Pre-Code Hollywood

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CHAPTER ONE

Pre-Code Hollywood
Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema,
1930-1934
By THOMAS DOHERTY
Columbia University Press

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On the Cusp of Classical Hollywood Cinema

On or about July 1934 American cinema changed. During that

month, the Production Code Administration, popularly known as the
Hays Office, began to regulate, systematically and scrupulously, the
content of Hollywood motion pictures. For the next thirty years,
cinematic space was a patrolled landscape with secure perimeters
and well-defined borders. Adopted under duress at the urging of
priests and politicians, Hollywood's in-house policy of selfcensorship set the boundaries for what could be seen, heard, even
implied on screen. Not until the mid-1950s did cracks appear in the
structure and not until 1968, when the motion picture industry
adopted its alphabet ratings system, did the Code edifice finally
come crumbling down.
Hollywood's vaunted "golden age" began with the Code and
ended with its demise. An artistic flowering of incalculable cultural
impact, Hollywood under the Code bequeathed the great generative
legacy for screens large and small, the visual storehouse that still
propels waves of images washing across a channel-surfing planet.
The synergistic spread of American entertainment, the whole global
kaleidoscope of films, television, video games, computer graphics,
and CD-ROMs, draws on the censored heritage for archival
material, deep backstory, narrative blueprints, and moral ballast.
Whether conventional retread or postmodern pastiche, Hollywood
under the Code is the prime host to a long line of moving image
parasites.
But what of Hollywood "before the Code" the motion picture
record that predates the censorship that polished up the golden age
heritage? For four yearsfrom March 31, 1930, when the Motion
Picture Producers and Distributors of America formally pledged to
abide by the Production Code, until July 2, 1934, when the MPPDA
empowered the Production Code Administration to enforce it
compliance with the Code was a verbal agreement that, as producer
Samuel Goldwyn might have said, wasn't worth the paper it was
written on. Relatively and in context, Hollywood was free to roam
far and wide, or at least to venture farther out on the frontiers of free
expression than would be permitted after the Code, when the range
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expression than would be permitted after the Code, when the range
was fenced in and the deputies were on duty.
That four-year interval marks a fascinating and anomalous
passage in American motion picture history: the so-called pre-Code
era, when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it.
Unlike all studio system feature films released after July 1934, preCode Hollywood did not adhere to the strict regulations on matters
of sex, vice, violence, and moral meaning forced upon the balance
of Hollywood cinema. In language and image, implicit meanings
and explicit depictions, elliptical allusions and unmistakable
references, pre-Code Hollywood cinema points to a road not taken.
For four years, the Code commandments were violated with
impunity and inventiveness in a series of wildly eccentric films.
More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than
what came afterwards, they look like Hollywood cinema but the
moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel
universe.
In a sense pre-Code Hollywood is from another universe. It lays
bare what Hollywood under the Code did its best to cover up and
push off screen. Sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or
man in Unashamed (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), and She Done
Him Wrong (1933); marriage ridiculed and redefined in Madame
Satan (1930), The Common Law (1931), and Old Morals for New
(1932); ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored in The Bitter
Tea of General Yen (1933), The Emperor Jones (1933), and
Massacre (1934); economic injustice exposed and political
corruption assumed in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), This Day and
Age (1933), and Gabriel Over the White House (1933); vice
unpunished and virtue unrewarded in Red Headed Woman (1932),
Call Her Savage (1932), and Baby Face (1933)in sum, pretty
much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled.
Of course Hollywood after 1934 is a rich index of all the above
too. The fractures of American life, still less the open embrace of
sex, did not close up when the Code clamped down. No matter how
rigid the body cast, Hollywood cinema is too supple and expressive
an art to constrain what Walt Whitman celebrated as "nature without
check with original energy." The Code seal stamped on Alfred
Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) did not keep Ingrid Bergman and
Cary Grant from simmering with erotic passion and flaunting the
sacrament of marriage, nor did it temper the plight of the
dispossessed or strangle the voice of protest in John Ford's version
of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Always too, in the
hidden recesses of the cinematic subtext, under the surface of
avowed morality and happy endings, Hollywood under the Code is
fraught with defiance of Code authority.
But in pre-Code Hollywood the fissures crack open with rougher
edges and sharper points. What is concealed, subterranean, and
repressed in Hollywood under the Code leaps out exposed, on the
surface, and unbound in Hollywood before the Code. Often what is
seen and heard in pre-Code Hollywood is not so much as glimpsed
or whispered in Codified Hollywood. Images, language, ideas, and
implications are projected on screen with blunt force and
unmistakable meaning. Aptly dubbed "the motion picture industry's
Magna Charta of official decency," the Production Code set down
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Magna Charta of official decency," the Production Code set down

strict laws of moral gravity. The universe of pre-Code Hollywood
operated under rules of its own.

Patrolling the Diegesis

To movie buffs, film professors, and inside dopesters, the phrase

"classical Hollywood cinema" is a loaded term liable to go off
whenever the dialogue turns philosophical at a postscreening
postmortem. The classic work on classical Hollywood cinema is
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson's The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to
1960, published in 1985. A magisterial and synoptic study, it refined
a set of notions percolating in academic film studies since the early
1970s, around the time the field became a secure university
discipline with its own departmental stationery and tenure-track
teaching slots. As Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson told it, the vital
components of classical Hollywood cinema were a conventional
visual style and a sturdy economic structure: how the films looked
and how they were produced, distributed, and exhibited. That
bifocal vision on film culture and studio commercelooking at the
means of art and the means of production, the "show" and the
"business" of moviemakingremains the best way of understanding
the hybrid medium.
As an art, Hollywood's creative unit is the narrative feature film,
which became its flagship product around 19121915, the
traditional touchstone being D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
(1915). Griffith's "twelve-reel photoplay" deployed full blown the
still-emergent grammar of the moving image, a morphology evolved
from snippets of documentary "actualities," picaresque slapstick,
and one-reel vignettes. After two decades of moving-image
spectatorship, roughly from Thomas Edison's perfection of the
kinetoscope in 1894 to the nickelodeon era of 1907-1912, the
building blocks of visual literacy had been mastered by filmmaker
and spectator alike: the close-up, parallel editing, point-of-view
shots, eyeline matches, montage sequences, and so on. The same
period marked another crucial transition, the shift from film-asspectacle to film-as-fabula, from looking at things move to being
moved by things on screen. Though anything might be filmed, the
movies were now primarily a story machine.
As a business, the medium underwent a concurrent
standardization. The pioneer days of rough-and-tumble hustle
settled into a civilized arrangement wherein the fittest of
moviemakers survived by crushing competition, gobbling up the
leavings, and consolidating assets. A technologically complex,
capital-intensive business dependent on circuits of national
distribution, the motion picture industry made no room for small
entrepreneurs or corner shops. Hollywood, a place name that
became synonymous with the American motion picture industry
around 1920, came to describe not just a location but an economic
practice. The vertical integration of motion picture production,
distribution, and exhibitionin which a single corporate entity
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distribution, and exhibitionin which a single corporate entity

produced, sent out, and screened the film productcrystallized into
the mature oligopoly of the Hollywood studio system. Like the
items on a grocery shelf or automobile lot, the familiar brand names
Columbia, Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, Universal, and Warner
Brotherswere defined by their trademark stars, consistent styles,
and signature genres.
Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger set the rough boundaries of
classical Hollywood cinema from 1917 to 1960. However, since the
gambit of historians dealing with matters of priority is to backdate a
genesis farther and farther into the past, and since research into the
archaeology of early cinema continues to unearth prior claimants,
some film scholars have pushed back the original birth date of
classical Hollywood cinema to about Edwin S. Porter's The Great
Train Robbery (1903). Eventually, an enterprising graduate student
will discover that the first true exemplar of classical Hollywood
cinema was originally shot in the back of Thomas Edison's Black
Maria in 1894.
Yet whether the date is 1903 or 1917, the problem with placing
silent cinema under the rubric of classical Hollywood cinema is that
no one watches it. For all its influence on descendants, the
forebearer is forgotten and the debts unacknowledged. If "classical"
means primal and formative, then the Bordwell-Staiger-Thompson
time clock seems punctual enough, but if it means alive in the
mind's eye, it runs slow. Except to antiquarians and preservationists,
silent cinema has little presence on the cultural radar screen, its
landmark films unrented on video, its iconic images spotted only as
fodder for video collage on MTV. Synchronized sound is so
intimately embedded in the structure of motion picture grammar that
it takes an effort of imagination to realize that American cinema
lived quite well without it for over thirty years.
The introduction of sound to the cinema in 1927 beckons as a
likely starting point for a true classical era, but not until 1930, when
the major studios announced the cessation of silent film production,
did the death knell for the silent screen toll for certain. If film style
and mode of production yoked to sound are the prime ingredients of
classical Hollywood cinema, then 1930 seems the logical birth date,
especially since it coincides so fortuitously with the formal adoption
of the Production Code.
Yet to think of classical Hollywood cinema is to think not solely
of means of production and film style, silent or sound, but to conjure
a moral universe with known visual and ethical outlines. This is not
to say that Hollywood cinema in the silent and pre-Code era refused
to bow to official virtue and popular expectations. Still less is it to
imply that the grammar deployed by the embryonic sound cinema
was not first cast by the previous three decades of silent cinema. It is
to say that the Code gave Hollywood the framework to thrive
economically and ripen artistically and that Hollywood in turn gave
the Code provenance over a cultural commodity of great pricethe
visible images and manifest values of American motion pictures.
What makes Hollywood's classic age "classical" is not just the film
style or the studio system but the moral stakes.
Naturally, motion picture morality, or the lack of it, had been
monitored by guardians of civic virtue since the chaste peck
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monitored by guardians of civic virtue since the chaste peck

between the middle-aged lovebirds in The Kiss (1896). For
progressive reformers and cultural conservatives who beheld in the
embryonic medium the potential for social damage and moral blight,
the products of the motion picture industry (no less than the
methods of meat packing or the distribution of demon rum)
warranted regulation and prohibition as a public health measure.
Especially after World War I, when Hollywood began spinning out
whole film cycles devoted to the sins of wild youth, dancing
daughters, straying wives, and dark seducers, the moral guardians
tried their damndest to break up the parade of wastrels marching in
the vanguard of the Jazz Age assault on Victorian values. In 1922,
after a cascade of sordid scandals offscreen and shocking antics
onscreen, their agitations compelled studio executives to recruit
Presbyterian elder and model of probity Will H. Hays, postmaster
general from the administration of Warren G. Harding, to clean up,
or at least put a more respectable face on, the motion picture
industry. For the next quarter century, as president of the Motion
Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Hays was
Hollywood's man in the crosshairs of controversy, the official who
defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing nostrums, and
negotiated treaties to cease hostilities. The most significant pact
between the censors and the censorable was the Production Code
itself, adopted in 1930 to roll back the profligacy of the 1920s and
set a reformed America again on the path of righteousness in the
new, harsher decade.
The Production Code, the enabling legislation for classical
Hollywood cinema, was written by Father Daniel Lord, a Jesuit
priest, and Martin Quigley, a prominent Roman Catholic layman
and editor of the influential exhibitors' journal Motion Picture
Herald. Their amalgam of Irish-Catholic Victorianism colors much
of the cloistered design of classical Hollywood cinema, not just the
warm-hearted padres played by Spencer Tracy, Pat O'Brien, and
Bing Crosby, but the deeper lessons of the Baltimore catechism
deference to civil and religious authorities, insistence on personal
responsibility, belief in the salvific worth of suffering, and
resistance to the pleasures of the flesh in thought, word, and deed.
As theological prolegomenon and cultural guidebook, the Code
was a sophisticated piece of work. Contrary to popular belief, the
document was not a grunted jeremiad from bluenose fussbudgets,
but a polished treatise reflecting long and deep thought in aesthetics,
education, communications theory, and moral philosophy. In the
context of its day, the Code expressed a progressive and reformist
impulse akin to that other emblem of elite cultural management, the
"noble experiment" of Prohibition. It evinced concern for the proper
nurturing of the young and the protection of women, demanded due
respect for indigenous ethnics and foreign peoples, and sought to
uplift the lower orders and convert the criminal mentality. If the
intention was social control, the allegiance was on the side of the
angels.
In good Jesuit fashion, the Code was divided into two parts, a set
of "general principles" (the moral vision) and "particular
applications" (a precise listing of forbidden material). Deeply
Catholic in tone and outlook, the animating rationale for the Code
held that "art can be morally evil in its effects," that both "as a
product [of a mind] and the cause of definite effects, it has a deep
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product [of a mind] and the cause of definite effects, it has a deep
moral significance and an unmistakable moral quality." As such,
motion pictures demanded responsible handling from those who
traffic in them and careful monitoring from those who shepherd the
flock.
Though the tones echoed the intellectual lineage of Ignatious
Loyola, the Code rightly presumed a broader constituency, a wellfounded confidence that sound-thinking Americans, Catholic and
non-Catholic alike, need not debate the right or wrong of some
issues or even utter aloud certain unpleasant matters. Pronouncing
the document "consonant with public opinion ... censorship or no
censorship," the poet and biographer John Drinkwater detected
"nothing in the moral aspects of the Code to which reasonable
objection can be taken." In an age of moral consensus, at least
among the moral guardians, the zone of agreement was large, the
areas of legitimate controversy small, and the realm "beyond the
pale" self-evident. "Even within the limits of pure love," asserted the
Code delicately, "certain facts have been universally regarded by
lawmakers as outside the limits of safe presentation." Father Lord
and Mr. Quigley saw no need to defile the document by typesetting
long lists of "pointed profanity" or "vulgar expressions." Likewise,
the prohibition against homosexuality dared not speak the name, but
it didn't need to. "Impure love, the love which society has always
regarded as wrong and which has been banned by divine law ...
must not be presented as attractive and beautiful." However, another
kind of forbidden love did warrant prohibition by name:
"Miscegenation," precisely defined as "sex relationships between
the white and black races," was never permitted.
Lending the Code moral authority and widespread acceptance
was the composition of Hollywood's audience, conceived to be a
great undifferentiated Public comprised of all ages, classes, and
moral sensibilities. On the universality of Hollywood cinema, both
the censors and the studios agreed: everyone goes to the movies.
"Most arts appeal to the mature," declared the Code. "This art
appeals at once to every classmature, immature, developed,
undeveloped, law-abiding, criminal." Given the nature of the mass
medium, an "`adults only'" policy would never be "completely
satisfactory" and "only partially effective" even were Hollywood
willing to shut out its most loyal customers, the young and
gregarious. "Films, unlike books and music, can with difficulty be
confined to certain selected groups," asserted the Code. So reasoned
Dr. Harlan T. Horner, assistant commissioner of education for New
York, in upholding a statewide ban on The Mystery of Life (1931), a
nature documentary featuring trial lawyer Clarence Darrow
discoursing upon the theory of evolution. "What constitutes decency
in a plan of general public amusement open to both sexes and all
ages may be vastly different from what constitutes decency before a
restricted audience brought together for scientific or educational
purposes," explained Dr. Horner. "In this case, the presentation of
such views taken in connection with the explanation of them in a
public moving picture house, wholly unrestricted, constitutes
indecency." Graduate students in medicine might watch the love life
of one-cell animals, snails, and spiders, but not the young and the
old, the male and the female mixed together indiscriminately.
In 1930, to circumvent government regulation and squelch the
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In 1930, to circumvent government regulation and squelch the

protests of religious and civic groups, the Motion Picture Producers
and Distributors of America pledged to abide by the Lord-Quigley
commandments. Yet the men charged with bringing studio
productions into line with the Codethe weak-willed factotums
Col. Jason S. Joy and Dr. James Wingate of the Studio Relations
Committeelacked the fortitude and vision to enforce it. More
importantly, the regulatory and oversight process was a rigged
game: members of the MPPDA could appeal unfavorable decisions
by Code administrators to the next level of executive authority,
namely themselves. By gentleman's agreement, material that
violated both the letter and spirit of the Code was granted a transit
visa for theatrical release. The lax oversight was an open secret in
Hollywood. "Does any producer pay attention to the Hays Code?"
the Hollywood Reporter inquired archly in 1931, knowing none did.
"Producers have reduced the Hays Production Code to sieve-like
proportions and are deliberately out-smarting their own document,"
declared Variety in 1933. The same year a prominent screenwriter
asserted that "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's
just a memory."
Looking at the gunplay of James Cagney and listening to the
wordplay of Mae West, American Catholics agreed. Beginning in
late 1933 and with escalating vehemence throughout the first half of
1934, they launched a crusade against Hollywood immorality. When
the New Deal in Washington insinuated the probability of federal
censorship, and a reformist educational group called the Motion
Picture Research Council published a series of reports linking bad
behavior to bad movies, the studios found themselves fighting a
three-front war against church, state, and social science. Desperate
to negotiate a peace treaty, they agreed to reorganize the internal
enforcement mechanism to ensure that the Code, so long a paper
tiger, acquired teeth. The old Studio Relations Committee and the
Producers Appeal Board were abolished and replaced with the
Production Code Administration. The PCA derived its authority
from, and ultimately answered to, the board of directors of the
MPPDA, the New York bankers and moneymen behind the
industry, not the on-site studio executives in Hollywood.
To head the new agency, MPPDA president Will H. Hays
appointed Joseph I. Breen, a former newspaperman and influential
Roman Catholic layman. As chief of the Production Code
Administration from 1934 until 1954, he became one of the most
influential figures in American culture. Upon his death in 1965,
Variety summed up Breen's preeminent role: "More than any single
individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion
picture." With the exception of a brief and unhappy term as an
executive at RKO from 1941 until 1942, Breen enforced the Code
commandments with a potent mix of missionary zeal and
administrative tenacity. Interpreter of the law and court of last
resort, he presided over and upheld the moral universe of classical
Hollywood cinema.
Thus, just as the term "pre-Code" has erroneously come to
designate the 1930-1934 interregnum between adoption of the Code
and enforcement of it, "the Hays Office," the shorthand designation
for the perceived nexus of Hollywood censorship, is also a
misnomer: "pre-Breen" or "Breen Office" would be more accurate.
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misnomer: "pre-Breen" or "Breen Office" would be more accurate.

Even for moral guardians of Breen's dedication, however, film
censorship can be a tricky business. Images must be cut, dialogue
overdubbed or deleted, and explicit messages and subtle
implications excised from what the argot of academic film criticism
calls the "diegesis." Put simply, the diegesis is the world of the film,
the universe inhabited by the characters existing in the landscape of
cinema. "Diegetic" elements are experienced by the characters in the
film and (vicariously) by the spectator; "nondiegetic" elements are
apprehended by the spectator alone. For example, in Casablanca
(1942), when Sam performs "As Time Goes By" on the piano for
Ilsa at Rick's Cafe, the music is diegetic, heard by Sam, Ilsa, and
Rick ("I told you never to play that song!") as well as by the
spectator. When the orchestral score reprises "As Time Goes By" on
the soundtrack as Rick bids Ilsa goodbye at the airport, the music is
nondiegetic, heard by and affecting the heartstrings of the spectator
but not Rick, Ilsa, Victor Lazlo, and Captain Renault.
The job of the motion picture censor is to patrol the diegesis,
keeping an eye and ear out for images, language, and meanings that
should be banished from the world of the film. The easiest part of
the assignment is to connect the dots and detect what is visually and
verbally forbidden by name, snipping out a flash of flesh or cutting
out a vulgar epithet. Anyone can see that Claudette Colbert's milk
bath in The Sign of the Cross (1932) is exposing more of her breasts
than section VI, part 3, of the Production Code permits, or hear that
the fifth word in the closing line from The Front Page (1931) ("That
son of a bitch stole my watch!") must be drowned out by ambient
noise on the soundtrack. More challenging is the work of textual
analysis and narrative rehabilitation that discerns and redirects
hidden lessons and moral meanings. The astute and dedicated censor
knows that correct images and proper words do not alone a moral
universe make.
Breen saw his errand in the Hollywood wilderness in grander
terms than the concealment of skin and the deletion of curses. He
wanted to remake American cinema into a positive force for good,
to imbue it with a transcendent sense of virtue and order. To earn
Breen's imprimatur, the moral meaning of the picture needed to be
clear, edifying, and preferably Catholic. Not for nothing was he
called the "supreme pontiff of motion picture morals." Hollywood
might show the evil that men do but only if it were vanquished by
the last reel, with the guilty punished and the sinner redeemed.
"Compensating moral value" Breen called it, the dictum that "any
theme must contain at least sufficient good in the story to
compensate for, and to counteract, any evil which it relates." Moral
compensation was the only justification for a glimpse of the snake
in paradise.
Adhering to the catechism's injunction that sin resided in three
places ("thought, word, and deed"), the genius of Hollywood's
system of censorship lay in the sophisticated critical scrutiny
accorded not only what was seen, said, and meant onscreen but what
was apprehended from offscreen as well. True dream police, the
Code censors extended their surveillance beyond the visible world
and into the space of the spectator's mind. For example, in The
Office Wife (1930), the camera follows Joan Blondell's legs into a
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Office Wife (1930), the camera follows Joan Blondell's legs into a
bathroom, where her lingerie drops to the floor as she disrobes. The
camera remains focused on her legs as she slips out of her chemise,
her arms entering the frame from above, thereby conjuring an image
of the naked actress bending over, her dorsal exposure beckoning in
offscreen space should the camera tilt upward just a few inches
higher. In pre-Code Hollywood, even what the spectator doesn't see
is more nakedly suggested. Under the Code, so explicit a mental
imagethat is, an image not even depicted on screen but merely
planted in the spectator's mindwould be too arousing to summon
up.
Just as the Code monitored explicit images in offscreen space, so
too did it regulate images that existed only contingently if at all.
Where the unseen body of Joan Blondell from The Office Wife is
sharply outlined, the offscreen images in Hollywood under the Code
are blurred and indistinct. The very obscurity of the image, its
openness to varied interpretations, was precisely what allowed the
Code to grant it a conditional existence. Under this formulation,
sophisticated and morally fit adults picked up on the shady
implications their guileless but susceptible children missed. The
Code itself recognized the two levels of comprehension: "Maturer
minds may easily understand and accept without harm subject
matter in plots which does younger people positive harm." Provided
the children were quarantined and the meaning was elliptical, the
Code permitted the possibility of a cinematically inspired thought
crime. Two examplesone from the fully operating years of Code
regulation, one from the lax enforcement of the pre-Code
interregnumillustrate the universe of difference.
Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) is a
heartbreaking melodrama about an impoverished elderly couple,
played by Frank Morgan and Beulah Bondi, who are forced to
depend on the kindness of familiars, the ungrateful brats who are
their grown children. Farmed out to two sets of homes, separated for
the first time in fifty years of marriage, they endure the humiliation
of being the recipients of filial charity unwillingly given. The
grandmother finds shelter but not welcome in the apartment of her
eldest son, whose upscale wife and teenage daughter resent the old
lady putting a crimp in their styles. In a subplot apprehensible only
to the alert and sophisticated, granddaughter Rhoda (Barbara Read)
is seeing a married man on the sly. The spectator who left for
refreshments midway into the plot might have missed the hints: the
girl, roped into taking her grandmother to the movies, sneaks out of
the theater to meet secretly with a man; later, she returns from the
assignation to pick up granny after the show. In the mannered world
of 1930s cinema, the mere fact she consorts with a man who does
not come to the door to meet her parents is a portent of trouble. The
man in question is not so much as glimpsed; all is rendered
elliptically.
One night Rhoda doesn't come home. Next morning, grandmother
and mother wait nervously by the telephone. The phone rings and
only the grandmother's side of the conversation is heard. A
description of the scene and a verbatim transcription of the dialogue
leaves much unsaid:

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"Hello? Yes? This is Mrs. Cooper," says the

grandmother, forgetting she shares the name with her
daughter-in-law. "What? Don't talk so fast ..." Her eyes
widen, her jaw drops. "You don't want meuh, hello?"
"Why didn't you let me talk?" demands the mother.
"She hung up. Talked about Rhoda."
"What did she say?"
The grandmother glances nervously over at an
eavesdropping maid. "I'll tell you," she says, leading the
mother into a back bedroom, tut-tut-ting all the way,
"Oh, dear ... oh, my, my ..."
The door closes behind the pair and the camera remains
outside the room, fixed on the door. The maid (Louise
Beavers) sneaks over, pretending to dust, and leans
down by the keyhole to listen, a surrogate for the
spectator.
After a slow fade, the scene shifts to the two women
behind the closed door. "You don't know how awful I
feel about this," says the grandmother, signaling that
the unspeakable contents of the phone conversation
have been exchanged during the ellipsis.

In 1937 few spectators under the age of fourteen would have been
able to figure out the message of the unscreened conversation,
namely that a betrayed wife has called to tell the mother about her
wayward daughter and threaten scandal. An early draft of the
screenplay confirms the suspicion: Rhoda holes up with her lover in
a hotel room in New Jersey and must be brought back to her family
by the authorities. During the preproduction review process, Breen
precisely pinpointed the moral flashpoint ("the indication on page F22 that the granddaughter, Rhoda, spends the night in a hotel room
with a married man") and decreed the solution ("this sequence
should be rewritten to remove any flavor of adultery or loose sex").
McCarey complied, making the flavor of adultery a challenge for
adults to detect. Since to speak the transgression is to call down
judgment upon the sinner, the revelation is neither depicted nor
uttered aloud. "Out of regard for the sanctity of marriage and the
home, the triangle, that is, the love of a third party for one already
married, needs careful handling," intones the Code. "The treatment
should not throw sympathy against marriage as an institution."
Perhaps the girl has slept with someone, perhaps she has not.
Regardless, the (possibly) adulterous subplot is tangential, a device
to trigger a crisis involving the continued housing of the
grandmother in the family's apartment. Director McCarey's real
concern is the shabby treatment of the elderly in American culture,
not the indiscretion of the frisky granddaughter. Make Way for
Tomorrow employs an elaborate conceit, above the heads of
children and the dim, in which adultery receives such "careful
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children and the dim, in which adultery receives such "careful

handling" as to be almost opaque. But though murky even in the
mind's eye of the alert spectator, what might be called the "diegetic
ellipsis"an ambiguous interlude occurring offscreenis still
subject to Code authority.
Victor Fleming's Red Dust (1932) is a hot-blooded romance,
produced smack in the middle of the freewheeling pre-Code
interregnum. Bare-armed and frequently bare-chested, Clark Gable
plays the hard-drinking owner of an Indochinese rubber plantation
who has the good fortune to find Jean Harlow squirming in his lap.
Warmed by hard liquor and soft flesh, he embraces her with a frank
lust she returns in kind. Dissolve to a morning six weeks later, when
a smitten and satiated Harlow is to leave the plantation and travel
downriver to Saigon, where she works as a "bar hostess."
Misunderstanding her needy affection for the bill come due, Gable
forks over some cash. As Harlow temporarily walks out of his life,
Mary Astor walks in, with a husband in tow. Dispatching the
husband to the jungle interior and ignoring Harlow's competitive
come-ons, including a titillating, open-air bath scene, Gable seduces
the mildly resistant wife. During a symbolic monsoon, a soaked
Astor is swept away and the couple kiss passionately. A fade-out
settles upon Astor, reclining languidly in bed, glowing with
satisfaction.
Ultimately, Gable resolves to relinquish Astor, a decision he
confides to a delighted Harlow. As the two tussle drunkenly, Astor
walks in, Gable insults her, and she shoots him. Distraught and
repentant, the wife retreats into her husband's arms, whereupon
Harlow lies brazenly to conceal Astor's complicity in the illicit
affair. "This bozo's been after her every minute," she declaims in
mock outrage. "And tonight he comes in drunk and tries to break
into her room and she shoots him"here, Harlow puts a sardonic
spin on the words"the way any virtuous woman would with a
beast like that!" None the worse for a flesh wound, Gable is nursed
back to virility by the platinum blonde and the randy pair, abed, fall
back into each other's arms. The End.
In 1932 no one would have had trouble figuring out that Harlow
is a hooker, Astor an adulterer, and Gable a double-dealing rake. As
Gable leaps between trashy blonde and classy brunette, he violates
propriety and the bonds of matrimony with impunityas do,
respectively, Harlow and Astor. No one suffers for the sins of the
flesh, and Gable and Harlow clinch happily in unsanctified lust in
the final shot. Although the camera moves away from the
consummations of desire, what happens when the camera retires is
utterly lucid. Not only does the diegesis proper violate the Code (the
triangle does not receive "careful handling"), not only is the
offscreen imagery explicitly conjured (spectators are invited to
unspool their own carnal images), but nothing in Red Dust is in any
way subtle or ambiguous in meaning. There is nothing truly
"elliptical" in the diegesis at all.
(Continues...)
(C) 1999 Columbia University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-231-11094-4

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