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So This Is Censorship: Race, Sex, and Censorship in Movies of the 1920s and 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2011

FRANCIS G. COUVARES
FRANCIS G. COUVARES
Affiliation:
Departments of History and American Studies, Amherst College. Email:[email protected].
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Abstract

The curious case of So This Is Africa (Columbia, 1933) shows that both Hollywood's in-house censors and state and local censors took seriously cinematic violations of racial and sexual norms. This spoof of “jungle” films exploited audience interest in a cycle of fictional and nonfictional depictions of “primitive” life. These films claimed partial exemption from taboos against sexual and racial boundary-crossing, and usually showed unclothed “native” women. But So This Is Africa went further. However farcical, its suggestions of adultery, interracial sex, homosexuality, and even bestiality raised an unusually large storm among the censors. Cut by one-third, the film still outraged many and helped precipitate the industry's creation of the Production Code Administration, designed to police the screen more tightly.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , August 2011 , pp. 581 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Gregory Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

2 David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Daniel Czitrom, “The Politics of Performance: Theater Licensing and the Origins of Movie Censorship in New York,” in Francis G. Couvares, ed., Movie Censorship and American Culture, 2nd edn (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 16–42.

3 See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002); Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Couvares, Francis G., “The Good Censor: Race, Sex, and Censorship in the Early Cinema,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 7 (Fall 1994), 233–51Google Scholar.

4 Edward Watz, Wheeler and Woolsey: The Vaudeville Comic Duo and Their Films, 1929–1937 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1994); Leonard Maltin, Movie Comedy Teams (New York: New American Library, 1970), 85–104; also Donald W. McCaffrey, The Golden Age of Sound Comedy: Comic Films and Comedians of the Thirties (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1973), 15, 82, 95, 110; Gerald Weales, Canned Goods as Caviar: American Film Comedy of the 1930s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 65–66. The Library of Congress holds a heavily censored print of the film.

5 Weales, 58.

6 McCaffrey, 82.

7 Maltin, 100.

8 The script is in the So This Is Africa file, Records of the New York State Motion Picture Commission (after 1927 the Education Department, Motion Picture Division), New York State Archives, Albany, NY (hereafter NYSMPC). All subsequent quotes from script are from this file.

9 Review of Tarzan, the Ape Man, Variety, 29 March 1932.

10 James Wingate to Harry Cohn, 29 Dec. 1932, So This Is Africa file, Production Code Administration collection (hereafter PCA), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.

11 Review of Congorilla, New York Times, 22 July 1932; also Variety, 26 July 1932. On the Johnsons see Pascal James Imperato and Eleanor M. Imperato, They Married Adventure: The Wandering Lives of Martin and Osa Johnson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

12 Review of Congorilla, New York Times, 22 July 1932. On impositions of narrative form on South Sea documentaries see reviews of Mawas, Variety, 4 June 1930, and of Isle of Paradise, ibid., 26 July 1932; on ones centered on the western hemisphere see reviews of Voodoo, New York Times, 27 March 1933, and of Savage Gold, ibid., 25 July 1933.

13 See reviews cited in note 11.

14 Review of Congorilla, Variety, 26 July 1932. Criticism of inferior documentaries appears in reviews of Up the Congo, Variety, 22 Jan. 1930; Ingagi, ibid., 16 April 1930; Africa Speaks, ibid., 24 Sept. 1930; Wild Men of Kalihari, ibid., 26 Nov. 1930; Ubangi, ibid., 2 June 1931; The Truth about Africa, ibid., 18 April 1933, and New York Times, 17 April 1933. The Imperatos (Congorilla, 167–68) say the Johnsons used staged footage shot at his African compound.

15 See Brian Taves, The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993).

16 See reviews cited in note 14.

17 Review of Bring `em Back Alive, New York Times, 18 June 1932.

18 Reviews in Variety of Up the Congo, 22 Jan. 1930; Ingagi, 16 April 1930; and Wild Men of Kalihari, 26 Nov. 1930.

19 In the case of Ingagi, the trump did not always work; Chicago's censors passed it, but Little Rock's banned it as “lewd, lascivious and indecent,” and the Dallas City Council was moved by it to “consider the need [for a] censor”; on the other hand, a New Orleans newspaper opined that while Little Rock “was violated in all its finer sensibilities … New Orleans was merely bored.” Quoted in Daily Reports, 5 April, 26 April, and 15 May 1933, Will Hays Papers (Microfilm Edition, University Publications of America).

20 Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 235.

21 Jeffrey Geiger, Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the US Imperial Imagination (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 137, 143–44, 156.

22 Quoted in Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 132.

23 Review of The Blonde Captive, New York Times, 28 Feb. 1932.

24 On reactions to The Birth of a Nation see Couvares, “The Good Censor,” passim.

25 Lyman, Stanford M., “Race, Sex, and Servitude: Images of Blacks in American Cinema,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 4 (Autumn 1990), 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Marybeth Hamilton, “When I'm Bad, I'm Better”: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 157–67, 162. On Harlem in the 1920s see David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1982).

27 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995).

28 Lyman, 55. On the Formula see Maltby, Richard, “‘To Prevent the Prevalent Type of Book’: Censorship and Adaptation in Hollywood, 1924–1934,” in Couvares, Movie Censorship and American Culture, 97–128Google Scholar.

29 Review of White Cargo, Variety, 26 Feb. 1930. For a broader look at this theme see Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

30 Review of Aloha, Variety, 29 April 1931.

31 In Daughter of the Congo, the African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux followed the same racial code, distinguishing between dark-skinned “savages of the jungle” and the “beautiful mulatto girl” who falls into their clutches: Gary Null, Black Hollywood: The Negro in Motion Pictures (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975), 44–45. New York's leading African American newspaper, the Amsterdam News, condemned Micheaux's “intraracial color fetishism … All the noble characters are high yellows; all the ignoble ones are black.” Quoted in Henry Sampson, T., Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977), 51. In “Micheaux: Celebrating Blackness,” Black American Literature Forum, 25 (Summer 1991), 351–60Google Scholar, bell hooks claims that beneath this apparent fetishism was a subtextual strategy affirming “an unbroken diasporic bond with Africa.” See also Thomas Cripps, “‘Race Movies’ as Voices of the Black Bourgeoisie: The Scar of Shame,” in John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson, eds., American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Ungar, 1979), 39–56.

32 Review of Aloha, Variety, 29 April 1931.

33 Review of Mamba, Variety, 19 March 1930.

34 Reviews of Kongo, New York Times, 17 Nov. 1932, and Variety, 22 Nov. 1932.

35 “Woody” Van Dyke, after directing several Tim McCoy silent westerns, was picked by MGM's David O. Selznick to take over a stalled documentary about the South Seas being made by Robert Flaherty. Van Dyke used Flaherty's footage “to provide a sense of atmosphere” for a movie that became “the story of a down-and-out American whose latent idealism is brought out by the love of an unspoiled native girl”; Van Dyke's success in this assignment led to Trader Horn and Tarzan the Ape Man, and, in 1934, his finest year, to The Thin Man and Naughty Marietta. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film Making in the Studio Era (New York: Faber & Faber, 1988), 54–57, 169.

36 Review of Trader Horn, Variety, 11 Feb. 1931.

37 Marianne Torgovnik, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 68, 45, 66. Cecil B. de Mille had given this theme the full treatment in Male and Female (1919).

38 Jason Joy to Harry Cohn, 12 Oct. 1932, So This Is Africa file, PCA.

39 On the rules of Hollywood self-regulation – the “Don'ts and Be Carefuls” of 1927 and the more elaborate Production Code of 1930 – see Maltby, Richard, “The Genesis of the Production Code,” and “Documents on the Genesis of the Production Code,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 15 (1995), 5–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 James Wingate to Harry Cohn, 12 Oct. 1932.

41 Carl Milliken to James Wingate, 18 Feb. 1933.

42 Daily Reports, 28 March, 4 April, 19 April, 26 April, 28 April, 1 May, 8 May, 15 May, 27 May 1933, Will Hays Papers.

43 Carl Milliken to James Wingate, 18 Feb. 1933; J. J. Pettijohn to Will Hays, 20 Feb. 1933; [Hays office] to Jack Cohn, 23 Feb. 1933; Will Hays to James Wingate, 9 March and 11 March 1933, So This Is Africa file, PCA.

44 Telegram, James Wingate to Will Hays, 14 April 1933, in ibid.

45 Alice Winter to Will Hays, 10 July 1933, Will Hays Papers.

46 Couvares, Francis G., “Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor the Movies before the Production Code,” in Couvares, Movie Censorship and American Culture, 129–58Google Scholar; Thomas Doherty, Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

47 On Breen's anti-Semitism see Walsh, Sin and Censorship, 84–90; Doherty, Hollywood's Censor, chapter 10.

48 See Hamilton, “When I'm Bad, I'm Better”, chapter 9; also Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), chapter 2.

49 Report of Examiner, 16 Feb. 1933, So This Is Africa file, NYSMPC.

50 Nate Spingold to NYSMPC, 25 Feb. 1933.

51 Ibid.

52 Review of So This Is Africa, Variety, 25 April 1933.

53 Ibid.