Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants fought
for freedom at the movies
William D. Romanowski
Oxford University Press £18.99
(978-0-19-538784-1)
Church Times Bookshop £17.10 (Use code
CT517 )
THE Protestant influence on Hollywood might not have been as
sensational as the Roman Catholic one, but it was every bit as
significant, the American scholar, William Romanowski, argues in
this labyrinthine history of attempts to regulate the film
industry, from the silent era to the present day.
Unlike the Roman Catholics, Protestants supported free speech
and favoured self-regulation, seeing legal censorship as
undemocratic, un-American, and open to corruption. They believed in
a reasonable measure of self-restraint to protect the public
welfare, and were keen to emphasise a film's artistic merit and
overall perspective rather than, as Romanowski puts it,
"nit-picking at perceived immoral incidents".
It's a fascinating history, meticulously researched, and almost
bewildering at times in the plethora of abbreviations attached to
the multitude of boards and organisations set up over the decades.
Some of the players are as colourful as the movies themselves,
notably Will Hays, the eminent Presbyterian layman and powerful
Republican leader, who Protestants, in the early days of cinema,
hoped would be their front-man in the battle against
commercialisation.
He was President of the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors Association, but was caught up in financial scandals
and associated with sleaze. When he started losing Protestant
support, he turned to making alliances with Roman Catholics. The
book reveals how their influence on Hollywood grew after the Wall
Street crash. They set up the Legion of Decency in 1934, and, while
the Protestants could only ask their flocks out of conscience to
stay away from bad films, Catholics could organise national
boycotts that put the fear of God into the studios.
It was as much a battle about whether the Catholics or the
Protestants were the custodians of American morality, and that is
one of the most absorbing aspects of the book. With Catholics
ascendant in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, the studios put out a
steady stream of films such as The Song of Berna-dette,
which extolled priests and the RC Church, and came under fire for
making Protestants figures of fun.
The post-war emphasis on civil liberties brought growing
opposition to censorship and boycotts, and, by the 1960s, the book
records, many top producers and directors, and religious and civic
organisations were converging on the idea of an industry-wide
rating system. And then there was the rise of the Evangelicals, who
saw film and television as tools to re-evangelise the nation, and
whose "Passion pound" in later decades was not lost on the
industry.
A great deal of this history is academic. The story comes alive
through the machinations of the studios, and the controversies that
surrounded landmark films: the first blockbuster, The Birth of
a Nation, was artistically lauded but condemned for its
racism; The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum
as an itinerant preacher who killed in cold blood (no RC priest
would have been treated so offensively, critics argued); The
Miracle, condemned as blasphemous; Elmer Gantry and
The Sins of Rachel Cade, condemned as morally
objectionable; The Last Temptation of Christ, which
provoked the evangelist, Jerry Falwell, to call for "an all-out
effort to cripple Hollywood, and make it regret ever releasing this
piece of garbage".
Romanowski concludes that in holding out not for censorship but
for an age-classification system (it came in 1965), Protestants
helped to secure a freedom for the film industry that was bound to
bring about a diminishing church influence. He expresses the hope
that recovering an important piece of missing film history will
help people gain a broader perspective, and I think he succeeds in
that for the general audience.