This essay is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media.
In 1930, Hollywood teamed up with the Catholic Church. The result was the Production Code, a censorship document that for almost 40 years dictated what movies could and could not depict. For Hollywood, it was a desperate attempt to avoid federal regulation, but for the Catholics who conceived, wrote and enforced the code, it was a chance to marry Catholic morality to popular culture and elevate the soul of a nation.
To understand how this unlikely alliance began, we need to go back to 1921. Roughly a decade after its birth, the American film industry had become a big business, and studios were courting Wall Street investors to provide the capital they needed as they grew. But Hollywood had also gained a reputation as the American Babylon, infamous for debauchery both on and off the screen. While newspapers breathlessly covered movie star scandals, state censorship boards hacked apart offending films, resulting in fines for studios and plummeting ticket sales when these clumsily edited versions of the films reached theaters. In 1921 alone, representatives from 37 states introduced nearly 100 bills in Congress calling for federal regulation of the film industry; that made potential investors especially skittish.
Studio heads seized on a bold strategy: self-censorship. In 1922, Hollywood created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the predecessor to the modern Motion Picture Association. As its first chairman, the studio moguls appointed William H. Hays, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and postmaster general under President Warren G. Harding.
Hays made several attempts to introduce clean movie guidelines: one was a list of “Don’ts” (topics that were off-limits) and “Be Carefuls” (topics that should be treated with “special care”). He ordered studios to submit all scripts and film concepts to the M.P.P.D.A.—nicknamed the Hays Office—for approval before production could begin.
All of his efforts failed. Studio owners might fret about Wall Street, but producers knew that edgy films sold better. Indeed, studios that cooperated with Hays found that their clean pictures couldn’t compete at the box office. In 1927, Universal Pictures co-founder Carl Laemmle complained to a colleague: “Invariably they are too damn clean and [audiences] stay away on account of it” (as quoted in Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons’s The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, a major history of the period). Filmmakers balked at censorship on principle, and actors were rankled by new morality clauses in their contracts. In 1929, studios submitted only 20 percent of their films to Hays for approval.
Martin J. Quigley, the publisher of the influential film industry trade journal The Motion Picture Herald, followed these developments closely. Quigley was a pious Catholic from Ohio who had long used his editorial pulpit to call for cleaning up the movies. In the Hays Office, he saw a solution. He imagined a new guiding code that would set moral standards for American films, inspired by Catholic teaching but broad enough that Hollywood would accept it.
In 1929, Quigley discussed the idea with his close friend FitzGeorge Dinneen, S.J., a member of Chicago’s local censorship board. Father Dinneen promoted the idea to Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago, who, in turn, exerted his influence on the officials of Halsey, Stuart & Co., a Chicago banking firm and major Hollywood investor. The bankers were more than happy to pressure the studios into cooperating.
Now they needed someone to write the code itself. Dinneen recommended a fellow Jesuit to Quigley: Daniel A. Lord, S.J.
A Tool for Good and Evil
Born in Chicago in 1888, Father Lord was a lover of music and theater. He used that passion in his ministry, writing and producing hundreds of morally edifying plays and musicals. He worked to reinvigorate the sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary nationwide, and became a popular figure among Catholic youth. A talented pianist, Lord provided the soundtrack when (silent) films were screened for his Jesuit community. He had also served as an advisor for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 film on the life of Christ, “The King of Kings.” Lord believed that movies could be a powerful tool for good or evil and was intrigued by the proposition of a new code.
“It was a challenge,” he wrote in his memoir Played by Ear. “Here was a chance to tie the Ten Commandments in with the newest and most widespread form of entertainment…. Could the code be written that would stand up before the immoralist, the amoralist, the skilled dramatist, the producer who had risen from the slums, the auditor, the audience, the films of the day and of fifty years from now? I agreed most willingly to try.”
The Production Code was short and direct, opening with three general principles:
1. No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
It went on to list various subjects that should be excluded or handled carefully in films, including crime, sexual activity and profanity. The code’s prohibitions ranged from depicting nudity to making a “razzberry” noise or using the term “cripes.” Most important, the code demanded that good must always be rewarded and evil punished, usually with death. Moral ambiguity was forbidden.
Although the code made no reference to Catholic teaching, its imprint was all over the text. The section on sex began: “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld.” Profanity prohibitions included “God, Lord, Jesus, Christ” (“unless used reverently”). A point under “Religion” reads: “Ministers of religion…should not be used as comic characters or as villains.” Lord’s original copy of the document was crowned with the inscriptions A.M.D.G. (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, “For the Greater Glory of God”) and B.V.M.H. (Beatae Mariae Virginis Honore, “To the Honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary”).
In 1930, the M.P.P.D.A. adopted the code. Lord and Quigley agreed that its Catholic authorship should remain a secret; many Americans were distrustful of Catholicism, and they feared a backlash. Hays took most of the credit, and it became popularly known as the Hays Code. Studios prepared to ignore it; by this time the Great Depression had begun, and audiences turned to the movies for an escape. Studio wisdom held that sex and violence sold, so Hollywood ramped up the racy content in films (and advertising) to entice bigger crowds. But the Catholic architects of the code had a secret weapon: the people in the pews.
With support from Quigley and Lord, films were blacklisted and boycotts organized. In 1934, Cardinal Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia forbade any Catholic in his diocese from entering a movie theater under penalty of grave sin. That same year, Archbishop John T. McNicholas, O.P., of Cincinnati organized the Catholic Legion of Decency, a group missioned to oppose “indecent and immoral motion pictures.” Members took a pledge to “remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality.”
Pope Pius XI lent his support to the cause in the 1936 encyclical “Vigilanti Cura,” which warned about the power of cinema to strengthen or corrode the moral fiber of a nation and praised the Legion of Decency for its good work. (Lord wrote the actual text of the encyclical, according to the historian Stephen A. Warner.)
Hollywood might not have cared about Catholic morals, but it did care about Catholic ticket money. Chastened by the boycotts and the renewed threat of federal regulation under the New Deal, Hays created a department within the M.P.P.D.A. dedicated to code enforcement: the Production Code Administration. As the P.C.A.’s first director he appointed his assistant, a man recommended to him by Martin Quigley: Joseph Ignatius Breen.
A Tenacious Advocate
A tough, agile-minded Philadelphia Irish-Catholic, Breen had cut his teeth as a journalist for several Catholic publications, including America, where he used the pseudonym “Eugene Weare” and formed a lifelong friendship with the then-editor in chief, Wilfrid Parsons, S.J. A friend of Quigley’s, Breen took part in early conversations about the code. As head of the P.C.A., he became its most tenacious defender.
Hays had let studios slide, but not Breen. They now had to submit scripts for the code’s “seal of approval” before they could begin filming, and any film without the P.C.A.’s imprimatur would be banned from theaters owned by M.P.P.D.A. members—most of the major chains. Any studio that released a film without a seal was subject to a $25,000 fine.
Reluctantly, the studios fell in line. Harry Warner, one of the titular Warner Brothers, wired his producers: “If Joe Breen tells you to change a picture, you do what he tells you. If any one fails to do this—and this goes for my brother—he’s fired.” From its offices on Hollywood Boulevard, the P.C.A. reviewed every film in production, from source material to final cut. The staff was solidly Catholic, to the point that a Protestant applicant was once cautioned that his denomination might make him incompatible for the job (in fact, he was hired).
Breen was very hands-on, making personal visits to film sets and doling out notes that could be hyper-specific, from mandating a higher neckline on an actress’s dress to removing a shot of a baby in diapers. He was pugnacious and unyielding, willing to fight Hollywood power players like Howard Hughes and David O. Selznick to the bitter end. Despite his professional dedication to propriety he was famous for his colorful language, which he used to earn the attention and respect of tough-talking Hollywood moguls. (Variety noted: “Hollywood is turning out cleaner pictures because of Joe Breen’s profanity.”) But he was also gregarious and charming, traits that won him friends as well as enemies among the filmmakers with whom he did battle.
One notable impact the Code had on American filmmaking was an increase of Catholic stories and characters. Films like “Boys Town” (1938), “Angels With Dirty Faces” (1938), and “Going My Way” (1944) and its sequel, “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (1945), featured Catholic clergy and religious as heroes. Hollywood leading men Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck, Pat O’Brien and Bing Crosby all portrayed priests, and between 1943 and 1945 Catholic movies were nominated for 34 Oscars, according to Charles Morris’ American Catholics: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church. During this time, the Protestant Digest complained: “A visitor from Mars, popping into a dozen cinemas at random, would be convinced that the United States is a Catholic nation.” According to Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, the preponderance of Catholic films can be attributed to a desire to attract Catholic filmgoers (a major demographic) and the fundamentally cinematic (and, at that time in America, exotic) nature of Catholic ritual. But it was also motivated by the desire to stay on Breen’s good side.
Many filmmakers never truly embraced the code; they just learned how to dodge it. “It was not easy…because they were very powerful and you had to be very smart,” the writer and director Billy Wilder recalled in 1978 at the American Film Institute. “Those days, in order to say, ‘You son of a bitch,’ you had to say, ‘If you had a mother, she’d bark.’” According to Hollywood’s Censor, the screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart once noted: “I used always to write three or four scenes which I knew would be thrown out, in order that we could bargain with Joe Breen for the retention of other really important episodes.”
The code’s power began to wane before World War II, when studios ignored code rules against criticizing foreign governments to make anti-Nazi films. The code also forbade propaganda, but once America entered the war, the Office of War Information enlisted Hollywood for exactly that purpose. In 1948, antitrust suits forced studios to give up ownership of theater chains, granting theater owners greater freedom to show films whether they had a seal of approval or not. Foreign films that weren’t bound by the code became box office competitors, which opened the door for American directors to make more challenging films. When Otto Preminger’s “The Moon is Blue” (1953) failed to receive a code seal, United Artists distributed it anyway; the film packed theaters and grossed over $4 million.
The code’s strong Catholic support also dwindled. The Legion of Decency had faded from relevance, and with it the threat of boycotts. In his 1957 encyclical “Miranda Prorsus,” Pope Pius XII directed Catholics toward the promotion of good films rather than the condemnation of bad ones. But the greatest blow came when a weary Breen retired in 1954. After his departure, the P.C.A. never regained its former power.
When it denied code seals to Sidney Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker” (1965) and Mike Nichols’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), the M.P.A.A. (as the M.P.P.D.A. was renamed in 1945) overruled them and approved the films. In 1954, Quigley pitched the M.P.A.A. on a celebratory short film for the code’s 20th anniversary but was refused. The code had begun to feel like a relic, even to the people who enforced it.
In the end, it was another Catholic who killed the code: Jack Valenti, who became president of the M.P.A.A. in 1965. Short, gregarious and with a history in advertising, Valenti had most recently served as aide and confidante to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“I didn’t like the Hays Code, and I was determined to throw it over the side, the sooner the better,” Valenti wrote in his memoir This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood. In 1968, he replaced the code with a letter-based rating system: G for General Audiences, R for Restricted and so on. Instead of censoring filmmakers, the ratings system allowed individual moviegoers to make informed decisions for themselves and their families.
“We had to make sure the First Amendment held sway, that filmmakers could tell any story they chose to tell,” Valenti wrote. “But I also emphasized that freedom demanded responsibility.”
By this point, all of the architects of the code were gone. Lord died in 1955; shortly before, he gave an overly optimistic assessment of the code’s legacy: “The whole industry learned that good morals are good business.” Quigley died nine years later. Breen was the last, passing in 1965. Many church leaders attended his funeral, but the film industry did not send an official representative. The brief marriage of Catholicism and Hollywood was over.
Crusaders, Not Missionaries
The story of the Production Code holds lessons for today’s Catholics.
We would all like to see a world that more closely resembles the kingdom of God. Like Quigley, Lord and Breen, I believe that entertainment plays a role in that: The stories that a society tells shape that society, for better or worse. The code now feels archaic, but—especially as a Catholic parent and educator—I understand the desire for a moral standard guiding our stories.
I also understand the impulse to make our culture moral by force. That was the logic behind the code, and we hear echoes in the integralist dream of a “confessional state” where Catholic doctrine is imposed by force of law. But I believe the primary lesson to take from the history of the Production Code is this: It failed. The code was an attempt to impose Catholic teaching without first inspiring conversion; it was doomed from the start.
In his 2013 exhortation “The Joy of the Gospel” (“Evangelii Gaudium”), Pope Francis warns against evangelizing through moral principles alone: “We need to be realistic and not assume that our audience understands the full background to what we are saying, or is capable of relating what we say to the very heart of the Gospel which gives it meaning, beauty and attractiveness.”
To Lord and Quigley, the principles of the code were self-evidently good, and people would recognize that and assent to them. But they approached Hollywood as crusaders instead of missionaries, with tactics that forced compliance instead of inspiring cooperation. This can be a viable strategy for political change, but not evangelization. Filmmakers cooperated with the code because they had to, not because they believed in its principles; consequently, their cooperation was halfhearted and resentful, and many looked for every opportunity to subvert it.
The critic Walter Kerr made this point in a negative review of the religious epic “Quo Vadis” (1951) for Commonweal:
We hear a great deal about the “influence” which Catholicism has had on the American screen. We forget that this influence has been wholly of one kind: the influence of the pressure group. The Legion of Decency is an economic weapon; the production code was written under the standing fear of boycott. Neither represents an intellectual victory in the sense that an esthetic principle has been stated with such clarity and force as to bring about free assent. The only persuasiveness we have been able to whip up is the persuasiveness of the dollar.
Our goal should be to convert culture, not conquer it. When Catholics support censorship, we present our faith as reactive, frightened and unreasonable (Kerr wrote that censorship “discredits the entire Catholic intellectual tradition”). But when we have the courage to enter into dialogue with challenging art—including well-reasoned and compelling criticism—we offer our faith as something to take seriously.
The synthesis report produced by the first meeting of the Synod on Synodality in 2023 called the church to become a conversation “within itself and with the world, walking side by side with every human being in the style of Jesus.” Evangelization, then, should be marked by an openness to listen, not to shut out all voices but our own.
It is worth noting that many great films from the last 50 years would not have met code standards, including “The Godfather,” “Schindler’s List,” “Moonlight” and the entire filmography of Martin Scorsese. It would be ridiculous to say those films have no moral merit. I also believe films like “Goodfellas” or “The Social Network” could not make such compelling moral arguments if all of the characters behaved like angels, or were killed at the end as the wages of sin. (Though some viewers, admittedly, take the wrong lessons from these films, and they are not appropriate for all audiences.)
Of course, there are plenty of filmmakers who just want to shock, provoke or make a quick buck. But when we trust filmmakers and audiences to engage with controversial topics, we get better films and a richer culture.
