To Trust the Public or Not? Movie Censorship in the Pre-Code Era

In 1930 the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) was the branch of the Hays Office tasked with enforcing the Production Code. Colonel Jason Joy and his successor James Wingate ran the SRC from the adoption of the Production Code in 1930 until its reformation as the Production Code Administration (PCA) in 1934 (Black Reference Black1996; Doherty Reference Doherty1999).Footnote ² The SRC advised studios on how to alter their scripts so that they met the standards of the Production Code. The SRC, however, could not force studios to accept their suggestions. This meant that despite their agreement to abide by the Production Code, studios frequently ignored the SRC's recommendations in the early 1930s (Olasky Reference Olasky1985; Doherty Reference Doherty1999). In addition, Joy and Wingate took a particularly lenient approach to the Production Code, which they viewed as a flexible set of general guidelines rather than a rigid set of rules (Black Reference Black1996). Confusingly, the time period between when the SRC adopted but laxly enforced the Production Code in 1930 and the creation of the PCA in 1934 is referred to as the pre-Code era.

For Joy and Wingate, movie censorship was primarily about protecting audiences from indecent depictions of sex and violence or from overtly immoral stories. They did not believe that the SRC should prevent studios from producing films with controversial topics as long as the films handled these topics in an intelligent fashion. According to film scholar Gregory Black, “Films that were considered immoral by religious clergy and other guardians of morality were often seen by Joy and Wingate as good entertainment, satire, comedy, or legitimate commentary on contemporary social, moral, or political issues” (Black Reference Black1996, 53). In essence, they believed that adult audiences could handle thought provoking stories as long as these stories did not blatantly incorporate immoral, offensive, or blasphemous messages. They also felt that films could communicate moral messages if the film's narrative punished characters who supported contentious ideas.

Joy and Wingate's lenient position meant that, in the pre-Code era, studios were often able to use narrative ambiguity to tell some semblance of the stories they wanted to tell about science. Film historian Richard Maltby explains that the Production Code “permitted producers to deny responsibility for a movie's content, through a particular kind of ambiguity, a textual indeterminacy that shifted the responsibility for determining what the movie's content was away from the producers to the individual spectator” (Maltby Reference Maltby2003). Shifting the responsibility of interpretation to the viewers was in line with Joy and Wingate's approach to administrating the Production Code. In fact, Joy recommended that studios develop a system of narrative and representational conventions “from which conclusions might be drawn by the sophisticated mind, but would mean nothing to the unsophisticated and inexperienced” (quoted in ibid.).

Ambiguity became a narrative strategy as studios relied on veiled language and polysemous scenes that tolerated multiple interpretations. This ambiguity prevented censors from removing storylines because they could not prove that they were explicitly about controversial ideas. But, long-standing narrative codes and conventions made it clear to supposedly more sophisticated members of the audience what the stories were about. According to Maltby, this strategy became “an enabling mechanism at the same time that it was a repressive one” by permitting educated audience members to join the conversation while preventing illiterate audience members from being exposed to problematic topics (ibid.).

The SRC's approach to movie censorship during the Pre-Code era was in stark contrast to the religious reformers and the various regional censor boards that were pushing for stronger censorship measures. The SRC referred to these various regional censor boards, including city and state censor boards in the US as well as international censors, as the political censor boards. The difference in approach between the SRC under Joy/Wingate and the political censor boards was significant because films approved by the SRC had to pass through the political censor boards before they could be shown in these regions. The political boards almost uniformly believed that cinema possessed a persuasive power that legitimated controversial concepts including scientific ideas like evolution, eugenics, psychology, and patent medicines. Therefore, they felt that what they considered to be morally problematic ideas should be kept out of movies.

The censorship history of Universal Pictures’ 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein is illustrative of how Joy attempted to mitigate the potential negative influence of cinematic stories during the Pre-Code era while also trying to allow studios to produce movies with challenging narratives. The film's original script passed through a lenient Hays Office with little difficulty.Footnote ³ Joy's only suggestion was for the removal of a line of dialogue overtly comparing Frankenstein's act of scientific creation to God, “In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!” After seeing the final film Joy was certain that it would be “reasonably free from censorship action” by the political censor boards.Footnote ⁴

Joy's optimistic prediction turned out to be completely wrong. The film ran into significant opposition from the numerous regional and international political censor boards. Political censor boards felt that two factors made the film dangerous for public consumption. One was the horrific nature of the monster and the film's visuals. The other element was the blasphemous nature of the narrative, which involved a scientist usurping God's role by scientifically creating life. “Blasphemy” was the issue that led to censors banning the film in several locations including Quebec and Kansas.Footnote ⁵ The Kansas censor board's initial rejection of the film makes these objections clear:

Generally, the filmmakers worked with the censor boards to overcome objections by removing dialogue or by cutting out scenes that were problematic. If the blasphemy in Frankenstein were confined to a scene or two then the solution was to simply remove these scenes. But the blasphemous notion of a scientist creating life is central to the entire film. There was no way for the studio to overcome this objection without fundamentally changing the film's narrative, which was an unacceptable solution for both the studio and Joy.

Eventually, the studio satisfied censors’ objections by simply adding a short prologue to the start of the film. This might seem to be a perplexing solution given that the prologue does nothing to change the blasphemous nature of the story. The film's narrative still involved a scientist creating life after the prologue ended. But the political censor's problems were not just with the fictional story. This particular story had existed in book form for over a hundred years. Instead, their anxiety stemmed from their conviction that the persuasive power of an audiovisual medium – cinema – would lead audiences to believe that a scientist could create life in a laboratory. Movie censors feared that uneducated working-class audiences were not capable of realizing that what they were seeing on the movie screen was just a story and that the public could not distinguish fiction from reality. Therefore, the studio suggested the following prologue to remind audiences that the story they were about to see was a fantasy and did not represent the real state of the world: “The story of ‘Frankenstein’ is pure fiction. It delves into the physically impossible and the fantastic. For almost a hundred years the story has furnished diversion and the picture like the story is for entertainment only. Although no moral is intended it shows what might happen to Man if he challenges the unknowable.”

For Universal Pictures, a prologue was an ideal solution to censorship challenges because it required minimal resources and it kept their films mostly intact. For Joy, the prologue was the perfect form of censorship because it allowed studios to maintain the integrity of their entertaining films but it also reduced the persuasive capacity of cinematic narratives by reminding audiences that these were just stories. The success of Frankenstein’s prologue led studios to trot out the prospect of adding a prologue as a means of fending off major cuts to films in the pre-Code era. For example, Universal Pictures suggested a prologue as a way to overcome the equally blasphemous story in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932).Footnote ⁷ But by the mid-1930s the censor boards found prologues to be an unsatisfactory solution. Ultimately, censorship organizations came to the opinion that film narratives were so powerful in shaping audience's conceptions about the world that even if people were told they were watching a story, movie magic would still convince them that these stories were true to life. From their perspective, the danger of motion pictures demanded an approach that prevented what moral reformers considered to be unacceptable stories from even reaching audiences.

The manner in which Joy/Wingate and Joseph Breen responded to the same film, Island of Lost Souls (1932), demonstrates their radically different attitude concerning audiences’ ability to handle challenging narratives. Paramount Pictures initially released the film in 1932 when Joy, and then Wingate, ran the Hays Office. The studio also re-released the film in 1941 which meant that they had to re-obtain approval from a much more rigorous PCA run by Breen. The movie was based on the H.G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr. Moreau and the film's script retained the source novel's evolutionary driven narrative (Kirby Reference Kirby2002). Despite the film's explicit evolutionary themes, it had little difficulty passing through the Hays Office in 1932. As with Frankenstein, Joy found nothing in the Island of Lost Souls script that he believed violated the Production Code except for one blasphemous line of dialogue uttered by Moreau: “Mr. Parker, do you know what it means to feel like God?” For Joy, and his successor Wingate, a controversial idea such as evolution was an appropriate topic for motion pictures as long as the filmmakers handled the topic in a manner that was not propagandistic.Footnote ⁸ The Hays Office's official approval letter concluded with Wingate telling the studio that the censors “enjoyed this picture thoroughly” and they believed others would enjoy it as well.Footnote ⁹

Unfortunately for Paramount, the political censor boards did not share Joy and Wingate's enthusiasm for the movie's narrative. Many censor boards found the plot's overt reliance on evolutionary theory to be unacceptable. The film was “rejected in toto by fourteen state censor boards” and it was banned in numerous countries.Footnote ¹⁰ The British Board of Film Censors, for example, banned the film until 1958 because of religious concerns over its evolutionary story being “unnatural” as well as its vivisection scenes.Footnote ¹¹ While Joy and Wingate felt that audiences could handle such “unnatural” themes, most censor boards felt that the public was best served by not being exposed to these ideas in a compelling narrative.

From the perspective of advocates for censorship the Hay Office's failure to rigorously enforce the Production Code meant that movies were just as problematic as they were before its adoption. In response, Will Hays created the Production Code Administration (PCA) as a way to curtail continuing calls by moral reformers for a governmental censorship organization (Black Reference Black1996). Tough-minded Catholic Joseph Breen took over as director of the PCA in 1934. Breen had the power he needed to force studios to alter their scripts to conform to the Production Code's standards or he would withhold the PCA's Seal of Approval (Leff and Simmons Reference Leff and Simmons2001). As such, the PCA exerted significant influence over movies scripts including the ways in which those scripts told stories using science.

This meant that when Island of Lost Souls was re-released in 1941, a much more vigilant PCA had to judge the appropriateness of the film's story for audiences. The PCA rejected the film outright because of the evolutionary basis of Moreau's experiments. Breen explained to the studio that the underlying evolutionary aspects of the narrative meant that it could not be approved under the Code. In his judgment letter to Paramount, he wrote: “The general unacceptability of this picture is suggested by the blasphemous suggestion of the character, played by Charles Laughton, wherein he presumes to create human beings out of animals.”Footnote ¹² Unlike the case of Frankenstein, the political censors were not satisfied with a prologue reminding people that the film was just a story.

Essentially the censors wanted the studio to remove any possibility that the audience could interpret this story as being about the nature of human origins. They could not allow a movie narrative where a character, even a clear villain like Moreau, contradicted the creation story in Genesis. In order to obtain the PCA's approval Paramount had to take out every line of dialogue in the film that suggested that Moreau was “creating” humans by evolving them from animals.Footnote ¹³ The studio assured the PCA that “these cuts eliminate from the picture the suggestions that Moreau considers himself on par with God as a creator, and reduces him to the status of a scientist conducting bio-anthropological experiments.” In the edited film there is no longer any indication that Moreau made the creatures on the island, he is now merely an anthropologist studying their behaviors. In this way, the beast-people merely become another of God's creations. That was a narrative about science that the PCA deemed appropriate for audiences.

Scholars refer to the pre-Code era as the “pre-Code era” because the Hays Office's SRC only loosely enforced the Production Code during this period. The Hays Office did not strictly adhere to the Production Code because the directors at the time, Joy and Wingate, did not believe that the goal of censorship should be to keep filmmakers from telling stories with difficult themes. Instead, they felt that it was better to allow the public to grapple with controversial themes in cinema as long as films did not present biased versions of these themes. But their views were not in line with the majority of moral reformers including the political censor boards who demanded more stringent censorship. They wanted censors to police cinema in such a way that meant that movies only featured what they considered to be narratives that would persuade audiences to behave in a moral fashion. In essence, these moral reformers wanted the censors to take a top-down approach built upon an assumption that the public could not be trusted to make their own decisions about how to behave. This approach to the persuasive power of narrative was more in line with what we now call deficit model thinking.

Creating Appropriate Stories about Science through Censorship

American censors were not content with merely preventing morally dangerous narratives from influencing what they saw as vulnerable audiences. In fact, many proponents of censorship wanted to harness cinema's persuasive power in order to transmit stories that would have a positive influence on audiences. This was a goal made clear in the Production Code's opening sentence: “If motion pictures present stories that will affect lives for the better, they can become the most powerful force for the improvement of mankind.”Footnote ¹⁴ Censorship for the PCA was not about creating movie narratives that matched our own reality; it was about using cinematic stories to depict an idealized reality that represented what the censors believed should constitute the real world. Therefore, the PCA tried to coerce studios into producing what censors considered to be suitably positive and morally uplifting narratives including those about science.

The PCA's desire for only virtuous stories was a problem for studios that wanted to tell provocative stories about science or stories highlighting potential ethical issues in science. As Susan Lederer notes, the PCA's approach to narratives often prevented mainstream filmmakers from addressing pressing moral, social, and political themes involving science and medicine (Lederer Reference Lederer1998). For the PCA, however, cinema was not a suitable medium by which to have ethical conversations about science or scientific ideas. They did not want movies to pose moral dilemmas about science. According to the PCA, movies were a tool for teaching people right from wrong; and for them right and wrong were clearly discernible. No grey areas were allowed. This stance forced studios to perform narrative gymnastics in order to tell some semblance of the stories they wanted to tell about science's ethical grey areas or about science's role in society.

I will use the PCA's negotiations with Warner Bros. over the script of their 1938 film The Amazing Doctor Clitterhouse as a way of demonstrating how the PCA compelled studios to modify their narratives and how studios tried to maintain their stories in the face of these efforts. The story in the original script involved the prestigious scientist Dr. Clitterhouse deciding that the best way to stop crime is to understand the criminal mind and that the best way to understand the criminal mind was to become a criminal himself. At the heart of the script's narrative is the ethical dilemma of whether or not the value of Clitterhouse's scientific findings justified his illegal actions.

After examining this script, the PCA informed Warner Bros. that their story was unacceptable under the principles of the Production Code by allowing that scientific progress justified immoral behaviour:

The PCA felt uncomfortable with the story of a scientist whose scientific goal is certainly admirable – reducing crime – but who needed to commit crimes in order to accomplish that objective. They told the studio that the only way they would approve this story was if the script overtly depicted Clitterhouse as insane. If Clitterhouse was insane then there was no dilemma about the moral cost of scientific progress. The audience would understand that his actions were obviously wrong because they were the actions of a deranged mind. That was a much more appropriate narrative as far as the PCA was concerned.

Changing the story in this way was problematic for Warner Bros. because they felt that the appeal of the story was its ambiguity. The studio wanted audiences to contemplate the ethical question of whether immoral actions could justify scientific progress. In response to the PCA's letter they changed the script but they also tried to retain the narrative's vagueness about the ethics of Clitterhouse's methods. In the revised script Clitterhouse acts overtly insane but at the end of the film he knowingly winks at the camera to indicate that he is not actually insane. This level of ambiguity about the acceptability of Clitterhouse's actions was still unacceptable to the PCA. They rejected the revised script saying, “In our opinion, this picture is not acceptable from the point of view of the Production Code, for the reason that the ‘question of right and wrong’ was left in doubt.”Footnote ¹⁶ From their perspective, there was right and there was wrong; and Clitterhouse was clearly wrong. If the character did not understand that he was wrong then he was clearly insane. They told the studios to remove any ambiguity from the narrative by having the judge officially declare Clitterhouse to be insane.

But this change was unacceptable to Warner Bros. They did not want to tell such a straightforward narrative in which criminal activities are never acceptable even if they might lead to a greater good. The studio still wanted to tell a story in which audiences are left questioning whether Clitterhouse's scientific work justified his crimes. To maintain this uncertainty they changed the ending of the story entirely.Footnote ¹⁷ The final script explicitly incorporates the ethical question into the criminal trial by making the jury vote on Clitterhouse's sanity. Ultimately, the jury is split in their opinion of whether Clitterhouse is sane or insane. The ambiguity of the jury's deliberations on this question left open the question of whether or not the ends justify the means for scientific progress, which was the narrative the studio wanted told.

Despite the jury's inability to come to a consensus about the ethicality of Clitterhouse's methods the studio did satisfy the PCA by having the jury ultimately judge him to be insane. But their decision about his sanity was not based on the scientist's belief that committing crimes was an appropriate way to accomplish his scientific goals. Instead the studio preserved their thought-provoking narrative by having the jury pronounce Clitterhouse insane for a completely different reason. In the film the jury argues that while it is in Clitterhouse's best interest to claim that he is insane in order to avoid jail, Clitterhouse continually insists that he and his scientific work are completely sane. From their perspective Clitterhouse's insistence on his sanity proves that he must be insane because only an insane man would work against his own self-interest.

This verdict meant that the studio technically met the censors’ demand. Clitterhouse was found to be insane in a court of law. But the narrative did not provide a definitive answer to the film's ethical question. It was still uncertain as to whether his actions in the pursuit of knowledge were right or wrong. The PCA, however, was satisfied with this ending. From their perspective it was not an ambiguous ending. As with the deficit model, the PCA wanted to live in a black and white world with single answers for complex questions.

The Authority of Science and Persuasive Narratives

Censorship organizations’ concerns about the persuasive power of mass media were motivated by the fact that moving pictures had a level of realism that had never before been encountered in previous media forms. Unlike literature, proponents of movie censorship considered cinema to be a medium of the masses. Cinema's visuality meant that audiences did not have to be literate to watch a film and censors believed that illiterate audiences did not possess the mental faculties necessary to critically evaluate a film's narrative (Walsh Reference Walsh1996). Those pushing for stronger censorship even feared film adaptations of books that had been around for decades, such as Frankenstein (1818) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1895), because they were convinced that cinema's realism would lead illiterate audiences to accept what they were seeing on screen as true including the novels’ problematic messages about the power of science.

Film texts create a reality effect because they are constructed in ways that encourage audiences to immerse themselves in the world or to submit to the pleasures of fiction (Sohn-Rethel 2013, 7). From censors’ perspective, cinema's reality effect was leading uneducated working class and immigrant audiences to forget that what they were seeing on movie screens were just stories, rendering them more susceptible to a film's themes. Film historian Lee Grieveson shows in his study of early movie censorship that the “links between ‘realism’ and ‘suggestibility’ became increasingly central to conceptions of how moving pictures affected audiences” (Grieveson Reference Grieveson2004, 64). Groups pushing for formalized movie censorship were worried that cinema's realism was normalizing and legitimating messages transmitted through movies. For moral reformers cinema's reality effect rendered it an extremely powerful and potentially dangerous medium for mass communication.

Sociological studies of cinema in the 1930s such as the Payne Fund studies seemingly provided convincing scientific evidence supporting censors’ assumptions about cinema's persuasive power. The Payne Fund studies – developed by the religiously affiliated Motion Picture Research Council – were one of the first large-scale studies of media effects and they appeared to demonstrate that individual movies could have a strong effect on behavior (Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller Reference Jowett, Jarvie and Fuller1996). These influential studies were crucial in the formation of the PCA because they confirmed for proponents of movie censorship that cinematic narratives had a potentially dangerous persuasive power. The Payne Fund studies made the censors’ practice of controlling narratives by closely analyzing and commenting upon the content in every script seem to be the appropriate tactic. If individual films could have such a powerful effect on audiences, then it made sense for these censorship organizations to act as gatekeepers who permitted what they considered to be acceptable narratives to reach the screen and, thus, mass audiences.

Concerns about fictional realism made science particularly problematic for movie censors. Censors considered science dangerous because it provided fictional narratives with an added level of realism that could mislead audiences into accepting problematic stories as legitimate representations of the world. One of the reasons the deficit model has such a continuing appeal for the scientific community is that science has been the Western world's accepted mode of determining truth since the Age of Enlightenment (Psillos Reference Psillos2005). It is easy to see how science's primacy in our culture can lead scientists to believe that the public should uncritically listen to what they have to say.

The notion that science represents objective reality is also one of the major reasons why censor groups wanted to control how science was used in movies. Filmmakers have historically utilized science to enhance the realism of their films and to make cinematic stories seem more plausible (Kirby Reference Kirby2011). For movie censorship organizations, science's ability to make cinematic stories seem more plausible made it a potential moral danger if the censors did not like the stories these movies were telling. Censors were concerned about filmmakers using science to legitimate problematic concepts whether the science was based on real-world scientific concepts or the science was totally fictional. Even fictional science benefits from science's cultural authority as the arbiter of truth.

Censors reacted negatively to scripts that employed science's authority to support what they considered to be philosophically problematic ideas such as spiritualism, secular humanism, and the transmigration of souls. Although the censors disliked these spiritual belief systems, they could not prohibit their inclusion in movies because the ideas did not violate any aspect of the Production Code. However, if a script used scientific explanations –even totally fictional science – to “prove” that one of these concepts was legitimate then it was in violation of the Production Code because the censors believed that such scientific validation in a movie would offend Christian viewers.

In Catholic theology, for example, there is a very clear explanation for what happens to a person's soul after they die: the soul leaves the body, it is judged by God and it is either brought into heaven, sent to purgatory, or condemned to hell. Any film narratives positing alternative beliefs about the nature of the human soul were problematic for the PCA but they could not force studios to alter these narratives just because they did not like these ideas. If the script had characters proffering scientific explanations to legitimate the alternative beliefs about the nature of the human soul, however, then the PCA asked the studio to remove these scientific explanations. The PCA forced studios to eliminate scientific explanations for soul dualism in Bewitched (1945), souls put into animals in Mesa of Lost Women (1953), and reincarnation in I've Lived Before (1956). As far as the PCA was concerned, filmmakers who used science to enhance the legitimacy of a fictional narrative were being dishonest by appropriating the authority of science to support an idea that might not stand on its own terms.

The Dangers of Real-World Science in a Fictional Narrative

Although fictional science could be an issue, the PCA was even more concerned about fictional narratives that deployed real-world science to validate what they saw as problematic concepts. I will examine the PCA's response to the use of real-world science in the original script for The Gamma People (1956) as a way to illustrate their concerns. The film was a typical science fiction B-movie from the mid-50s with a plot about a mad scientist bombarding children with gamma rays in order to transform them into super geniuses. The PCA approved most of the initial script except for one element that made the whole narrative unacceptable. The script included text from Bertrand Russell's Reference Russell1931 book The Scientific Outlook that was to be projected on the screen as an epilogue:

The studio's intention was to use Russell's writings as a way to heighten the plausibility of the fictional scientist's experiments. As the PCA's response shows, however, the studio's use of real-world science to legitimate their fictional scenario did not sit well with the PCA:

Although this fictional scientist's experiment was disturbing on its own, the PCA considered it ridiculous enough not to be disturbing for audiences. But the suggestion that the film's gamma ray experiments were grounded in real-life science turned the story from silly to horrifying in their minds. From the censors’ perspective, scientific legitimacy was the real horror.

The essence of the deficit model in science communication is a conviction that science is far too complicated for the public to understand without the help of scientists. Movie censors shared this belief about the nature of science. They felt that there were certain scientific concepts that should never be disseminated through fictional movies because any misunderstandings of these ideas by the audience were morally problematic. They believed that the inclusion of scientific themes in films required expert intercession by real-life scientists or these themes became dangerous. For censors, the simplistic nature of movie narratives meant that the medium was incapable of providing this expert support.

The Legion of Decency's handling of the 1962 bio-picture Freud provides a good example of how censors worried about scientific discussions in fictional narratives without appropriate guidance for the audience and it also shows their own deference to the scientific community. Psychiatry was of particular concern for both the PCA and the Legion of Decency because it was the science of human behavior. They believed that misunderstandings of psychiatric theories would lead audiences to believe that science justified certain morally problematic behaviors. For censors, this made the psychiatric sciences a risky topic for movies and they carefully vetted scripts that included psychiatric concepts.

The same pressure from moral reformers that resulted in the creation of the PCA also led the Catholic Church to form the Catholic Legion of Decency in 1933 (Walsh Reference Walsh1996). The Legion of Decency's primary means of censorship was through their film classification system. The Legion's classification system was a guide for Catholic viewers as to what were morally suitable and what were morally questionable films for consumption. They had three levels of classification: A, morally acceptable (with subcategories from I to IV); B, morally objectionable in part; and C, condemned (ibid., 135). Studios were anxious about receiving a B or C classification for their films because they believed that these classifications could seriously impact a film's box office if it drove significant numbers of Catholics away from cinemas (Black Reference Black1996, 222). Therefore, studios often negotiated with this censorship group to avoid a B or C classification. This included sending their scripts or their final films to the Legion for approval or recommendations for cuts.

The sexualized nature of cinema was a primary concern for movie censorship organizations. Universal-International Pictures was aware that, for the public, Freud's scientific theories were synonymous with sex. The film's producer William Gordon understood that maneuvering the studio's proposed Freud bio-pic past the censors was going to be difficult and that the “subject matter requires very special, delicate treatment and handling from its inception.”Footnote ²⁰ Therefore, Gordon sent the initial script to the Legion of Decency as a way to preempt any censorship problems before the studio began production. The Legion then asked a number of priests to review the script and offer their opinions of its suitability for the screen.Footnote ²¹ The priests who reviewed the script agreed that the narrative was not sensationalized. They also felt that the story treated Freud's development of his theories about human sexuality in a restrained and sensitive fashion. They decided that any reasonably intelligent person watching the film would be able to understand these scientific theories without coming to the conclusion that they were all about sex.

The priests’ problem with the script, however, was the fact that they did not believe that most moviegoers were reasonably intelligent people. Father Ray's sentiments were typical of their attitude towards public audiences, “[The script] is suitable for a specialised audience but hardly for unlettered adults, who would tend to dwell on the more sensational aspects of the exposition.”Footnote ²² From the priests’ perspective, the average viewer would not be able to comprehend Freud's complex scientific ideas and, thus, they would misinterpret the narrative and the moral implications of his science. The Legion of Decency makes it clear that such misunderstandings would be “dangerous.”Footnote ²³

The Legion's priests did not think that the general public would be able to understand Freud's theories and their moral implications without the assistance from an expert guide like a psychiatrist or a priest. Catholic theologian and literary critic Reverend William F. Lynch made it clear in his review of the script that these ideas required extensive consultation with a trained psychiatrist, not two hours in a movie theatre:

In fact, Lynch conceded that even priests might not possess enough expertise to determine the suitability of the science in the script by claiming, “I do not believe it is a question to be resolved by the clergy.”Footnote ²⁵ Instead he recommended that the Legion of Decency only endorse the script if they had assurances from the American Psychiatric Society and the American Psychiatric Association that the science in the script was safe for presentation in the powerfully persuasive medium of cinema. Ultimately, the Legion of Decency deferred to traditional deficit model thinking about science by allowing the scientific community to determine the most appropriate messages about Freudian psychiatry.

Censors felt that the use of real-world science within cinematic narratives was morally dangerous if these narratives led non-experts to embrace immoral behaviors. But movie censorship organizations also worried that scientific knowledge could pose a genuine physical danger if put in the hands of non-experts. The PCA's handling of Marathon Picture Corporation's script titled “The Quiet Murder” usefully illustrates their concerns about fictional narratives depicting non-experts gaining access to powerful scientific information. The PCA rejected every script the studio sent them because the story hinged upon a layperson acquiring specialized scientific knowledge about hypnotism that he then misuses to command a hypnotized woman to commit a murder.

The PCA made it clear in their final decision letter that they would never allow this story to be produced because they wanted to prevent “the inexpert and bizarre use of this science.”Footnote ²⁶ From the PCA's perspective hypnotism was a powerful scientific tool and only experts could be trusted to use this tool appropriately:

Consequently, they did not want movies to demonstrate to the inexpert public how to gain this knowledge.

One simple solution for the studio would have been to make the main character an expert in the field of psychiatry rather than an amateur pursuing the science. Marathon Pictures was unwilling to make that change because their goal was to use the film as a warning about the dangers of amateur hypnotism schools. The studio assured the PCA that they would “write a shooting script and produce a picture which will effectively serve to disclose the dangers of hypnotism schools and the evils caused by indiscriminate use of hypnotism in the hands of laymen.”Footnote ²⁷ Their hope was that their film would motivate the public to support legislation such as the Desmond Bill that would “outlaw the use of hypnosis by anyone but an M.D.”Footnote ²⁸

Essentially the studio was caught in a conundrum. In order to establish regulatory legislation, they needed to demonstrate to a mass audience the dangers of non-experts gaining specialist knowledge. But by showing how non-experts could acquire this knowledge they were potentially inspiring lay audiences to imitate what they saw on the screen. The studio's final tactic to obtain approval for their story was appeal to the PCA's shared concerns about the dangers of amateur hypnotism schools.Footnote ²⁹ But their argument that their film represented the greater good despite any potential imitators in the audience was unpersuasive.Footnote ³⁰ No matter how much the PCA wanted to help shut down amateur hypnotist schools, they were more worried about the power of movies to inspire the public to obtain dangerous scientific knowledge that could only be properly applied by scientific experts. That is why the PCA never allowed “The Quiet Murder” to be produced.