Mae West: Joe Breen

Joe Breen ran MAE WEST through the ringer and robbed her scripts of vigor.
• • According to Mark Vieira, in his 1999 book "Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood," the Code was even more important than the screen stars at one time.
• • Mark Vieira writes: "The Code forbade profanity, excessive violence, illegal drugs, ‘white slavery,’ miscegenation, ‘sex perversion,’ suggestive dancing, lustful kissing" — — all cinematic staples of the motion pictures made between the Code’s creation and its enforcement. During the Depression, when Americans had very little money to waste on leisurely pastimes [such as going to the movies], the studios felt they had no choice but to give the people what they wanted — — which meant everything that the Code would come to ban. To modern-day film fans, this extraordinary list of no-nos is what keeps pre-Code relevant.
• • Pre-Code Hollywood is the marquee name for a brief period in motion picture history, a privileged zone of relative screen freedom, dating from (approximately) 1930 to (precisely) July 15, 1934. The phrase Pre-Code evokes a time when sinful seductresses, gun-happy gangsters, wisecracking dames, and subversive rebels — — male and female — — ran wild through the lawless badlands of American cinema.
• • Mark Vieira’s picture of censor Joe Breen — — "a militantly devout public relations man" — — is both comic and chilling. Not for nothing was Joe Breen nicknamed "the Hitler of Hollywood" in the words of one British trade magazine, and his steady rise to power on a mountain of butchered movies would have made a fascinating pre-Code film all by itself. Single-handedly, this Roman Catholic activist transformed whores into housewives, made extramarital affairs platonic, and rewrote entire passages and endings to restore, or invent, or superimpose a moral.
• • Joe Breen’s irrational demands on Mae West’s "Belle of the Nineties" — — she complained that she had to remake it three times to satisfy him — — were typical of his hubris. At least he didn't punch out the Brooklyn bombshell the way he decked director Woody Van Dyke for questioning proposed cuts in the Joan Crawford vehicle "Forsaking All Others."
• • Ramona Curry added to this dialogue in an excellent essay [published in 1991 in Cinema Journal]: Mae West as Censored Commodity: The Case of "Klondike Annie" (available in most libraries).
• • From 1934 to 1954, except for a brief eight-month stint as head of RKO studios in 1941, the Victorian Irishman held Hollywood to a strict catechism of thou-shalt-nots. When Breen died in 1965, Variety aptly summed up his legacy: “More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture.
• • Joseph Breen died in December — — on 5 December 1965. It's doubtful that Mae West attended his funeral.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1934 • •
NYC
Mae West.