Hollywood Film Style and the Production Code: Criticism and History

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Abstract

The introduction to this special issue sets out to account for an allusiveness, a suggestiveness, an indirectness of expression that is characteristic of Hollywood film style under the Code, using It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and its PCA regulation as a case in point. This introduction’s surveying of Code literature considers shifts that occurred in its historiography in the 1980s and 90s, particularly visible around the contested notion of the “pre-Code.” This promotional label has found or created a ready market for the more titillating productions of the early-sound period. The opening up or exploitation of the film archive sits in tension with the opening up of the MPPDA written archives, which showed scholars such as Jacobs, Maltby and Vasey (in a 1995 special issue of Quarterly Review of Film and Video and elsewhere), that a negotiated regulation of movie content was taking place in Hollywood before 1934. The shifts in Code scholarship are also to be seen in the context of the “historical turn” that increasingly questioned the taking of films as primary or principal evidence in Historical work, and the introduction considers points of tension with a practice of “criticism” that would seek to consider film style. For the reader’s reference, the introduction also includes a shortened version of the Code’s “General Principles” and “Particular Applications”, which is also used to discuss what is covered and what is not within this special issue and to reflect on the sexual bias of the culture that produced the Code (so much of the Code covers “Sex”) and of the culture that examines it (so much Code scholarship, including here, is focused on sexual matters). After a discussion of key scholarship on the impact of the Code on issues of racial representation, a bibliography includes some annotations.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-50
Number of pages50
JournalQuarterly Review of Film and Video
Volume42
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Jan 2025

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