Rate It X? Hollywood Cinema and the End of the Production Code

CHRISTIE MILLIKEN

We will oppose these intrusions into a communications art-form shielded and protected by the First Amendment. We believe the screen should be as free for filmmakers as it is for those who write books, produce television material, publish newspapers and magazines, compose music and create paintings and sculptures.

... I have urged film creators to remember that freedom without discipline is license, and that's wrong, too. I have, in the many meetings I have had with creative people in film, suggested that the freedom which is rightly theirs ought to be a responsible freedom and each individual film-maker must judge his work in that sensible light.

JACK VALENTI, MPAA, "Motion Picture Production Code and Ratings Program: A System of Self-Regulation," personal statement of Jack Valenti, 1968.

Commercial American movies are at last beginning to talk about sex with pertinent and refreshing candor. But although they are outspoken, most of the new movies are less revolutionary than they look. Traditional puritanical attitudes are often concealed beneath the kinky contemporary trappings, still dictating rewards and punishments for the characters. Only the language of the sermons has changed; now they are phrased in the up-to-date psychoanalytical lingo that the "permissive society" understands.

STEPHEN FARBER, "A Film That Forgets Sex Can Be Fun ...," New York Times, 1971.

Historians have described the period from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s as one of the most tumultuous and transformative in American film history, perhaps second only to the coming of sound. In addition to the myriad pressures that rocked American society at this time, the decision on the part of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to finally abandon the increasingly obsolete Production Code in 1968 in favor of a voluntary age-based rating system enabled the possibility of making more adult-themed Hollywood films that could explore, in unprecedented detail, formerly regulated topics such as sexuality and violence. Given the profound changes in sexual and cultural mores from the time of the establishment of the Production Code Administration (PCA) in 1934, this transformation was a long time coming. Although the dramatic shift in the treatment of screen sexuality was embraced by some as a sign of Hollywood's belated willingness to deal with more culturally relevant, mature subject matter, others objected to many of these new films and lamented the demise of the family audience. It is clear that the MPAA, straddling both sides of this divide, introduced the new Code and Rating Administration (CARA) largely as a public relations ploy to help Hollywood's faltering box office, to refresh the organization's image, and to answer the demands of the fragmented film going audience, particularly its most lucrative demographics: the increasingly well-educated adult audience, and the youth market.

This chapter examines this transitional period in film history, using the backdrop of shifts in the social, cultural, and sexual climate of the era to consider debates about sexuality and sexual representation in a number of films made at this time. My emphasis will be on those films made immediately preceding and after the implementation of the rating system through 1973–1974, when this new system was largely consolidated and Hollywood had recovered from a period of severe economic crisis and instability. I will concentrate on films that were controversial for their sexual representation, whether in the courts, through the MPAA's regulatory constraints, or through the media. Before discussing this period, however, brief background on Hollywood during the years preceding the adoption of the rating system will provide context for this transformative move from the PCA-era model of "harmless" entertainment suitable for all to one that allows for discretion and distinction on the basis of age appropriateness, a system promoted by Jack Valenti as "responsible" entertainment.

Code and Law: Postwar Challenges to the PCA and the Changing Legal Status of Motion Pictures

In the postwar period the Hollywood studios were forced to forego their oligopolistic control of the film business when a Supreme Court ruling in 1948, U.S. v. Paramount Pictures et al., required them to divest of their theatrical holdings. Along with the dramatic decline in film attendance that began in the late 1940s and continued into the 1960s, production costs increased significantly, fewer films were made, and more money was invested in a smaller number of films with the hopes of realizing large financial returns. Challenges to the Production Code increased significantly during the period, as the PCA-enforced morality collided with changing audience demands and industry conditions. Foreign films, notable for addressing adult themes, began to make inroads at the box office through the proliferation of art house theaters.

A foreign film became the subject of a groundbreaking legal case that changed the status of motion pictures in American society. Il Miracolo (The Miracle) was one portion of an anthology film, L'Amore (1948; The Ways of Love). Directed by Roberto Rossellini, it was the story of a peasant woman (Anna Magnani) who believes that a stranger she sleeps with is Saint Joseph, convincing herself that the baby she carries is the product of an immaculate conception. The film sparked controversy in its native Italy and was deemed blasphemous by the Catholic...