A code is born: how catholic crusaders and New Deal regulators created the most intrusive censorship regime in Hollywood history.

• Author: Doherty, Thomas

PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD is the marquee name for a brief period in motion picture history, a privileged zone of relative screen freedom, dating from (roughly) 1930 to (precisely) July 15, 1934. The phrase evokes a time when trigger-happy gangsters, wisecracking dames, and subversive rebels, male and female, ran wild through the lawless territory of American cinema. To survey the titles is to register the temperature of the times: Red Headed Woman (1932) and Baby Face (1933), where predatory trollops went horizontal for upward mobility; Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932), where charismatic killers murdered with seditious relish; I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and Heroes for Sale (1933), where legal authority warrants only contempt; Skyscraper Souls (1932) and Employees Entrance (1933), where ruthless capitalists violated business ethics and female chastity at will.

To a grand alliance of moral guardians, the trademark transgressions of pre-Code Hollywood--the coarse wisecracks, the mercenary trollops, the chronic cynicism and snide contempt for stuffed shirts and lawful authority, all ballyhooed by lurid posters and drooling tag lines--were no mere Hollywood high finks but a grave threat to the moral fiber of the nation. More than in 1922, when the moguls formed the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) to put their best face forward, and more than in 1930, when the MPPDA adopted a Production Code but left it toothless, Hollywood in 1934 incited a withering barrage of righteous anger and moral opprobrium. The product line was damned from the pulpit, condemned by editorialists, and denounced by politicians.

After more than three years of unholy and unwholesome screen fare, Catholics formed an organization to beat back the plague. Its official name was the National Legion of Decency--morally upright Protestants and Jews might enlist as well--but the group was known as the Legion of Decency or, more ominously, simply "the Legion"

A notion that had percolated in Catholic circles for years, the Legion took formal shape in October to November 1933, after Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, speaking at the National Conference of Catholic Charities in New York on the authority of Pope Pius XI, denounced "the incalculable influence for evil" exerted by the motion picture screen. "Catholics are called by God, the Pope, the bishops, and the priests to a united front and vigorous campaign for the purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals,' said the bishop. Within a matter of weeks, the Legion of Decency congealed into the most feared of all the private protest groups bedeviling Hollywood. Backed by a coordinated network of Catholic weeklies whose front-page headlines, editorial broadsides, and scare-mongering cartoons fueled parishioner outrage, the Legion lanced Hollywood's hide with pitiless zeal. It had numbers, focus, energy--and a blunt instrument. "Worn out by promises, tricked by pledges, deceived by codes, and dismayed by filth, the Church has finally decided to take action in the one way left for it--boycott," warned Chicago's Catholic weekly, the New World.

The Legion was as good as its word, and it put its word into writing with a brilliant tactical device, the Legion pledge. A prayer-like pact, the Legion pledge was a contractual avowal signed by parishioners and recited in unison at Sunday masses, Knights of Columbus meetings, Ladies Sodalities gatherings, and parochial school assemblies. "I condemn absolutely those debauching motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land," affirmed the pledger. "Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality."

Copies of the Legion pledge were distributed wherever Catholics congregated: Sunday masses, parochial schools, and, to the horror of exhibitors, in front of motion picture theaters to patrons queuing in line. One copy of the signed pledge went to the parish priest; the other was kept by the pledger. The exact number of pledgers was hard to calculate, and the percentage of signers who kept faith with the contract impossible to monitor, but as the campaign gained momentum Variety warned that "fully half of the U.S. Catholic population of 20,000,000 can be counted upon as enlisted crusaders" In the choice between faith and film, enough Catholic moviegoers refused to gamble their salvation to deplete box office revenues from Boston to Los Angeles.

While the Legion of Decency marshaled the religious opposition, two like-minded forces attacked Hollywood along different fronts: the federal government and the...