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Virtue For Commercial Purpose: A Look At Production Code Censorship In The 1930s, Jacob Key

Honors Theses

This paper is a study of the conservative political bias inherent to the Motion Picture Production Code as it applies to Great Depression cinema. Many films in this period attempted to explore progressive themes but were edited or prohibited outright under the Code’s authority. Father Daniel Lord, the Code’s author, greatly feared cinema’s cultural and moral influences, but may have been unaware of the political ramifications of his work. On the other hand, his boss, Will H. Hays, was an ambitious man fully in support of the Code’s ability to censor politics that differed from his own. The unlikely partnership …