Cinema Civil Rights

Ellen C. Scott

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813571355
• eBook ISBN: 9780813572925
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the “N-word.” This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers.
Cinema Civil Rights  presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards.
Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched,   Cinema Civil Rights  presents us with an in-depth look at the film industry’s role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.

1

Regulating Race, Structuring Absence

Industry Self-Censorship and African American Representability

The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) was the most consistent and powerful censor of American films in the classical era.¹ Headed initially by Will Hays, former postmaster general and a representative of the Midwestern sensibilities key to securing the industry’s moral image, the MPPDA worked for the common interests of the major Hollywood studios. Its role, from the late 1920s until 1968, was to suggest changes to Hollywood film scripts to avoid outside censure and censorship by local, state, and international boards. From 1934 to 1968, it seriously undertook the task of reviewing all the major studios’ screenplays. Sensational stories from the headlines, stage, and history might have appealed to individual producers, but the MPPDA was there to weigh each plot and script against what it considered the industry’s collective moral responsibilities and its larger financial interests. This soft censorship was carried out through two successive subunits: the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) (1926–1934) and the Production Code Administration (PCA) (1934–1968).

The MPPDA is most famous for the Production Code, a document devised by industry leaders and two prominent Catholic consultants that largely curtailed screen depictions of sex and crime. For much of its history, the Production Code only contained one explicit reference to race—a prohibition on showing miscegenation, which it defined as “sex relationships between the black and white races.”² But beyond the Code, the PCA censored films according to “Industry Policy,” an unwritten constellation of MPPDA-designated prohibitions outside the Code that governed delicate subjects as varied as Communism, the presentation of American businesses, and race relations.³ At times, Industry Policy caused greater concern to the industry than the Code itself. Industry Policy vitally affected African American representation—and the representation of civil rights abuses. In different ways and using different methods, film scholars Ruth Vasey, Lea Jacobs, Stephen Prince, and Stanley Cavell have suggested that when it came to white sex and violence the PCA’s censorship was, in Foucauldian terms, “productive.”⁴ More specifically, the PCA forced producers to be creative, which led to the repressed material appearing symptomatically and diffusely throughout the texts. Vasey and Jacobs have demonstrated that the advice of MPPDA censors gradually trained Hollywood screenwriters in representing controversy through subtle allusion rather than direct revelation. Thus, they were more than censors; they helped to author a system of representational aversion that allowed indirect, deniable representations to pass beneath the radar. But to what extent did the PCA’s incitation to allusion extend to the representation of African Americans?

The movie industry’s self-regulation of civil rights issues can be divided into five eras: the SRC era (1926–1934), in which this self-censorship was governed by the MPPDA’s Studio Relations Committee under the leadership of Jason Joy and, later, James Wingate; the early Code era (1934–1941), in which the far sterner PCA headed by Joseph Breen governed the process; World War II (1941–1945), during which the Office of War Information’s campaign to improve Black representations drew attention to racism in Hollywood; the postwar era (1946–1955), during which Breen continued his leadership; and the Shurlock era (1955–1961), when Geoffrey Shurlock headed the PCA during the early years of the civil rights movement. During this thirty-two-year span, the MPAA helped to devise a formula for representing civil rights issues onscreen, but to do so while veiling any racial resonance and even omitting direct signifiers to race relations. Over the course of this history, however, based on various cultural shifts—including the Cultural Front, white southern backlash, the democratic discourse of World War II, and the civil rights movement—the PCA gradually shifted its policies on the treatment of racial issues to allow for more nuanced and direct representation.

CIVIL RIGHTS IN HOLLYWOOD IMAGES UNDER THE SRC, 1926–1934

The term “pre-Code” is a widely accepted misnomer: the Code was written in 1930 but it was not until 1934 that it was fully enforced. Thus, the term “pre-Code” designates not the era before the Code’s existence but rather an era of weak enforcement from 1930 to 1934. This section covers not only the pre-Code era as designated by scholars such as Thomas Doherty, but also the four years prior in which Jason Joy was actively developing the industry censorship standards that would govern the next three decades. Some scholars have suggested the pre-Code era featured greater onscreen racial freedom.⁵ This is only partly true. Black and white extras mingle in crowd scenes, prisons, and breadlines in the hardboiled, unsentimental, pre-Code cinema of the Great Depression. SRC head Jason Joy generally did not cut from finished films these scenes of naturalized integration where the poor, Black and white, intermix without differentiation (but with a wealth of racial wisecracks and insults). This may have been because Joy saw himself as an ally of producers, and these unscripted moments of racial equality were largely backdrop. But when he learned that a script called for racial mixing—especially in pictures set in regions where segregation reigned—he consistently fought hard to have it removed, at least partly out of fear of white backlash. Thus Joy, who is known for having been liberal in his censorship of sexuality and who aided producers in indirectly representing the erotic, sought on the other hand to establish a firm color line and called for the elimination of racial integration, miscegenation, and the racial abuses of the criminal justice system in film.⁶

Race and Punishment in the SRC Era

The abusive penal system became the basis for a film cycle in the early 1930s. Under MPPDA scrutiny, it was almost impossible for producers to show the criminal justice system’s endemic evils or weaknesses, though several tried to reveal the corruption and brutality that produced fatal injustices. Films like The Last Mile (1932), 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing (1932), and Ann Vickers (1933), which raised social questions about the morality of state punishment and depicted prisoner discontentment and revolt, were a tough sell in the face of Depression-era censors, even the more lenient SRC.⁷ But films that used Black characters to pose challenges to the criminal justice system were subject to even greater scrutiny.

Joy restricted the racial implications of the anti-penal film cycle of the early 1930s. Initial treatments for I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Hell’s Highway (1932), and Laughter in Hell (1933), all chain-gang films, criticized the criminal justice system’s brutality and boldly showed that it gave (southern) states the power to lynch. All these films even showed Black multitudes and bit players, sometimes in speaking or singing roles, obliquely revealing state punishment’s disproportionate racial impact. But Joy censored each film for its depiction of race relations. Joy’s persistent concern about offending the South may be explained by the fact that his right-hand man was white Southerner Lamar Trotti, who consistently defended southern segregation, to the point of suggesting the industry avoid alienating even those who supported the Ku Klux Klan.⁸ In the case of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Joy warned producers not to include too many Black extras so that the southern locale would be less obvious, an instruction that the film’s producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, refused to heed.⁹ Nervously employing a double negative, Joy asked David O. Selznick, the producer of RKO’s Hell’s Highway, “Would it not be a good idea not to show the negroes and whites chained together?”¹⁰ Selznick avoided these shots. But in other sequences the racial separation was less firmly policed. Black and white prisoners communicate with each other across the segregated cellblocks, work together on gangs, and, most importantly, escape together, an act that shows allegiance and coordination. Though Joy wanted to avoid offending the South, the film indicted southern race prejudice obliquely. Not only does the head guard call a Black mule-tender a baboon, but Selznick shot scenes in which only Black men are lynched by an all-white posse after a mass escape. Joy twice railed against this sequence and, though Selznick ignored him, RKO official B.B. Kahane removed this and other scenes of “the capture and slaughter of convicts.”¹¹

In terms of race, an important film of the chain-gang cycle was Universal’s bitterly gritty Laughter in Hell, a film that also featured the only onscreen Black lynching of the decade. In the original synopsis, Laughter in Hell’s Barney was a sympathetic, slow-witted white man who, catching his wife in an act of infidelity, murders her and her lover. Sentenced to a prison chain gang, he develops a friendship with a Black inmate named Jackson, eventually escaping but not before suffering whip-wounds that fester without treatment and witnessing four Black inmates being lynched by prison officials.

Joy’s initial concern was less brutality than the film’s Alabama setting, given “the South’s dislike of criticism.”¹² Showcasing his characteristic alignment with producers, Joy told his supervisor, Will Hays, that the studio should be allowed to be honest, because “if brutality persists on in these days and systems are wrong, I see no reason why we should not be permitted to say so.”¹³ Trotti, ever concerned about a white southern backlash, pressed Joy to defend whiteness; southern blame should be alleviated by establishing the “justice” of Barney’s imprisonment, contrasting “the brutal head guard with more humane officials,” “soft-peddling . . . flogging [and] hanging,” and setting the film in the 1880s to diminish its commentary on present conditions.¹⁴

As the film moved from treatment to first draft, Joy’s racial concerns mounted, and he worried specifically about the lynching of Black men and a scene where Jackson and Barney are whipped. “Perhaps you want to consider having one of the hanged men a white man to avoid a note of racial prejudice,” Joy suggested.¹⁵ The studio, however, maintained these elements. A week later, Joy took a sterner tone in defending the racist South. It would violate “policy,” he said, for Universal to contrast a drooping American flag in the prison with a Confederate flag proudly hung in the courtroom or to name any particular southern states. Even the “suggestion that negroes and whites are placed in the same cages” was anathema, although they could be shown “in the same camp together, provided they are not shown to occupy the same quarters.” Integrated quarters could not “be possible in any Southern state and I’m quite sure that it would add a note that Southern audiences would resent.”¹⁶ Joy desperately wanted Universal to cut the hanging of Black men by the chain gang official. “Personally,” he wrote, “I wonder if you are going to get out of this scene on the screen all that you hope to get. . . . It is difficult for me to believe a chain-gang boss would have the right to execute State prisoners.”¹⁷ Joy also recommended visual techniques to downplay the lynching, describing with considerable detail how to achieve the effect of lynching without directly showing it. If Universal insisted on keeping the scene, he said, censorable details like the shadows of the hanging figures, shots of the noose around a man’s neck, and other “gruesome” details should be removed and the whole thing played as much as possible by suggestion.

But Universal Studios boss Carl Laemmle refused to cut the lynching scene, arguing that the director would handle it “with discrimination.”¹⁸ In the end, Laemmle and director Edward Cahn persisted in shooting the scenes graphically. Despite interventions from the MPPDA’s James Wingate (a former New York state censor), state censorship took its toll: New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania (as well as Chicago) cut almost all of the lynching sequence, allowing only shots establishing that a hanging is about to take place. However, each state modified the scene in a different way, indicating its own state-level approach to the art of indirection and regulatory editing. Pennsylvania permitted the most, a “view . . . of guard bringing noose toward him, of wagon moving and of rope stretching.”¹⁹ Ohio allowed only a “view of rope hanging from tree as prisoners approach place of execution.”²⁰ New York permitted “scenes where prisoners get on cart and cart drives away.”²¹ These states also cut a scene where Barney and Jackson are whipped together. Thus th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Regulating Race, Structuring Absence: Industry Self-Censorship and African American Representability
• 2. State Censorship and the Color Line
• 3. Racial Trauma, Civil Rights, and the Brutal Imagination of Darryl F. Zanuck
• 4. Shadowboxing: Black Interpretive Activism in the Classical Hollywood Era
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author