Mae West: Hays Fever

NPR's "All Things Considered" did an episode on the Hitler of Hollywood, celluloid censor Will Hays, whose Hays Code crippled the motion picture career of MAE WEST.
• • Here is an excerpt from Bob Mondello's broadcast — — Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On.
• • Bob Mondello begins: · When people talk about the "more innocent" Hollywood of years gone by, they're referring to an era when the movie industry policed itself. But that early Hollywood wasn't always so innocent.
• • For decades, it's true, the major film studios were governed by a production code requiring that their pictures be "wholesome" and "moral" and encourage what the studios called "correct thinking."
• • But that code, which was officially abandoned 40 years ago this year, was the result of a nationwide backlash — — an outraged reaction to a Hollywood that by 1922 had come to seem like a moral quagmire, even by the bathtub-gin-and-speakeasy standards of the Roaring '20s.
• • Silent-film comic Fatty Arbuckle charged with manslaughter in the death of an actress; a bisexual director found murdered; movie stars dying of drug overdoses — — small wonder the nation's religious leaders were forming local censorship boards and chopping up movies every which way to suit the standards of their communities.
• • And at first, when Hollywood studios banded together under former Postmaster General Will Hays to come up with a list of 36 self-imposed "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," it's no wonder no one believed them. There were no penalties, no laws, no enforcement.
• • Moralists were so outraged, meanwhile — — by Mae West's casual slatternliness in I'm No Angel, by Barbara Stanwyck's promiscuousness in Baby Face, by Cecil B. DeMille's racy biblical epic Sign of the Cross — — that calls for official government censorship became overwhelming.
• • A Power Play, For Propriety's Sake • •
• • Of course, they were calls that Hays himself, working behind the scenes, had helped to make overwhelming — — and he used the pressure to force filmmakers to toe his line and obey the new Production Code he eventually promulgated.
• • "The code sets up high standards of performance for motion-picture producers," Hays proclaimed when the new code was unveiled. "It states the considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment." . . .
— — Excerpt: — —
• • "Movies — — Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On"
• • Byline: Bob Mondello
• • Published by: NPR — — "All Things Considered" — — www.npr.org/
• • Published: 8 August 2008
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1933 • •
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Mae West.