If you ask me, the most shameful example of an embarrassing, tacked-on ending is that of The Blue Dahlia. It's obvious even while you watch that some guy in Hollywood with a stick up his ass couldn't besmirch a war hero even if it makes a gripping, dreadful and totally believable story. The twist ending that sidesteps a current social problem is dictionary definition willful ignorance. As a viewer, from a very early age, I have been infuriated by false endings and the sanctimonious retribution forced on characters in classic movies.
Frank Miller's book is not new. I had a copy when it was, fifteen years ago. But it remains a solid entry on the mechanisms at work behind the censorship of film, both from within the industry and without. Having forgotten much of the history and conflating everything in my mind to "the Hays Code," it was worth a re-look and it reminded me that there were many hands at work muddling messages from the script stage, to point the film went out of the camera and into theatres. The industry's Production Code was presided over by many strong personalities (not just Hays), including Joe Breen. His and his colleagues' Irish sensibilities, according to Jack Vizzard, were less concerned with the effects of violence than sex, an observation that may explain why to this day American films go lightly on blood but get queasy when anything sexual crops up. Miller quotes Vizzard in saying, "to the Irish, violence was not necessarily connected with the debasement of human life. It was frequently a sign of manliness...The Irish culture was infected with Jasenism, which dreaded sex as being identified with the darker forces, but which did not so fear brutality, since this was not as 'catching.' It contained its own remedy in that it hurt."
Miller presents many accounts of films that were presented to the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) for approval, then snipped and sliced into oblivion. The littleness of the mentality behind the quibbles can be astonishing. As Miller notes, it wasn't until well into the 1960s that censors considered a film and the ideas presented within it as an organic whole, rather than resorting to a checklist of forbidden actions. The extent to which individuals such as Joe Breen would develop alternate ideas for a script so that it could avoid being censored, is equally astonishing. Maybe Breen should have lobbied for a screenwriting credit, considering how many gay men he turned into Jews, how many abortions he aborted, and how many other sins he blotted from the sight of wholesome American families.
It's worth remembering that most of this censorship was driven by the assumption that any of these products should be able to be viewed by children. The notion that a film might have an adult-only audience was late in coming. Cracks appeared in the Production Code when historic events (such as the Second World War) made audiences thirsty for realism. The appearance of European films and their natural portrayal of human relationships also emphasized the exaggerated artificiality of American films under the Code. As a non-American, it's interesting to observe how consistently this country's films have always been under attack by moralizing forces.
I wouldn't have minded a few more photos, and had a bit of an issue with the statement Miller makes a number of times that "everyone in the audience knew what was really going on," (when, for example, a female character was a "dancer" but in the original script a prostitute). Miller's book's traces censorship of movies from its very beginnings right up to the mid-90s. Having been a teen when it was published, I have to say that now as an adult I'm surprised that the efforts to edit and smother film was as busy in the 90s as it was in the 30s. Yet I was one of those kids that got my hands on the video version of Louis Malle's Damage for the extra two minutes!
The ultimate message I took away from this book is that there's always going to be someone out there who wants to squash your fun and call you a sinner.
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