A humorous but critical portrayal of the Catholic Church's
censorship of Hollywood movies from WW I to the present. Walsh
(History/Univ. of Mass., Lowell) traces the formation and
activities of the Legion of Decency, the powerful film review board
that rose within American Catholic ranks in the 1930s. One of
Walsh's primary contributions is to demonstrate that the Legion did
not, as it seemed at the time, burst out of nowhere in 1931 to
become a prime mover in Hollywood. American Catholics had been
flexing their censorship muscles ever since WW I, when two public
health shorts about venereal disease sparked serious controversy.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Legion of Decency reigned as the
studios' most influential censor, seeking to eliminate nearly all
film references to pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, and even
divorce. Walsh tells this story in an engaging, often sardonic
fashion, a kind of behind-the-scenes romp through the cutting
floors of Hollywood history. He paints vivid portraits of the
legendary studio executives, directors, and producers, as well as
the lesser-known censors of the Legion and other review boards. But
the book's most obvious fault lies with its subjectivity: Walsh
admits that he is very reluctant to endorse any ecclesiastically
motivated censorship. This honesty is refreshing, but it does
little to mitigate the sometimes harsh tone of the narrative. Walsh
has a tendency to see the Catholic Church as a monolithic and
institutionally static entity during the decades in question,
although he quite ably documents Catholic demographic changes that
led to the Legion's demise in the 1960s. Walsh dramatically
highlights tensions between Catholic dogma and Hollywood glitter,
but greater insight into the Church would have given this study
more weight. (Kirkus Reviews)
During World War I, the Catholic church blocked the distribution of
government-sponsored V.D. prevention films, initiating an era of
attempts by the church to censor the movie industry. This book is
an entertaining and engrossing account of those efforts-how they
evolved, what effect they had on the movie industry, and why they
were eventually abandoned. Frank Walsh tells how the church's
influence in Hollywood grew through the 1920s and reached its peak
in the 1930s, when the film industry allowed Catholics to dictate
the Production Code, which became the industry's self-censorship
system, and the Legion of Decency was established by the church to
blacklist any films it considered offensive. With the industry's
Joe Breen, a Catholic layman, cutting movie scenes during
production and the Legion of Decency threatening to ban movies
after release, the Catholic church played a major role in
determining what Americans saw and didn't see on the screen during
Hollywood's Golden Age. Walsh provides fascinating details about
the church's efforts to guard against anything it felt might
corrupt moviegoers' morals: forcing Gypsy Rose Lee to change her
screen name; investigating Frank Sinatra's fitness to play a priest
in Miracle of the Bells; altering a dance sequence in Oklahoma;
eliminating marital infidelity from Two-Faced Woman; compelling
Howard Hughes to make 147 cuts in The Outlaw; blocking the
distribution of Birth of a Baby; and attacking Asphalt Jungle for
serving the "crooked purposes of the Soviet Union." However, notes
Walsh, there were serious divisions within the church over film
policy. Bishops feuded with one another over how best to deal with
movie moguls, priests differed over whether attending a condemned
film constituted a serious sin, and Legion of Decency reviewers
disagreed over film evaluations. Walsh shows how the decline of the
studio system, the rise of a new generation of better-educated
Catholics, and changing social values gradually eroded the Legion's
power, forcing the church eventually to terminate its efforts to
control the type of film that Hollywood turned out. In an epilogue
he relates this history of censorship to current efforts by
Christian fundamentalists to end "sex, violence, filth, and
profanity" in the media.
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