American Cinematographer - March 1995 - 87

by George Turner

You Tarzan

-

Masculinity,

Movies and Men

edited by Pat Kirkham
and danet Thumim
St. Martin's Press, 221 pps.,

cloth, $39.95

clubs and churches led in 1930 to the

adoption of a Production Code with teeth
in it, drafted by Father Daniel Lord, S. J.
and publisher Martin Quigley. In the
Spring of 1934 the teeth were elongated
enormously when it was declared that
the world's millions of Catholics would

Male-bashing books are all the
rage of late. Even if men are variously
beasts or pains in the butt, they may be
tired of having it hammered into their
Neanderthal skulls.
The present anthology offers
titles like "Rock, the Last Guy You'd Have

Figured," "Clark Gable's Balls," and
"What Are Big Boys Made Of?" All of
them deal with masculinity (or, as the
editors insist, "masculinities," because
"we can no longer use the confident sin¬

gular"). This time the editors are women,
but
surprise! -all 14 essays are by
-

males.

Hollywood Censored
by Gregory D. Black
Cambridge University Press,
346 pps., cloth, $27.95
Several books about that

phase of movie censorship dealing with
the Motion Picture Production Code and
the Catholic Legion of Decency have
been published recently. "Hollywood
Censored" can be counted among the
better ones because it is extensively re¬
searched and maintains a nice balance

boycott any pictures not okayed by the
newly formed Legion of Decency. At this
point the power of the censors ran com¬
pletely amok, with the dread "con¬
demned" rating being bestowed upon
the likes of Manhattan Melodrama, One
More River, and The Informer. Many of

the demanded cuts defy belief.
The author, a professor of
communications history at the University
of Missouri, Kansas City, does a good job
of revealing how the industry was pres¬
sured into presenting a Shirley Temple
view of the world. He stresses that cen¬

sorship promoted conservative political
views, yet such leftish Code era pictures
as Black Fury, Our Daily Bread, Bed Sa¬
lute, ".
one third of a nation," The
Grapes of Wrath and Dead End managed
to get produced and released.
There are occasional bloops,
e.g., the Fox executive was Winfield, not
Wilfred, Sheehan; the writer was Aben
Kandel, not Handel; Boris Karloff was not
a mad scientist in The Walking Dead, but
an ex-con framed for murder. They're not
enough to do much damage to this indepth study of the nature of roughshod
censorship and its effects.
.

.

Double

Your Choice

Super 16

of

Lenses

between the serious, the ironic and the
The First

Century of Film
by Martin S. Quigley, Ed. D.

amusing aspects. Also, it publishes a lot
of previously buried material from the
Legion archives.

& Associates

Quigley Publishing Co.,
cloth, $49.50

The Motion Picture Producers
and Distributors of America (MPPDA), or

"Hays office," was established by indus¬
try leaders in 1922 to combat a bad pub¬
lic image of movie people following a
series of scandals. Self-regulatory cen¬
soon became a function of the
MPPDA but had little effect on the mem¬
bers. Pressure from local censors, ladies'

sorship

408 pps.,

This reference book contains
more than 1300 biographies representing
"who

was

who" in the American film in¬

dustry, from the world premiere of the
Edison Kinetoscope on April 14,1894 to
August 1,1994. It begins with Aaronson,

March 1995

Now there isbayonet
an OpTex range and
extender
for
for Aaton.
Arri PL

mount

or

Each is suitable for all

-

Canon, Angenieux and

RTH, Super 16 and Standard 16mm lenses.

Call
ZGC

us now on:

(201) 335 4460

44-181 441 2199
Fax: 44-181 449 3646

OfHw

85
American Cinematographer - March 1995

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 1995
