The genres dominated production: screwball come-
dies, musicals, gangster movies, historical epics,
melodramas, newspaper and horror movies, West-
erns, and biographies. Many of these movies were
forgettable, but the remaining ones are some of
Hollywood’s most important, influential, and mem-
orable creations.
While the moguls ran a tight, highly prof-
itable business within their fortresslike studio walls,
outside there were calls for censorship, which, if
not answered, threatened those profits. During the
early 1920s, after several years of relatively frank
portrayals of sex and violence on-screen (a period
in which the industry also suffered a wave of scan-
dals), Hollywood faced a credible threat of censor-
ship from state governments and boycotts from
Catholic and other religious groups. In 1922, in
response to these pressures, Hollywood producers
formed a regulatory agency called the Motion
Picture Producers and Distributors of America
(MPPDA, later the Motion Picture Association of
America, or MPAA), headed by Will Hays. Origi-
nally conceived of as a public- relations entity to
offset bad publicity and deflect negative attention
away from Hollywood, the Hays Office (as the
agency was commonly known) in 1930 adopted the
Motion Picture Production Code, a detailed set of
guidelines concerning acceptable and unacceptable
subject matter. Nudity, adultery, homosexuality,
gratuitous or unpunished violence, and religious
blasphemy were among the many types of content
that the code strongly discouraged. Perhaps even
more significant, the code explicitly stated that art
can influence, for the worse, the morality of those
who consume it (an idea that Hollywood has been
reconsidering ever since).
Adherence to the Motion Picture Code remained
fundamentally voluntary until the summer of 1934,
when Joseph Breen, a prominent Catholic layman,
was appointed head of the Production Code
Administration (PCA), the enforcement arm of the
MPPDA. After July 1, 1934, all films would have to
receive an MPPDA seal of approval before being
released. For at least twenty years, the Breen Office
rigidly controlled the general character and the par-
ticular details of Hollywood storytelling. After a
period of practical irrelevance, the code was offi-
cially replaced in 1968, when the MPAA adopted the
rating system that remains in use today.
Movies produced during Hollywood’s golden age
were made to be entertaining and successful at the
box office, and the result was a period of stylistic
conformity, not innovation. If an idea worked once,
it usually worked again in a string of similar
movies. The idea was to get the public out of the
house and into the theater, give people what they
wanted (entertainment, primarily), and thus help
them forget the Depression and the anxieties caused452 CHAPTER 10FILM HISTORY
Screwball comedyThe genre of screwball comedy—
popular during the Great Depression in the 1930s because it
offered an escape from reality—continues to exist today (for
example, in movies such as Joel and Ethan Coen’s Intolerable
Cruelty[2003] or George Clooney’s Leatherheads[2008]),
but without the wit or sting of the original. Its principal
characteristics include stories of mistaken identity, often
involving a person of the working class who accidentally (or
not so accidentally) meets with someone from the upper
class and, contrary to all expectations, becomes romantically
involved; rapid, witty dialogue; and farcical—even fantastic—
rags-to-riches plot situations. Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living
(1937) easily fits the bill. Its script by Preston Sturges, a
master of the genre, begins when tycoon John Ball (Edward
Arnold), who resents his wife’s buying a new sable coat,
throws it from his penthouse roof. It lands on Mary Smith
(Jean Arthur), an office worker, who is riding on the top of a
Fifth Avenue double-decker bus (behind her, the man in the
turban is a classic bit of screwball incongruity). Seeing the
coat, people assume she is rich, and she quickly learns to
enjoy that illusion as she is enticed into a world of glamour
and falls improbably in love with John Ball, Jr. (Ray Milland).