For a holier Hollywood

Joseph Ignatius Breen is not just a name lost to history, he was little known to the public even in his own time. He wrote no memoir, commissioned no biography, talked not at all in retirement. Could this be the man Liberty magazine identified in 1936 as the individual who “probably has more influence in standardizing world thinking than Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin”? Yes, it could.

Because for 20 years, as Thomas Doherty writes in this authoritative, entertaining and unexpectedly unnerving biography, “it was Breen -- not the studio mogul, not the Oscar-winning director, not the marquee superstar, and certainly not the lowly screenwriter -- who had the right of final cut over Hollywood cinema.”

As the resolute and indomitable head of the Production Code Administration from 1934 to 1954, Breen was the decider on what could and could not be shown on Hollywood’s -- and by extension the world’s -- screens. Twin beds and the triumph of virtue were in, drug traffic and miscegenation and “the sale of women” were out.

Although calling Breen “Hollywood’s Censor” makes for a catchy title, it is, as Doherty is the first to point out, misleading. A censor merely cuts a finished product, whereas much of the work done at the Breen office consisted of ruling on scripts and even concepts for films. “Breen’s legacy,” Doherty writes, “rests not in what he tore out of but what he wove into the fabric of Hollywood cinema.”

On one level, the notion of everyone in the movie business kowtowing to one individual in the area of moral fitness as if he were God’s Lew Wasserman seems like a relic of some antediluvian past. It’s hard to imagine a modern mogul telling a studio, as Harry Warner wired his, “If Joe Breen tells you to change a picture, you do what he tells you.” Yet there is a feeling of familiarity here. Hollywood didn’t go along with this scheme out of the goodness of its collective heart, but because a steady drumbeat of dissatisfaction with its product, stoked by religious figures and even the government, hurt the studios at the box office. Anyone who claims that kind of scenario couldn’t repeat itself is whistling past the graveyard.

It was the gloriously bawdy excesses of Hollywood (which Doherty chronicled in “Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934”) that led to Breen’s reign. Viewed since the scandalous 1920s, in Doherty’s felicitous phrase, as “a sun-drenched Sodom luring Midwestern farm girls to a fate worse than waitressing,” Hollywood raised hackles with its pre-code ways. State and local censorship boards multiplied, the New Deal looked into regulation, and, most potent of all, the Catholic church’s Legion of Decency instituted an effective boycott.

As a result of this hubbub, a new enforcement regime, the Production Code Administration, was created to impose decency, and Joseph Breen, a committed, passionate Catholic who privately viewed himself as engaged in “a magnificent piece of worthwhile Catholic action and achievement,” was brought in to run things. Intent on the production of “films of a higher order,” he announced that “the vulgar, the cheap, and the tawdry is out! There is no room on the screen at any time for pictures which offend against common decency.”

One of the administration’s achievements was hiding how much the scheme was driven by prominent Catholics, one of whom, trade publisher Martin J. Quigley, is generally credited with primarily crafting the code.

The Catholics took the lead, Doherty theorizes, because Protestantism was fractured and “discredited by Prohibition and sullied by hucksters.” Not that the Protestants didn’t complain. “The minority control of the most vital amusement source of the nation,” huffed the Protestant Digest, “is one of the most astounding things in the history of the United States.”

By and large, Breen and his team were too busy to worry about complaints. In a given year, some 1,000 scripts were subjected to “Breening,” not to mention about 3,500 pieces of potential source material. In addition, the man complained: “I am looking at pictures morning, noon and night, until I am almost frantic.” No detail, from the tightness of sweaters to the suitability of titles -- “Hell on Ice” became “Idol of the Crowds” -- was too small. Breen even tried to get the most famous line in “Gone With the Wind” changed to “Frankly, my dear, I don’t care.” Preview audiences rebelled, and the original stayed.

One reason the Breen office was so successful was the man’s ability to raise hell with recalcitrant moguls (“stormy story conferences, during which Breen shouted, pounded the table, and walked out, were frequent”). Plus, as the book’s cover photo of Breen flirting with showgirls on the set of 1942’s “Arabian Nights” demonstrates, he was not a stereotypical bluenose.

Still, producers and directors tried with some success to get around the code’s provisions, using innuendo to be “risque but never vulgar.” Some even argue, the chapter entitled “Joseph I. Breen and the Auteur Theory” explains, that he was responsible for “the moral universe of classical Hollywood cinema -- the world of reticence, constraint, discretion, untruths and unspokens.”

This system worked well enough during the ‘30s, but after World War II, when newly worldly audiences felt candor and reality were more important than morality, the code took a beating.

One of the key players in both Breen’s and the code’s eventual demise was the nascent art-house business. These non-studio-affiliated theaters could play films that didn’t need the Production Code seal of approval, and when Breen tried to cut an innocent scene of a young boy urinating on a wall in the classic 1948 Italian film “The Bicycle Thief,” the enforcers suddenly looked like out-of-touch laughingstocks.

Breen retired in 1954 and with “the battalions of obedient parishioners who once fell out of line at the ticket window” vanishing, the entire apparatus was jettisoned for Jack Valenti’s industry-run rating system. “Where the Breen Office whispered a soothing ‘Be Assured,’ ” Doherty writes, “the Classification and Rating Administration issues a curt, ‘Be Warned.’ ” Or, as Variety put it, “Pious Platitudes Take It on Chin as Film Biz Rewrites Moral Code.”

Though Breen died in 1965 largely forgotten by the industry (the last film he saw was, appropriately, “The Sound of Music”), the idea that we have seen the last of those who would regulate what we see for our own good is wishful thinking.

With patrons getting exercised by the level of on-screen violence and the studios unable to regulate themselves when profits are concerned, it may be just a matter of time till this scenario happens all over again.

Kenneth Turan is a Times film critic.