The Enforcer

...Breen’s role wasn’t exclusively negative...

...Empowered by the threat of 20 million Catholics boycotting unapproved fi lms, Breen soon turned the Hays Offi ce into a true regulatory agency...

...any such exhibition house that screened a nonseal fi lm was subject to heavy fi nes...

...His most notable role, and the one that probably secured his rise to Hollywood’s in-house censor, came when he directed the publicity for a silent fi lm commemorating the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress in Chicago...

...Doherty provides some context to the charges of anti-Semitism that have dogged Breen’s reputation in recent years, combining archival materials and new interviews with Breen’s compatriots to paint a fuller picture of the man, his offi ce, and his times...

...Yet the fi lm mostly misses the point—the MPAA is in place to protect children and provide parents with guidance, not protect box offi ce hauls—and you have to wonder which system today’s directors would prefer: A subjective process that sometimes leads to head scratching results (such as the NC-17 slapped on Team America for explicit puppet-sex) or a Breening process with explicit limits on the amount of blood, fl esh, and profanity portrayed on screen guided by an iron hand...

...there could be no denigration of religion...

...Before the rise of foreign fi lms, independent ventures, and art house fare broke the Production Code’s back, Breen’s “regime facilitated the artistic creativity and industrial effi ciency of the vaunted Golden Age of Hollywood,” Doherty argues...

...Arthur Hornblow Jr., producer of the Oscar-winning Gaslight (1944), said that Breen “has given me plenty of trouble, on occasion, in the way of making me change scripts to make them conform, but I fi nd there is a great satisfaction in sweating through and getting the points made in the right way, instead of the easy way that is so often the wrong way...

...Unlike the state and municipal censorship boards, whose rulings were off-the-cuff and whose members rotated with election cycles, the Breen Offi ce was an entrenched bureaucracy with transparent procedures, consistent regulations, stable personnel, and institutional memory...

...Rather, Joseph Breen controlled the red pen, wielding it to transform the Production Code Administration into a feared and effective tool of studio self-censorship...

...Breen, if he is remembered at all, is dismissed as Victorian-minded, a busybody committed to limiting artistic achievement and freedom of speech on the big screen, and a racist...

...Profanity was out, as was excessive violence...

...It’s hard to disagree: Thirteen of the top 30 fi lms in the American Film Institute’s most recent list of the 100 greatest American movies were released during Breen’s tenure...

...The modern rating board—the body that hands out Gs to Disney cartoons and Rs to Judd Apatow’s raunchy comedies—has come under fi re recently for being an opaque, subjective process...

...in addition to trimming scenes, he made suggestions to improve the substance of fi lms...

...Without Breen, Hollywood could not do business...

...The fi lm would almost certainly endure stricter scrutiny from censor boards across the nation, those run by Tarantino’s “jerkwater counties...

...Their battle over Jane Russell’s d?colletage was recreated in Martin Scorsese’s recent Hughes biopic, The Aviator...

...As legend has it, the Hays Offi ce ruled Hollywood’s Golden Age with an iron fi st, shielding a pliable public from lewd and lascivious imagery that might “lower the moral standards of those who see it...

...But that wasn’t all: Crime couldn’t pay—miscreants had to face punishment for what they had done—and Sonny Bunch, assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, reviews movies for the STANDARD’s website...

...A fi lm’s themes were watched as closely as the hemlines of its dancers and the tommy guns of its gangsters...

...Breen [sat] at the table with the moguls as an equal partner,” writes Doherty...

...As a student of the motion picture industry (if not constitutional law), Tarantino knows that he and his peers have it pretty easy compared with their predecessors...

...Not every producer was so understanding: Howard Hughes and Breen went at it hammer and tongs over several fi lms, most notably The Outlaw (1943...

...And even if it could fi nd a screen to play on, and survived the censors intact, any fi lm that reached the public without a Code seal faced boycotts from the Catholic Legion of Decency and other groups...

...Nudity, of course, as well as unnecessarily skimpy clothing...

...Dealing drugs in any way, even as a cautionary tale in which the pusher is punished, was forbidden...

...His connections within the Catholic community, and familiarity with the fi lm industry, made him the obvious choice to handle “enforcement” of the Production Code, a document written by a Jesuit priest and the Catholic publisher of Motion Picture Herald and suffused with the moral teachings of the Church...

...The [Motion Picture Association of America] has a very hard job and does it as well as they possibly can,” he told USA Today...

...BY SONNY BUNCH Faced with the prospect of a fi nancially crippling NC17 rating for his latest fi lm, Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino took a stoic view of the revisions he would have to make...

...Intertwining Breen’s life and the establishment of the PCA into a cohesive narrative, Doherty seems most interested in rehabilitating the censor’s image...

...Desecrating the fl ag and interracial romance were banned...

...Before the formation of the PCA in 1934, Joseph Breen worked as a journalist and government functionary, parlaying his Roman Catholic ties into prominent positions and currying favor with the Church intelligentsia...

...Doherty’s description here draws a contrast between the Breen Offi ce and both the censor boards that littered the country in the fi rst half of the 20th century and the current regime, the Motion Picture Association of America...

...as Thomas Doherty’s new book shows, Breen was so well known around town that Variety “coined endless variations on verbs such as ‘Breens,’ ‘Breening,’ and ‘joebreening’ . . . around Hollywood his surname was lingo and his word was law...

...The alternative would be every jerkwater county in America having their own obscenity laws...

...As Doherty writes, the Breen Offi ce maintained the gold standard by helping the major studios refi ne the substance, polish the surface, and corner the market...

...He didn’t see himself as a censor...

...Less well known is that onetime postmaster general Will Hays was not actually in charge of enforcing the Hays Code...

...This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a documentary about the ratings process that focused on the MPAA’s most restrictive designation, NC-17, wowed critics and drew plaudits from fi lmmakers hampered by fi nancially damaging ratings...

...What, exactly, was Breen there to excise...

...Producers looking to distribute a movie without the seal of approval faced several hurdles...

...Actually, more than equal...

...To begin with, it couldn’t be shown in any theater owned by one of the major studios...