Motion Picture Production Code

The Letter and the Spirit of the Code

Amid public outcry at the immoral tenor of movies, especially their negative influence on children and young people, and to avoid the imposition of government censorship, the Production Code Administration (PCA), headed by devout lay Roman Catholic Joseph I. Breen and often referred [Page 1491]to as the Breen office, was incepted in 1934. From this point on, all Hollywood scripts had to be submitted to the PCA for approval before production, and the completed film required a code seal of approval before release. The code was now applied with full rigor, although its details would be amended as time went on and the studios would find ways to stay within the letter of the code while undermining its spirit.

This latter point may be illustrated with reference to the multicultural issue of anti-Semitism. Two Code strictures coalesced to make it very difficult to address racial or religious prejudice. The first was number 11 of the absolutely forbidden things: “Wilful offense to any nation, race, or creed.” In addition, the Code had a supplementary list deeming “That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated.” Number two of this category was “international relations [which included] avoiding picturing in an unfavorable light another country's religion.” The ban on the word Jew in dialogue on the grounds of avoiding offense was, in practice, taken by the Breen office as an excuse to preclude films from addressing the morally troubling issue of anti-Semitism in the United States or the rising problem of Jewish persecution in Germany. The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, 1937), a parable for contemporary European events made by the socially conscious Warner Bros., looked at Zola's quest to clear the name of the Jew, Dreyfus, wrongly convicted of espionage by the 19th century French military. When looking for a scapegoat on whom to pin the treason, officers are seen looking at Dreyfus's records and tracing down his particulars, pausing at the printed word “Jew” while saying “I wonder how someone like him rose up our ranks.”

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