Talking Motion Pictures

The talking motion pictures of the early 1930s were a dazzling new medium — silent film had only acquired synchronised sound in 1927 — and they quickly became the target of serious public anxiety. With children flocking to cinemas for escapist entertainment during the Great Depression, parents, clergy and politicians grew alarmed that films (especially crime thrillers and the racier romances) were corrupting young viewers.

The social reformer Henry James Forman distilled a set of academic studies into a scathing 1933 book called Our Movie Made Children, arguing flatly that movies were turning kids into delinquents. The panic got some cities to ban violent gangster films outright by 1931. Medical experts went further, framing movie-going as a kind of addiction. In a 1941 paper, Dr Mary Preston reported that three-quarters of the children she studied were "addicted" to bad radio and movies, which supposedly disturbed their sleep and eating habits. "This atrophy leaves scar tissue," she wrote, describing "a hardness, an intense selfishness, even mercilessness" in children proportional to their exposure. Claims like this, splashed across journals and newspapers, convinced a large public that Hollywood was producing a generation of criminals and emotionally stunted youth.

The response was institutional rather than purely rhetorical. The Motion Picture Production Code — drafted by the Jesuit priest Fr Daniel A. Lord and the trade-paper publisher Martin Quigley — was adopted by Hollywood in 1930 and enforced in earnest from July 1934 under Joseph Breen's Production Code Administration. The Code spelled out, in meticulous detail, what could and could not appear on screen: no nudity, no sympathetic criminals, no open-mouthed kissing, no ministers as villains, and a long list of related prohibitions. The Catholic Legion of Decency, founded in 1934 and organising roughly ten million pledge-signers who promised to boycott objectionable films, helped drive a 40 per cent box-office drop in Philadelphia before the industry capitulated. The so-called Payne Fund Studies (1929–33), which Forman popularised in Our Movie Made Children, provided the scientific gloss for the panic. Modern historians (notably Jowett, Jarvis and Fuller in Children and the Movies, 1996) have since shown that the studies' methodology and Forman's popularisation were a good deal shakier than their 1930s reception suggested.

The fears eventually subsided, but only after the industry and the church had together rewritten what Hollywood was allowed to show. The Code reassured an anxious public. It also shaped, quietly and for decades, the kind of stories Americans told themselves on the screen.