Blockbuster - The ‘Hayes Code’

 

The Hays Code, officially known as the Motion Picture Production Code, was a rigid set of guidelines developed around the advent of sound pictures in the late 1920s that strictly policed how morality and immorality were depicted in Hollywood movies.

TASK:
I have given you a copy of the Code. Consider films that would have violated these rules had the code been in place still today.


Film Geek Challenge: 

Can you think of any films that may have flirted with these rules during this time period?

http://www.asu.edu/courses/fms200s/total-readings/MotionPictureProductionCode.pdf

Influence from Abroad

 

The collapse of the Hayes code

Case study: 'Bonnie and Clyde' 

Reading

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/aug/26/thriller.romance 


The 1960s were the end of an era in Hollywood. The industrial studio system that had dominated American moviemaking for half a century was beginning to crack, and new ways of getting films cast and produced were emerging. The vibrant new visual and storytelling styles of the French New Wave were making their way across the Atlantic, and changed the movie world forever. These movies were characterized by unconventional visual and editing techniques, long takes, and a renegade production style among other things, and focused on younger people and modern settings, morals, and concerns. The films they made were a system shock to the film establishment, and in the years following their influence spread.

Bonnie and Clyde is widely considered the first major Hollywood production to feature many of these characteristics. The film’s editing and tone, the moral choices of its characters (who are amoral more than immoral), and the (for the time) graphic and stylized violence of the movies were sharp breaks from the Hollywood norm.

Bonnie and Clyde was not the first film to push on the walls of the Hays Code. The code itself had been only loosely enforced for the several years leading up to the film’s release, and it was formally laid to rest two years later with the substitution of the MPAA’s film rating system that is still in place today. American films before 1967 had broken rules of the code, increasingly so as the 1960s progressed. But if Bonnie and Clyde was not the commencement of the rebellion that brought down the Hays Code, it was, at least, its coronation. It was the film that brought together the stylistic changes conceived by the French New Wave and celebrated in the New Hollywood movement of the late ’60s and 1970s, and the moral ambiguity and violence that flourished after the dismantling of the code, and it did so with skill, beauty, and effortless cool.