When motion pictures first became popular in the United States, they were kind of like the Old West – or maybe the Internet. They were unregulated, and the pictures that got made were whatever people would pay to see and local censorship boards would allow. There certainly wasn’t a universal ratings system like we have now, and you might be surprised at how provocative some of the films made in the teens, 20s, and early 30s were. There was nudity, violence, the glorification of criminals, blasphemy, and all sorts of shocking-for-the-time elements like homosexuality and interracial relationships. In the teens, the Supreme Court had ruled that motion pictures were not covered under laws protecting free speech and so the racier the films became, the greater the threat of federal level censorship became.
So Hollywood established what’s known as the Hays office in
1922. It was essentially the prim school marm with a ruler ready to whack the
knuckles of any filmmakers who wanted to get too saucy. The office enforced the
Motion Picture Production Code which was introduced in 1930. The Code was a
list of eleven “DO NOTS” and twenty five “BE CAREFULS.” Do nots were things films were explicitly
forbidden from showing at all such as nudity, drug use, or white slavery.
(Apparently, every other kind of slavery was totally fine.) The Be Carefuls were things that could
potentially be included but only if done with restraint and the proper
attitude. For instance, it might be okay to show someone committing an act of
arson, but only if he gets caught and appropriately punished.
The Code wasn’t really enforced for several years but in
1934 the Production Code Administration was established to replace the Hays
office and Joseph Breen was put in charge. Breen was an active part of the
Catholic League of Decency and was dedicated to stamping out cinematic smut.
The Code was rewritten so that all films were required to get a stamp of
approval from Breen and the PCA before being before seeing the light of day.
One thing that led to the establishment of the PCA and
Breen’s ascension to power was a spate of envelope-pushing films released in
the early 30s. One of those is 1933’s
Baby Face starring Barbara Stanwyck. She plays Lily Powers, a girl from a
dirty steel town whose mother ran out and whose neglectful father runs a
speakeasy. He basically hands his beautiful, bitter daughter around to his more
powerful customers in return for keeping his illegal bar open. Lily’s dad dies
when his moonshine still explodes and she flees to New York where she literally
sleeps her way to the top of Gotham Trust, a bank housed in a massive
skyscraper.
Lily seduces the guy in HR and then her boss and then his
boss and then his boss and so on. Every time she’s caught or confronted, she
lies and plays innocent for about thirty seconds before leveling her laser-like
gaze of desire and invitation at the next sorry sap who immediately falls
before her feminine powers. It’s kind of hilarious to watch man after man turn
simpering and helpless just because Lily is looking at him. But it is Barbara
Stanwyck, so frankly I get it.
There’s a whole dissertation to be written about whether
Lily is a feminist hero who takes responsibility for her own sexuality and
accrues power in a man’s world, or whether she’s simply an amoral anti-hero.
Whatever your take, Baby Face was
provocative enough to move the powers of the day in the 1930s to put some teeth
in the production code and change filmmaking forever. The ratings system we
have today is the direct result of what happened over eighty years ago. Watch Baby Face because it’s a fun and
revealing look at what was transgressive so long ago, but also because it
shapes the movies you see in the multiplex now.
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