools, Dance featured a lingerie party aboard rich girl Joan Crawford's yacht, during which the boys and girls stripped down to their underthings to drink and dance. In her first two Tarzan films, Maureen O'Sullivan, as Tarzan's Jane, was outfitted for jungle life in the scantiest of bras and a couple of leather flaps for the mid-section. Later, when reform was rampant, the jungle providentially provided a far more concealing wardrobe. Miss O'Sullivan and Johnny Weismuller proved to be the most durable of all the Jane-and-Tarzan teams, Maureen lasting until Tarzan's New York Adventure in 1942; getting his second wind, Weismuller didn't turn in his loincloth for another seven years. In 1939, Maureen had grown weary of jungle life and arranged, in Tarzan Finds a Son, to have herself killed off—only to find herself resuscitated by MGM, which decided in the nick of time that the public simply wouldn't be able to endure the shock of a dead Jane. Only recently, as the mother not of Tarzan's Boy but of Mia Farrow (of Peyton Place fame), the 19-year-old girlfriend of Frank Sinatra, Maureen was in the news again, commenting wryly on the age disparity between her daughter and the 49-year-old crooner: "If Mr. Sinatra is planning on marrying anyone in this family, it ought to be me." If Mr. Sinatra had seen her swinging from the vines in one of those early Ape Man epics, he might well have been tempted.

But it was the musical extravaganza of the Depression era that glorified the American girl more lavishly than ever before or since. In fact, one musical was actually titled Glorifying the American Girl. This glorification, it should be said, had begun in the waning years of the Twenties, when a craze for musicals that talked, sang and danced swept through Hollywood. What was revealed of the American girl in the featherweight confections of the Thirties was perhaps more derivative of the harmless peekaboo movie sex of these Twenties' musicals than of the cold-blooded, exploitative cinematic erotica of the Depression decade. This is to say that the musicals featured primarily visual sex: the silhouetted nude and the scanty attire—with the coy suggestion of its removability. The early-Depression musicals represented, then, something of a cultural lag—a residue of old values rather than a reflection of new ones. At any rate, Glorifying the American Girl was fairly typical of the genre, in that it featured dozens of gauzily draped nymphs in pageantlike production numbers. Women of All Nations, Footlight Parade and Hips, Hips Hooray were musical extravaganzas of similar ilk. Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals employed the Goldwyn Girls—all carefully measured for breasts, waists and hips of ideal proportions—who in waistlong wigs and the flimsiest of coverings merrily cavorted through a harem scene. So scandalous was this sort of goings-on by today's television standards that whenever the film is videocast in yet another rerun, the whole sequence is omitted. When Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made their bow as a dance team in Flying Down to Rio (1933), the grand finale of the film was an acrobatic ballet in which a whole troupe of glorified girls perform pirouettes and high kicks on the wings of a squadron of airborne airplanes. To compound the madness—and the interest—of the scene, the girls were shown bare-breasted at that high altitude.

No one in Hollywood, however, could match the flights of choreographic fancy of Busby Berkeley, concocter of the above-mentioned harem number in Roman Scandals. Film historians now habitually give credit to Berkeley for his ingenuity in liberating the camera and enlarging the scope of the screen by creating musical numbers that could not possibly have taken place on any theater stage in the world. But he was also the possessor of unerring bad taste and a voracious appetite for scatological eroticism, often more revealing than Berkeley could possibly have imagined. In Fashions of 1934, one of his numbers transformed a bevy of full-bodied beauties into human harps whose strings were plucked by a comely group of female harpists presumably playing in perfect Lesbian harmony. In another scene, the girls revealed their scantily covered buttocks to audience view as they tossed back and forth a foamlike substance that had, at least according to one Danish chronicler of movie erotica, distinct sperm connotations. For Warner Brothers' Gold Diggers of 1933 (a humorous musical tribute to that Depression-encouraged female habit), he dreamed up a "Petting in the Park" fantasy, in which his camera moved lewdly through a scene of amour en masse, insistently closing in on the girls, all of whom wore lace brassieres and gartered panties.

An unwritten law of the Code was that the inside of a girl's thigh must never be shown on the screen; but Berkeley disobeyed it by showing all parts of the thigh in the scene. Later, a cloudburst breaks up what appears to be the first stages of a mass orgy, and the girls—with what is left of their attire clinging revealingly to their figures—hurry behind a translucent screen to strip off their wet clothes, and treat the audience to a silhouette view of their nakedness. When they reappear, moments later, they are wearing chastity brassieres made of steel. Undaunted, the boys counter this ploy with huge can openers with which they proceed to clip open their petting-party dates. As though this were not enough to deliver the erotic message, through the entire scene cavorts a lewd midget, frequently used in Warner films as a little-boy satyr. Wearing baby clothes, the midget proves to be an inveterate voyeur; he is constantly peeking through the shrubbery at the amorous proceedings, and turns to wink in childish glee at the audience. So fecund was Berkeley's extravagant imagination that today's school of "camp" followers solemnly declares that Berkeley was the one true genius among the early "campers."

Far less "camp" than "pop art" was Jean Harlow, who, although she arrived in Hollywood in the late Twenties as a ripe teenager, had to wait for the brassy Thirties before achieving her lasting identification as one of the most potent sex idols of the decade. Her career was to be tragically brief, and her reign as a platinum-blonde love goddess encompassed no more than half a dozen years. But during those years she was responsible for the albinolike hair tint adopted by a considerable portion of American womanhood, and she also gave popular currency to the phrase "Excuse me while I slip into something more comfortable"—which she proceeded to do in Hell's Angels, her first starring vehicle. The "something" turned out to be a clinging black-satin robe of startling décolletage. Harlow typified the trampy but basically good-hearted American girl of no particular education or status, and was to be seen more often as mistress than married in her films. In a later chapter, on the sex stars of the Thirties, we will be taking a closer look at her on-screen image, and at her ill-fated off-screen romance with Paul Bern, her producer, whose suicide, after a brief marriage to Harlow, precipitated the steamiest Hollywood scandal of the decade. Suffice it to say, at this point in our chronicle, that Harlow almost single-handedly administered the coup de grâce to the screen flapper—for the flapper's daring but essentially virginal attitude toward sex was no match for Harlow's forthright acceptance of it on the screen—and off.

If Harlow disposed of the flapper type on the screen, Mae West killed off the last remaining vestiges of that other old stand-by, the vamp. Mae came to the movies in 1932, after long establishment as a risque singing comedienne of the stage and variety theater, when she was nearly 40 years old, and she managed at that lushly ripe age to strongly imply that a woman's sexual needs—her own, anyway—were just as demanding as any man's. "What the movie audiences had uniformly been privileged to see before over a period of years," wrote the distinguished critic George Jean Nathan, "had been nothing but an endless succession of imported Lesbians, flat-chested flappers, beauty-parlor imitations of women. Miss West came like a veritable torrent upon a dry desert."

The first rivulet of this inundation was her maiden appearance in Night After Night, a gangster film in which she did little more than walk around in languid, bosomy, hip-swaying majesty. Richard Schickel, author of The Stars, rhapsodically described her manner of mounting a flight of stairs in the film: "A simple, everyday act which, when performed by the biggest blonde of them all, was a study in the vulgar poetry of motion." Her first starring vehicle, She Done Him Wrong, did so right by her producers that the firm was saved from bankruptcy. The Mae West brand of sex was a delightful change for the movie public, unaccustomed to such frank ribaldry on the screen. Even so, the looming menace of censorship caused a title change from the original Diamond Lil, a play of Miss West's own authorship that had run into trouble on Broadway because it dealt with an unreformed, unrepentant prostitute. Lil was changed to Lady Lou for the picture, in which Miss West described herself as "the finest lady that ever walked the streets." She sang such songs as I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone and A Man Who Takes His Time, which, even in somewhat sanitized versions, still retained their original bawdyhouse implications. At the time, Mary Pickford—just on the verge of her own divorce from Douglas Fairbanks—reacted with shocked modesty to the songs, and stated to the press that Mae West was the worst thing that had ever befallen Hollywood.

Since then, a great many have thought that Mae West was one of the best things ever to happen to Hollywood, if only because she mocked so completely the prevalent repressive attitude toward sex in most movies. "When I'm good," she said in I'm No Angel, "I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better." She wrote much of her own dialog and coined new national aphorisms, such as "A thrill a day keeps the chill away." But this good-natured, well-padded temptress with her standing invitation to "come up and see me some time," was to be held largely responsible for the virulent reform of movies that followed in her perfumed wake. Miss West would be the first to support the theory that the Legion of Decency was established in the hope of abolishing her from the screen; and it was hardly a coincidence that within six months after the release of She Done Him Wrong, a form of punitive Catholic film censorship was under way. Nevertheless, with all deference to the wayward Miss West, churchly moralists had a good deal more to alarm them at the time. Mae West was but one more constellation in the galaxy of gangsters, fallen women and mixed-up musicals that had incurred their wrath.

A worried Will Hays was already cooperating with these Catholic censorship groups. "Early in 1933," he recalled later, "in the gathering chaos and economic night, some voices called for the repudiation of the Code and all its prior restrictive agreements. Some felt that if the industry was to save itself and keep its thousands of people in their jobs, it had to 'Let her go, Gallagher,' with anything permitted to bring in the money." To save Hollywood from itself, as he regarded his efforts, he acted as intermediary between the Motion Picture Producers Association and the religious leaders who were vociferously denouncing the film industry. It is certainly true that Protestant and Jewish clergy were adding their voices to the censorial clamor, but they were not nearly so militant in their righteous zeal as the Catholic clergy and its minions—members of the Catholic laity—to whom Hays directed his intermediating efforts.

While the earlier censorship Putsch that had brought about the adoption of the Production Code was the result of conditions largely of the Twenties, the new moral crusade was distinctly of the Depression Thirties. The Catholics now had a repressive social atmosphere in which they could push even harder than before, and push they did. In the dark ages of the Thirties, most of the country rubes, and even the masses of city dwellers—however paradoxical their private behavior—still equated sin with sex; so the Legion of Decency didn't have much difficulty selling the public on their crusade against sex on the screen.

The first salvo in this Catholic war of repression was a statement made in the summer of 1933 by an Italian visitor, the Apostolic Delegate from Rome, the Most Reverend Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, who thundered, "Catholics are called by God, the Pope, the bishops and the priests to a united and vigorous campaign for the purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals." There is every reason to believe that the Apostolic Delegate was prompted to make the statement, for it was speedily followed by the formation of an Episcopal Committee on Motion Pictures to draft appropriate measures for the control of picture content. And shortly after this, the Legion of Decency was formed. It quickly became the most effective and disciplined pressure group the film industry had yet encountered, and it remains active in the same capacity today.

In April 1934, the Legion introduced a pledge to be read aloud in all churches throughout the land, and specifically requested all members of the Catholic Church to endorse it with their signatures. Eight million signed in the first year of the Legion's existence, promising that they would "condemn indecent and immoral pictures, and those which glorify crime and criminals." "The whistle had blown!" Hays wrote in a memoir. "Immediately protests against salacious films and offensive advertising swept across the country in a rising tide. The movement was like an avenging fire, seeking to clean as it burned. For the most part, it took the form of a popular movement, in some cases the clergy being obliged to restrain their people from boycotting even decent shows and condemning all movies!" Protestant and Jewish groups, too, 54 in number, marched in the movement against "the immoral cinema." The Christian Century, a Protestant publication, bellowed editorially, "Thousands of Protestant ministers and laity say Thank God that the Catholics are at last opening up on this foul thing as it deserves."

The main reason for the Legion's effectiveness, where other types of censorship had failed, lay in its ability to threaten—and on occasion to impose—a punishing economic boycott. Faced with this threat, the film industry came quickly to heel. In June of 1934, the Production Code was brought out of mothballs, dusted off and amended, again with the help of Martin Quigley and Father Lord. It was given much sharper teeth, too, with the addition of a Production Code Administration (which still exists) under the supervision of a young Catholic newspaperman, Joseph I. Breen, who was given authority—and who accepted it with alacrity—to police all studio movies from the first screen treatment to the completed negative. A new weapon of enforcement, the Production Code "Seal of Approval" was unveiled at the same time. The dictatorship of virtue, as it has been termed, was further enforced by heavy fines for offending producers without a Seal, and by the unwillingness of exhibitors to risk Legion of Decency wrath by showing films lacking it.

To clarify its position on pictures, the Legion instituted a system of ratings, or classifications, which separated movies into three main groups: A, morally unobjectionable for all; B, morally objectionable in part for all; and C, condemned. For the next 20 years, a condemned film stood little or no chance at the box office, until Otto Preminger, early in the Fifties, proved with his The Moon Is Blue that the Legion's "condemned" rating was a powder puff for anyone who stood firm against it. By that time, not only morals but the entire structure of the industry had undergone profound change. During the Thirties Hollywood was far too craven to provide any outright opposition and instead went in for evasive action. Indeed, censorship became such a commonplace of film production that W. C. Fields, sipping a soda in an ice-cream parlor, got a laugh by looking into the camera and stating, "This scene was meant to be in a saloon, but the censors made us change it."

Actually, this kind of chocolate-fudging was no laughing matter. It drove the frank, healthy sexuality of Mae West from the screen and substituted several types of curiously mixed-up women, one of which became known as "the good-bad girl." This latter was a direct offspring of censorship—a girl who appeared to be bad, who was so regarded by the hero and the audience throughout the film, but who eventually turned out to be basically good. She would smoke, drink, play poker, flaunt her hips, appear to be on the make, possess an unsavory past—but it would be revealed at the end that she was as virginal as Mary Pickford in Little Lord Fauntleroy. Her psychological value for the mixed-up American male, according to two psychiatrist authors, Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, was her ability to provide "an eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too solution to the old conflict between sacred and profane love.... The exciting qualities of the bad woman and the comradely loyalty of the good one are all wrapped up in one prize package."

The obverse of the "good-bad girl" was "the bitch heroine," a woman of tempting sexuality but withal too neurotic to use it for any satisfying end. Bette Davis was the principal portrayer of this kind of role in the Thirties, and she proclaimed her mastery in Of Human Bondage. As Mildred, the cockney waitress who makes life hell for a clubfooted medical student, she willfully destroys his paintings and almost wrecks his career before, now a streetwalker, she falls victim to tuberculosis (changed from the syphilis of Somerset Maugham's novel). Throughout the film, Bette showed Mildred to be unrelentingly grasping, vulgar and embittered by her inability to satisfy her sexual whims with any man. She was a new kind of heroine (and villainess) for the movies; and despite the disinfectant the studio applied to the script, there was no escaping the sexual implications of her volatile performance. Later she was honored for the playing of another such character when she won a 1938 Academy Award for Jezebel, in which she was seen as a perverse and unrepentant flouter of antebellum traditions of ladylike behavior.

Jezebel antedated by only a year the screen's most famous antebellum epic, Gone with the Wind, in which Vivien Leigh played that apotheosis of all bitch heroines, Scarlett O'Hara. Even the implicit presence of censorship was unable to prevent the sexual sparks from flying between the team of Miss Leigh and Clark Gable. The handsome Gable, with his appearance and portrayal of aggressive masculinity, was more than a match for the beauteous bitchiness of Miss Leigh as Scarlett. Although the screen went discreetly dark when he carried Scarlett up the stairs to her bedroom, the morning-after smile on her face was eloquent proof of his prowess.

As a result of the Code, and the Legion's ever-watchful eye, the American movie perforce invented an odd sort of sexual mythology that occasioned much ironic comment at home and abroad. One of its myths held that divorced couples always remarried, and always with their former mates. Another maintained that couples used the bedroom only for sleeping and generally in separate beds. The sale of twin beds boomed during the Thirties as a direct result of their prominence in movies. Whether their buyers knew it or not, the Code said that "certain places are so closely and thoroughly associated with sexual life or with sexual sin that their use must be carefully limited." A myth about marriage sprang up, too, with incalculable consequences to the psyches of innumerable young people of impressionable age who, until the advent of television, were accustomed to attending movies as often as four and five times a week. They usually learned, wrote Gilbert Seldes, "that the bridal night is a long series of accidents through which young lovers are kept from entering or staying in the same room after nightfall."

Frank Capra cleverly kidded the prevalence of censorship in It Happened One Night. The film's popularity, at least in part, was due to the famous "walls of Jericho" sequence, a joke on the movie habit of inventing a variety of plot devices to keep unmarried lovers from consummating their relationship. In Capra's comedy, a runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert) and a newspaperman assigned to follow her (Clark Gable) are forced to share the same room in a motel. There are two beds, but no privacy; and in the interests of movie morality Gable strings a blanket between the two beds and christens it "the walls of Jericho." Morning comes and the "walls" are still standing. Miss Colbert's virtue is intact and she has, of course, fallen in love with the man who respects it. As the movie ends, the couple, now married and honeymooning, return to the same motel and insist upon occupying the same room as before. In the middle of the night, much to the amazement of the motel keepers, the sound of a toy trumpet rings out from the room. The walls of Jericho have tumbled down. And the audience's hilarity, as well as its sigh of relief, implied good riddance!

If Hollywood had stuck firmly to the principles of the new moral regime ruled by the Production Code Administration and guarded by the Legion of Decency, the screen soon would have become barren of sex—illicit or otherwise. And, for a time, it did look as though the forces of sweetness and light were winning the day. A legion of writers was put to work turning out vehicles for dimpled little Shirley Temple. Andy Hardy came along, sponsored by Louis B. Mayer, who professed to believe above all in God, country and mom's apple pie. The early Judy Garland sang her way into national fame without more than an occasional sisterly kiss for Mickey Rooney. So did starry-eyed Deanna Durbin, Universal's treacly bid for asexual social acceptability. Musicals also were changed, and to fit the new formats such favorites as Ginger Rogers and Jeanette MacDonald were forced to alter their screen personalities quite drastically. In the early part of the Thirties, Miss MacDonald was famous for the slightly risque quality she brought to such films as Lubitsch's The Love Parade and Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight. Both abounded in boudoir scenes and double-entendre. As for Ginger Rogers, she was now teamed in "family pictures" with Fred Astaire; while Miss MacDonald, who drew the stalwart, marcelled Nelson Eddy for her singing partner, was quickly transformed from a highflying thrush into an iron butterfly. Her operatic films may have pleased the Catholic clergy, and little old ladies loved them clearly, but compared to her pre-Legion efforts, they were pallid stuff, indeed. And while the films of Astaire and Rogers had some delightful moments, especially one called Swing Time, their plots were mainly a series of hoary clichés. The antisex, or nonsex, reaction to Code restrictions also brought in Sonja Henie, skating her snow-flecked way to fame and fortune in a series of treacly ice musicals. Miss Henie, with her inanely sweet, chubby-cheeked wholesomeness, could never have been accused of having a lustful thought. Lily Pons, Gladys Swarthout, Grace Moore were brought from the opera stage to the sound stage in the middle and late Thirties to provide "class" in Hollywood musicals. Nothing could have been more chilling to the bone marrow than to watch Miss Swarthout and John Boles singing their soulful duets in Rose of the Rancho, a 1936 post–Legion of Decency musical. When sex was left out of the musicals, the life seemed to go out of them, too.

John Boles typified the antiseptic movie hero of the last half of the Thirties. Other notably clean-cut and clean-living types who flourished in the purified screen atmosphere were Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor, possessed of profiles of near beauty, but giving the impression that their sexual cylinders were not sparking properly. The quintessence of moral, asexual "manliness" appeared, however, in the person of toothy, perpetually smiling Don Ameche, who was teamed, appropriately, with Sonja Henie on more than one occasion. A return to the swashbuckling male type of the Twenties was eventually found in Errol Flynn, but his love-making was oddly chaste and remarkably restrained when compared with the steamy four-minute Barrymore kisses of the previous decade and the Latin leering of Valentino.

To further demonstrate its basic goodness of soul, Hollywood went on a culture kick, turning out deluxe adaptations of Little Women, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Becky Sharp. The five-foot shelf was culled for suitable biographical material, and dull, relentlessly noble biographies of such worthies as Pasteur, Zola, Cardinal Richelieu and Baron Rothschild were made, all obviously immune to Legion condemnation. Should a classic have some questionable elements in it, such as the clear suggestion of incest in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, the film adaptation was carefully dry-cleaned before presentation to the public. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was forced to carry this kind of thing to absurd extremes when, after purchasing Lillian Hellman's Broadway success The Children's Hour, which dealt with two schoolteachers accused of Lesbianism, the Breen office stipulated that he could not use the title, the plot, or even publicize the fact that he had paid $50,000 for the screen rights. In 1964, it is worth noting, the film was remade by the same director with Miss Hellman's original title and plot—although her fee had now jumped considerably above $50,000.

Despite this apparent sterilization of Hollywood morality, the Production Code people persisted in their efforts to make the movies toe an imaginary moral line. Indeed, so successfully was the Code enforced after its readoption in 1934 that only two years later an encyclical letter by Pope Pius XI characterized the system as something that all nations might well emulate. Martin Quigley heaped glowing praise on Hollywood for the "new dignity" of motion pictures. And in November of 1936, Will Hays was granted the signal honor of being received by the Pope, who gave Hays personal assurances of his pleasure with what had been done to "improve" pictures and of his hope that the progress would continue.

It did. Take, for example, the strenuous efforts to "improve" Tolstoy's Anna Karenina so that it would conform to the standards set by the Code. MGM, before deciding to film the story, conferred with Production Code boss Joseph Breen, and it was agreed that all mention of the illegitimate child which figured in Tolstoy's novel be eliminated. It was also agreed that the adulterous love of Anna (to be played by Greta Garbo) and her lover Vronsky (Fredric March) would not be presented as "attractive or alluring." Anna was to be constantly torn between her child and her lover. She would lose her friends, and then go through protracted and agonized torment when she also lost Vronsky. As if all this were not enough, she was to atone for everything by dying. Vronsky, too, was to suffer for his adultery with Garbo, even though a majority of the men of the nation might have gladly traded places with him. He was to be forced to resign from the army and "suffer remorse for the remainder of his life because of Anna's tragic fate," even though toward the close of the book Vronsky joined the army because of his grief.

The producers agreed to all of Breen's stringent demands, but after the script was written, Breen continued to be implacable about removing all traces of "sinfulness" from the material. The scriptwriters forlornly attempted to remain true to the spirit of the book nevertheless, and at one point wrote a speech for Anna in which she said: "Am I ashamed of anything I have done? Wouldn't I do the same again tomorrow? Who cares what people say so long as I love you, and you don't change?" Breen recommended that the first two sentences of the speech be deleted, and they were. Again, he informed MGM that certain scenes, in his opinion, accentuated the adultery. "They should not be played in Anna's bedroom, but, if possible, in her living room." Even then he worried over the inviting appearance of the sofa. Eventually Garbo played upon the spartan couch one of the briefest and most uncomfortable of her many acts of passion on the screen. Tolstoy must have turned over several times in his wintry Russian grave. Certainly no more passionate were the love scenes in Garbo's next vehicle, Camille, in which youthful Robert Taylor played Armand to her Marguerite, the consumptive demimondaine. Retreating to conventional 19th Century romanticism, MGM kept the relationship of the lovers as seemingly chaste as possible by dressing Garbo in bulky, ultraproper gowns, and by seeing to it that Robert Taylor's kisses landed more often on her shoulder than on any more strategic target. Predictably, Camille was uncensured by the censors, for Marguerite paid the classic price for her sins: death. These scrupulous efforts to expunge all traces of genuine sex from the American screen were to continue until at last a revolution of "maturity" was forced in the early Fifties by box-office competition from that deadly menace, television.

In the Thirties, meanwhile, the way was open for the foreign film, untrammeled by Hays Office restrictions, to make inroads in a burgeoning group of cinema theaters called "art houses." And the independent domestic producers of fly-by-night quickies found themselves in a privileged position. Not belonging to the MPPA, they had no reason to fear the Code and were willing to take their chances with each state's individual board of censorship. The process was almost always the same: cheap production, lurid advertising, quick box-office returns, and quicker oblivion. If the film sparked some scandal, so much the better. Many of these low-budget sexploiters could be cashed in again and again in smaller towns and cities where the so called art houses had yet to appear.

The sexploiters were free to move into subject areas forbidden by the Code, such as venereal disease—though Sam Goldwyn, who railed against the Code but was seldom able to buck it, was forced to change the syphilitic whore of Dead End (1937) to a consumptive streetwalker (played by Claire Trevor), much as RKO had done with Of Human Bondage three years earlier. In 1937, two films dealing with syphilis did appear in New York City; but these were produced by independents without benefit of the Hays Office. They were called Damaged Lives and Damaged Goods, and the state censors promptly banned them both. The state board of regents overruled their ban, however, and both were eventually shown.

The first, Damaged Lives, told the story of a youth who married, then discovered he had contracted syphilis through his earlier careless ways and that he had passed the vile disease on to his wife. Several stills inserted in the film showed the ravages of the disease, and were accompanied by a lecture on the sound track. Damaged Goods told a similar story, and was based on a Broadway stage play of some 20 years before and on the silent film that was made from it. In this tale, not only the wife but the child of the union is infected with the disease. Their plight results in all but hopeless tragedy, but the film eschewed unctuous finger-pointing at sinful behavior and rightly made public ignorance the primary villain. It did not fail to echo, however, the righteous tones struck by the original Damaged Goods and its successors in 1915.

Birth of a Baby came the following year (1938), again without Code sanction, because it forthrightly showed a woman in labor. The public was shocked by it (an issue of Life in which clips from the picture were published was banned in Canada and Pennsylvania, as well as Boston and 32 other cities), not because pregnancy and birth were rare occurrences in real life, but because Hollywood seldom so much as showed a pregnant woman on the screen, and its heroines were usually seen entering a hospital to give birth with their waists still a girlish 18 inches in circumference.

The afore-mentioned films had a certain social value, no matter how quickly or cheaply made; but the other sex quickies seldom bothered to have any social purpose at all, and fell into two main categories: the outright nudist film and the jungle picture. The first category was made in Europe, mainly, one popular example being Elysia. Views of pubic areas of the body were confined to long-distance shots, while breasts and buttocks were shot in medium closeup. The jungle film was usually of the pseudodocumentary type. The first of these, Goona-Goona, made on the island of Bali by Armand Denis, enjoyed some success. It was a native romance, supposedly factual, set in an exotic paradise, and peopled mostly by pubescent girls in sarongs that left the breasts exposed. Samarang, which followed hard upon it, featured more pubescent girls with breasts exposed in a tale of Malay pearl divers, and added a fight between a shark and an octopus for flavoring. Because the girls in these "true-life" native romances, of which there were several, had skins considerably darker than those of Anglo-Saxon white-skinned American Protestants, the censors were inclined to regard the films as ethnic documents, and they were passed without much in the way of cutting. Nudity was immodest, evidently, only for white women. On the other hand, male sexual organs, of whatever color, were always taboo.

Animals and sex were discovered to be a good combination by the producers of quickies, who found it a good deal cheaper to buy stock footage of jungles, animals and unclad actresses, and to build stories around them, than to set off with camera and crew for Africa or the islands of the Pacific. Both Ingagi and Forbidden Adventure used actors in gorilla suits who pursued "native" women all over the wilds of California and through papier-mâché jungles erected on sound stages in Harlem. The marquees promised such simian sensationalism as: "A Country of Ape Worship by Women!" and "The Mating of Beauty and the Beast!"

To such depths as these had the depiction of the sexual instinct degenerated by the end of the Thirties, caused primarily by Hollywood's own dismal fear of a vocal minority of prudes. Not for another decade was it to regain its courage, and not until television threatened the box office did it regain a sense of reality.

This is the sixth in a series of articles on "The History of Sex in Cinema." In the next installment, authors Knight and Alpert shift their focus to the European scene during the turbulent Thirties, where sound films reached an artistic maturity that permitted the frank exploration of erotic themes still barred to American moviemakers by the Legion of Decency—and banned from American screens by the bluenosed U. S. Customs Bureau.