Hollywood was exploring sexuality, gender, and feminism in the 1930s—but one man stopped it
Joseph Breen’s moralizing changed American cinema for decades
Norma Shearer was bored. It was 1929 and the actress had just wrapped up Their Own Desire, playing a predictable good girl. She always played the good girl, but now she craved something more nuanced. Her husband Irving Thalberg, MGM’s production head, had just bought the rights to a provocative novel. The film adaptation, The Divorcee, was about a woman who finds out her husband is cheating and decides to respond in kind, embarking on a life of sexual adventure. When Shearer suggested she play the role, her husband laughed at her. She climbed into her yellow Rolls Royce with her negligee and boudoir furniture and headed to a photography studio. “Can you turn me into a siren?” she asked the photographer. The pictures won her the part, and the role proved to be highly controversial. A woman who slept with someone beside her husband portrayed as a heroine was unheard of. The film’s poster read, “If the world permits the husband to philander — why not the wife?”
Americans were shocked. Bedroom equality was not an idea condoned by “polite company.” The film was supposed to be provocative — and it provoked one person in particular. Joseph Breen was a pro-censorship staunch Catholic and the following year he would score a powerful role in Hollywood, targeting actresses like Greta Garbo and Shearer exactly because they sought to dispel stereotypes with daring, new roles. Breen liked the trope of the virginal woman and he wanted to make sure that she was the only heroine Americans saw.
Between 1929 and 1934, some of the most progressive Hollywood films were made. The roaring twenties had transformed the screen, reinforcing and compounding delightfully experimental attitudes toward gender and sex in real life. Family values, prudishness, religion, and gender stereotypes were out — refreshingly radical and sexually liberated women were in. But like Siamese twins, cultural shifts come paired with their correlative conservative backlash.
In Design for Living (1933), the heroine had two lovers and chose to keep them both. Torch Singer (1933) featured an unwed mother, while Men in White (1934) touched on illegal abortions. In Queen Christina (1933), Greta Garbo played a cross-dressing bisexual monarch. Film critic Mike LaSalle said of the movie, “It’s one of the best examinations of sexual identity, and it’s one of the most humane films that Hollywood ever made.” Murder at the Vanities (1934) had the heroine crooning an ode to marijuana. (Though the star of the show, Kitty Carlisle Hart, turned out to be less savvy than the character she was playing, mistakenly thinking marijuana was “some kind of a Mexican musical instrument.”) Female (1933) featured a tough, free-loving female auto magnate. In total, these films give the impression of enlightened and liberated people earnestly exploring cultural orthodoxy — and having a whole lot of fun while doing it. Women were not any one thing, these films argued, and nothing was beyond scrutiny in this brave new century.
Hollywood movies were, in theory, meant to adhere to the Hays code, a list of “do’s and don’ts” developed in 1930 for what was acceptable in cinema. But these were treated as suggestions and widely ignored. In response to the flouting of the code, the Catholic church issued a slew of condemnations. The Legion of Decency, a Catholic organization that effectively alerted parishioners as to whether they were allowed to see a movie, singled out Norma Shearer: “We advise strong guard over all pictures which feature Norma Shearer,” an announcement read. The archbishop of Philadelphia told worshipers that the film industry was “promoting a sex mania in our land,” and instructed Catholics not to go to the movies under pain of mortal sin, until instructed otherwise.
Joseph Breen had been hired by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, a trade association representing distributors’ interests.The onus to determine what was acceptable in film fell to them. Breen had strong ties to the Catholic church and considered Hollywood immoral. He galvanized the Catholic church against the industry, even writing speeches on the scourge of Hollywood for clergy.
His efforts worked and sent Hollywood into an economic tailspin. Breen offered a solution to the problem he had manufactured: movies would be required to have a seal of approval from his office certifying that they had followed the Hays code to the letter. Violators faced a $25,000 fine. It went into effect in July of 1934. “Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing,” the code read. Adultery and “scenes of passion” were to be avoided. Even a silhouette of childbirth was prohibited. The racism of the code was overt — miscegenation was forbidden. Women’s bodies were to be closely regulated: dance movements and costumes must be free of sexual innuendo.
Just like that, the fun was over. The code would remain in effect for more than 30 years.
In 1935, The Flame Within featured Anne Harding as a successful psychiatrist engaged to a man who doesn’t approve of career women. Over tea, she tells her groom-to-be, “I’m not going on with the work.”
“What are you doing to do?” he asks.
“You tell me,” she replies meekly, as “happy ending” music swells. The couple locks in an embrace, the man’s face filled with domineering satisfaction.
The code, according to film critic Molly Haskell, “closed off a whole area of women’s expression…. They cut it off right at the beginning, right as women were feeling their way into a new kind of relationship with men, a new kind of relationship with their bodies.”
Film historian Mark Vieira argued that Breen’s machinations “kept mature thought from an audience that was ready for it.” As David Denby wrote in The New Yorker, “In effect, the Code licensed pleasure in a woman’s words, in her temperament, and even in her laugh.”
Of course, the stakes were much higher than cinema. Breen’s battle was over the American way of life. By censoring Hollywood, Breen and the others were acknowledging the film industry’s powerful influence over American minds. “Art enters intimately into the lives of human beings,” the code read. Women who watched heroines excel everywhere from the boardroom to the bedroom might demand their liberation too. While Breen’s ideas were undergirded by an infantilizing belief that the public cannot think for itself, he was right to be concerned. Liberation is a seductive elixir. Once freedom has been tasted, chains become intolerable. It is tempting to wonder what women might have done had Breen kept his Bible-thumping hands off of American movie reels.
