How the Hays Code shaped New Hollywood
These days, it’s not surprising to see full frontal nudity, graphic violence, gore, and strikingly realistic sex on our cinema screens. Of course, these movies are restricted to audiences over the age of 18, but the availability of rather explicit content is now more widespread than ever before. Yet, cinema used to look rather different, with censorship preventing anything remotely taboo from potentially tainting viewers’ imaginations.
The Hays Code was properly enforced by Hollywood in 1934, preventing depictions of everything from nudity, sex, violence, profanity, and interracial relationships to drug use, blasphemy, excessive kissing, and homosexuality. Criminals could not be portrayed in any way that could possibly allow audiences to sympathise with them, nor could ambiguous explorations of morality be accepted.
Thus, the Golden Age of Hollywood was significantly affected by these rules, which limited pure creative expression in mainstream American cinema. While filmmakers working outside of this system, such as foreign or indie directors, were more daring, Hollywood was reluctant to allow anything that could be seen as transgressive or out of line with American societal ideals and expectations to fly.
However, by the 1960s, the cinematic landscape began to change. Certain films emerged during the decade that proved that Hollywood couldn’t keep up this censorial way of operating forever. Psycho, released in 1960, saw Alfred Hitchcock present a brutal murder scene, with images of a knife touching bare skin and blood circling the drain, causing outrage. He had to shoot the film in black-and-white to make the scene less shocking, negotiating with censors by relying on quick editing that didn’t actually expose anything completely explicit. The movie was groundbreaking, but it would still be several years until the Hays Code was abandoned.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, various foreign films, from British kitchen sink dramas to European arthouse movies, gained attention in America. Many of these featured provocative images or explored taboo themes, like abortion or racial issues. The strength of the Code started to weaken as tantalising and experimental foreign films gained more influence in America, and more adventurous Hollywood films subsequently started to emerge.
In 1966, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni released Blow-Up, a film set in Swinging London featuring sex, nudity, and violence that proved popular. The Code did not grant the movie approval, but somehow, MGM released the film regardless, bypassing the rules in the hopes of finding success. Of course, it worked, and people loved the erotically charged mystery, and as a result, the Hays Code was once again rendered less important.
As the civil rights movement, feminism, and other countercultural developments emerged in the 1960s – alongside many members of the post-war generation taking a liking to rock and roll, pacifism and activism, and drug use – America started to look a lot less uptight than ever before. It was a new era for the country, but while the hippie era promised optimism, it quickly died out as the Vietnam War raged on, the Manson family spread terror across Los Angeles, and many iconic musicians died of drug overdoses.
There was a sense of disillusionment in the air, but paired with increased sexual liberation and the influence of pioneering new and exciting music and fashion, cinema became fertile ground for creative expression. The Hays Code was finally abandoned in 1968, and the MPAA film rating system came into effect instead. This system allowed for more explicit content under the condition that young audiences were banned from consuming such material.
Bonnie and Clyde, released in 1967, was a landmark moment for American cinema, and it is often classed as the start of the New Hollywood era. Post-Hays Code, the industry allowed filmmakers to be more expressive, so Arthur Penn created a complex portrait of two criminal lovers, including graphic violence and risque scenes that would’ve never been allowed before. The fact that the movie didn’t explicitly condemn the pair was shocking, but the movie turned out to be a hit, and it endures as one of the era’s greatest films.
Many other taboo movies followed suit that proved to be hugely successful, like Harold and Maude, which featured a relationship between a 20-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman, and The Graduate, which also explored a (less significant) age-gap affair between a newly graduated college student and his parents’ friend. Then there was the nihilistic Easy Rider, with its psychedelic acid-taking sequence and tragedy, and also Wanda, which contained a depressing depiction of a directionless woman.
The Godfather was another major New Hollywood movie, with its epic tale of gangsters and no shortage of violence, while Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver also pushed the boat out with its exploration of madness, obsession, murder, and child prostitution. These films dramatically changed the landscape of Hollywood, but this wouldn’t have been possible if not for the demise of the Hays Code, which stifled creative freedom and prevented mainstream audiences from watching movies that contained harsh truths or confronting images.
Yet, cinema is a tool that demands that we face the often dark and brutal nature of reality, or the violent and surreal nature of living, and only once the Hays Code was abandoned could Hollywood truly flourish to its full potential.
