ABSTRACT
Not all movies that depict wrongfulness depict it as deservedly wrongful. Sometimes the normative violators are the good guys and the characters who condemn them are the bad guys. Though no film-makers express the sentiment that “all crime is good and all criminals are heroes,” many have constructed their narrative in such a way that the crime they depict is not terribly wrongful, and the characters who commit it, not terribly bad—indeed, they are often likeable. In the United States, for decades, motion picture boards censored images and stories their members considered too sexually explicit, or, sometimes, too violent and bloody. Most historians of censorship argue that between 1930 and early 1934, the MPAA’s Production Code was lax and ineffective.
