A anti-Semetic lay Catholic [Breen] imposed a racist Jesuit priest's [Lord] take upon what is proper entertainment for the masses with the aid of a Catholic extortionist [Quigley]. What triggered this piestic morality run riot in the 20th Century?
This generous coffee table volume proves that a single picture is worth a chapter of description. Two other excellent scholarly studies provide lengthy verbal descriptions of the 100 movies which resulted in the Catholic Legion of Decency controlling the total output of a billion dollar industry, until an amalgam of 1st Amendment and antitrust court decisions showed that the Legion was in reality a fake and a fraud. This volume shows in photographic stills what outraged the lay Catholic Grundy's. As the lyrics of the musical "Chorus Line" state it was "tits and ass," male and female.
The author's preface alone is worth the price of admission, pointing out that the bagman of the Harding Election, Will Hays, a Presbyterian elder and postmaster in the Harding Cabinet, succesfully prevented additional state and federal censorship boards from being established. A facinating tidbit is that Hays bribed Father Lord with a $500 stipend [1930 $$s], which infuriated Quigley, publisher of the Exhibitor's Herald.
This book examines with a discerning microscope the 100 post code pre-Legion movies which caused the wholly Jewish industry to produce films suitable for Catholic grade schoolers. It is absolutely mandatory to have this volume in hand when reading the two Black books ["Catholic Crusade" (1998) and Hollywood Censored" (1994)]. shows what the fuss and feathers was all about.
It is also noteworthy that most Catholics, lay and clerical, considered "miscegnation (sex relations between the white and black races)" [from both the Hays "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" and the 1930 Production Code] to be immoral and communistic. Father Lord, SJ, a racist right winger, agreed totally with this premise, since like President Wilson, his initial cinematic immersion was in "Birth of A Nation." It should be remembered that in 1930-34, over 30 states made miscegnation a criminal offense, and Lord's Code forbade the movies from depicting criminal violations in a favorable manner. Most, but not all, Catholic bishops in the United States, prohibited priests from witnessing marriages that were forbidden by state and federal law. Another interesting premise is that if a social, moral, or economic delimna is not discussed, then it does not exist. In other words, if the movies do not discuss white slavery, or divorce, or abortion, or miscegnation, then these problems cease to exist for moral America. Fortunately, then as now, the so-called moral majority was neither.
I would have given my eyeteeth to have had this volume when I was teaching "Entertainment Law."ÿ
