5 Quotes by Mick LaSalle

World War I was the final straw. Youth turned on their elders for making a hash of the world. Older men’s values had produced a cataclysm, and young men had paid with their lives. “The older generation has certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us,” wrote a young man in the Atlantic Monthly of September 1920, expressing the prevailing sentiment. How could the younger generation, the idea went, possibly do any worse?

After the Code, crime films, adventures, gangster films, war movies, and comedies all continued to get produced, with some adjustments. But the social dramas that took a woman's point of view, that remained on the woman's side from start to finish, requiring of her no last-minute conversion, apology, or reversion to happy subservience, all but disappeared. One can infer the intent of censorship by seeing what exactly got censored.

Hollywood’s motives in marketing sex may have been cynical—Hollywood’s motives always are. But in providing audiences with sophisticated fare, it was also responding to real cultural changes that had happened within American society. Hollywood was a few years behind the trend, of course, but that’s nothing new. Don’t forget, this is the same industry that for seventy years has made wonderful, passionate, stirring anti-war movies six or seven years after every war, never during one.

Before the Code, romance and sex were intertwined. It was the Code that wrenched them apart, and the divorce remains in effect today. A cold-blooded and often depraved cinema that gives us sex with no humanity, feeling, or tenderness is Joseph Breen’s most fitting legacy.

Under the Code, actresses lost their edge, their ability to surprise. As one studio executive grumbled, “The leading lady must start out good, stay good, and be whitewashed for the finish.” Consigned by censorship to a fantasy land of purity, they lost their social relevance. After all, what is the point of a Kay Francis movie in which Kay Francis is less sophisticated than the viewer?