ABSTRACT
In 1882, the British theologian Stanley Leathes declared confidently: “We find the Ten Commandments accepted as the basis of moral and social life, in the most civilized nations of the world.”1 For Leathe, the moral force of the Ten Commandments, and the Bible as a whole, is rooted in divine authority: “Thus morality and religion are seen to be coordinate, and religion is not dependent upon morality but morality upon religion. Destroy the foundations of morality, and you do indeed destroy religion.”2 Leathe’s views were no doubt shared by many, including Cecil B. DeMille, whose 1923 The Ten Commandments has the pious Johnny use Bible stories to convert the wayward Mary. But from the outset, film was an ethically ambiguous medium. Even as
Passion films and other Bible movies promoted both religion and morality to the satisfaction of Christian clergy,3 movies as such were often seen as morally corrupting, particularly with the advent of the “talkies” in 1930. At a 1929 meeting of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Philadelphia, the president Maude Aldrich complained “that the movies glorified ‘the Jazz age baby type’ of girl, thus causing ‘good men and bad men alike’ to ignore the ‘well-mannered, old-fashioned girl.’”4 Well-mannered, old-fashioned girls just did not draw mass audiences the same way that “sex, glamor, and entertainment” could. No doubt DeMille would have agreed, for even as he was making The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927), he was also directing such steamy films as Madame Satan (1930) and Cleopatra (1934).
In 1934, the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency was finally able to assert its moral influence upon the movie industry by imposing a Production Code, thus bringing the “‘muck merchants’ of Hollywood, that ‘fortress of filth’ that had been destroying the moral fiber of the American people,” to its knees.5
The Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays Code, after the chief censor, Will H. Hays) was in place for over two decades in the midtwentieth century as a de facto censorship code. Joseph Breen, the head of the Production Code Administration from 1934 to 1954, along with his staff,
