Why Be Good? Sexuality & Censorship in Early Cinema

Review and Interview with Director / Co-Producer Elaina B. Archer by Dan Lybarger of eFilmCritic.com. (12.17.08)

In the public's mind, you stand for love, passion, glamour…and they eat it up. But they could turn in a minute. Believe me, Gloria, you're living on the very cusp of scandal. We all are. - Jesse Lasky to Gloria Swanson

Post-Victorian America celebrates new-found freedoms and the reticent attitude of the Victorian age is challenged. Hollywood becomes the pinnacle for film production, allowing producers, directors and stars to thumb their noses at attempts for restraint and control. Celebrities drink, divorce and make their own rules! As long as the stars bring in box office dollars, their scandalous behavior goes unnoticed. Power is entirely dependent upon audience popularity, however, and fans are fickle. When threatened with government censorship, the Hollywood system creates their own in-house censors putting a lid on scandals whenever necessary, and finding scapegoats to appease the Puritanical -thinking American public. This is the pre -pre-code era, a time when anything goes...as long as it remains on the screen.

I cannot unbuckle the bible belt. That is why I will never write my memoirs.
- Louise Brooks

With film in its infant stages, Hollywood represents freedom to some, and shackles to others. The dream of stardom reaches across the globe, and beautiful women and talented directors come from Germany, Hungary, France…all to work in the most successful location in the world for the production of motion pictures. The foreign sexual iconoclast creates a world of her own under the watchful eye of Hollywood studio execs. The studios own their stars, and they keep a short leash on their actions due to the ever-present fear of impending censorship. In the theatres these women express themselves openly; off the screen, they must answer to the studio.

The game they had been playing for years was finally over. There was a dead silence in every car driving home.
- Frances Goldwyn, on the evening of the premiere of The Jazz Singer

By the end of 1927, the entire movie colony was home to 4,000 principals, each wondering whether he or she would survive the conversion to sound film. Some walk away, some survive, others are destroyed. By 1929, all of Hollywood converts to sound, giving the studios the perfect opportunity to “clean house”. Rebellious or expensive stars suddenly find themselves vulnerable to a studio system that monopolizes upon this dramatic change in cinema. Louise Brooks rebuffs the studio's demand to come back to Hollywood in order to translate The Canary Murder Case into a talkie. A year later, she returns, only to be cast in bad B-Westerns and shorts. Her career is abruptly ended. We now enter the world of talkies, the 1930's, and Hollywood's pre-code era. Still under the inevitable hatchet; the watchful eye of the film production code, women on the screen continue to flirt, seduce, empower and captivate…and those with a voice thrive .